My ‘Back Catalog’ Challenge

Back in 2020, decided to try to improve my overall achievement completion percentage on Xbox. I’ve always enjoyed achievements and each game in some small part being a part of a larger whole. I use TrueAchievements to track all sorts of achievement stats. I’ve also been collecting achievements on Xbox for quite a while (since 2006), so I have all sorts of games that I have started but not finished.

Improving my overall completion percentage could be done by starting new games and playing them to 100% achievement completion. But given I have a decent number of games already, the changes made by a single game are all pretty small. More effective, in terms of moving my completion percentage, is to go back and complete games that I had already started.

And so, the ‘Back Catalog’ challenge was born. I tried to go back to games I had at least one achievement in and aimed to complete them (preferrably ones with very few achievements unlocked, so I could play the whole game). And I was trying to ensure I unlocked at least one achievement every real world calendar day for th duration. (There wasn’t a lot of “going outside” that might interrupt this in 2020.)

Throughout this challenge, I revisited a number of games that I hadn’t yet given a fair shake and had a lot of fun with many of them. Some I thoroughly enjoyed on the replay, and took them all the way to 100%. Others it was clear I had put them down for a reason - I played some but not much.

Along the way, I documented the process in a series of Twitter threads. Some read more like play-by-plays. Others are more like reviews. Either way, I thought this blog would also be a good home for them. And I formatted them differently from my other posts to better match the style of the content.