Platinum #51 - Hitman 2 : Silent Assassin

Platinum Difficulty Rating - 7/10

Despite being a very shallow list, complete with just 26 trophies, there is still a fair challenge presented by this Platinum.

The "Professional Mode Complete" trophy, awarded for completing the game on Professional difficulty, is not only a tough challenge in itself, but also an incredibly frustrating experience at times.

The game shows it's dated aspects most prominently through some botched AI and clunky controls, which can cost you hours of gameplay at times if you get caught in a situation where you're spotted or found out by enemies for no apparent reason. Logic can completely go out of the window, which is hard to accept in a game where logic has a huge influence.

This makes it even harder to bear on professional difficulty because saves are disabled during missions, meaning you have to beat them all 1 at a time, and can't afford to be caught or killed, else you'll be playing through the entire mission from scratch. When you can sometimes be cost a completion because you brushed past a guard, having to restart the whole mission is a tough concept to get through sometimes.

Some missions are easy, and some are much harder, especially when trying to figure out the more complicated means to beat a certain level. It can mean you will spend hours on individual missions, and the amount of trial and error you have to go through just to understand the mechanics of a level in order to beat it with foresight, is vast, so patience is a massive factor in this game.

You're probably looking at anywhere between 20-30 hours to finish all 21 levels on Professional, and the difficulty trophies do stack, meaning you can get away with playing this game through just the once.

The "5 Professional Silent Assassins" trophy, awarded for earning 5 Silent Assassin ratings on Professional difficulty, isn't really too difficult if you approach every level in the way it should be played out. As long as you don't use guns and stay under the radar, you can obtain a Silent Assassin rank easily, but you may have to be selective with the levels you choose, as some are just way too hard to beat without raising a few alarms in the process. However, if you play out this game in the way it's intended to be played, 21 missions should be enough to get you 5 Silent Assassin ratings anyway.

Again, these trophies and their variants for other difficulty levels also stack, meaning you can pick up the 5 Normal Silent Assassin ratings, and the 5 Expert Silent Assassin ratings simultaneously, which negates the need for multiple playthroughs.

The only other trophy really worth a mention is the "All Firearms Collected" trophy, awarded for collecting all firearms and having them displayed in the hideout.

Collecting all firearms in the game requires you to finish a level with the gun in your possession, which might sound easy enough, and for most of the smaller weapons, it is. However, extracting certain guns from missions can be quite difficult in specific scenarios. This is especially true for the bigger weapons that cannot be holstered and are always on view, making you vunerable to attack, such as sniper rifles and larger machine guns.

You'll need to strategise in order to make sure you can smuggle weapons through the level exit without being caught and killed, and some weapons are level specific, meaning you don't have the advantage of always being able to pick which levels you go after for the guns you're missing. It is also important to note that certain weapons cannot be found in levels, such as the silenced Ballers, the M4 and Sawn-Off Shotgun, and are instead awarded for achieving certain feats throughout the game.

There are a chunk of trophies broken down and awarded for collecting the weapons in each weapon group, of which there are 7, which makes it alot easier to track which weapons you still need to collect, given the fact there's no direct way to look at your gun collection without being automatically taken back to your shed after certain missions by the game.

Weapons will also disappear from your collection if you take them into a level that you cannot finish or you quit from, so either be prepared to complete the mission at any cost or equip yourself with weapons that you can afford to dispense. This means weapon selection prior to starting a mission is very important, and the harder weapons to earn are best kept in your inventory to prevent losses.

The other trophies are incredibly easy, and the whole challenge of the list pretty much exclusively comes down to the Gold trophies on offer. There are no progression based trophies, which is unusual to see in story driven games, and there's nothing in the hidden parts of the list that will spring a surprise on you either.

Professional difficulty makes for a worthy challenge, and some of the weapons you need to collect will pull out some difficult situations from time to time but you can still target 25-30 hours as a realistic completion time for the entire list.

Notable Trophies - 

Professional Mode Complete - Completed professional difficulty
5 Professional Silent Assassins - 5 Silent Assassin ratings awarded on Professional difficulty
All Firearms collected - All Firearms collected and displayed in Hideout

Hardest Trophy -

Professional Mode Completed
Completed Professional Difficulty

DLC #68 - Saints Row : The Third - Gangsta's in Space

Tackle a movie themed mini story, in
"Gangsta's in Space!"

The second offering of Saints Row : The Third DLC brings a more familar story based angle than the Genki Bowl VII DLC, with a small selection of new missions to tackle, all bundled in with 10 additional trophies to unlock.

The "C-List Celebrity" trophy, awarded for completing all missions in Gangsta's in Space, is the main focus, but don't be mislead by the term "All". There are only 3 new missions to beat and you can easily blast through them within half an hour, depending on the other trophies, which are all circled around performing certain actions within each of the 3 missions.

It's important to note, there is no mission replay function, which makes it important to pick up every trophy at the correct time in the short story. If you miss the point at which you can earn a trophy, you can always replay the mission, providing you haven't actually beaten it, so it's definitely useful to find out where the trophies need to be unlocked, since replaying a mission after beating it would involve deleting all saved game and utility data, restarting the whole game from scratch and then getting back to the specific point in the DLC you need to unlock a trophy. 

Apart from that, this is an incredibly easy selection of trophies. The challenge posed in terms of game difficulty is practically non-existent, and as long as you're on the ball regarding which trophies to unlock during every mission, you shouldn't need any longer than an hour or so to collect all of them.

DLC #67 - Saints Row : The Third - Genki Bowl VII

Compete in some more Genki bashing activites!

The Genki Bowl DLC adds a range of new activities to the Saints Row world, along with 10 additional trophies all tied into the 4 new side activities.

This is a pretty basic package, with the majority of the trophies being awarded for completing simple tasks within the new instances of activities within Genki Bowl (Super Ethical PR Opportunity, Sad Panda Sky Blazing, Apocalypse Genki and Sexy Kitten Yarngasm.)

In typical Saints Row fashion, the activities themselves are incredibly laid back and easy enough to blast through. The "Genki Bowl Champ" trophy, awarded for completing all activity instances in Genki Bowl VII, requires you to beat both variations of each new activity, 8 activities in total, which is about as demanding as this DLC gets.

It's very plausible to suggest that you can beat every single activity first time, though you may have to repeat a couple of them, simply for the sake of unlocking the other trophies pertaining to the specific actions you need to perform to unlock the rest of the list. Apart from the "Genki Bowl Champ" trophy, every other trophy here is awarded for such things, so it's highly likely you'll be replaying a few of the activities.

There's nothing at all that will slip you up though, and it's an extremely easy 10 trophies to scoop up. Even with a hint of repitition, and 8 activities to beat, you're still only looking at a 1-2 hour package.

Playstation 4 : Why It's the ONE for me

I'm going to go ahead and say it straight off the bat, the next-generation console war is over, and it hasn't even begun yet.

Sony delivered a presentation with promises and features that ticked almost every box, decisions which were galvanised and enhanced courtesy of a horror show from Microsoft earlier in the day that left consumers practically begging Sony to put things right with their press conference.

Slick design, but not too sure on the controller.

Therefore, it would be most appropriate to start with the things Sony did get right, which are consequently the things Microsoft got wrong, and the biggest cheer I've ever seen at any gaming press conference came when Jack Tretton announced that the Playstation 4 would support the pre-owned and used games market, at no additional costs or penalisation to the customer.

It goes without saying this is a good decision. I do have certain personal disagreements with used games, because I believe they de-value developers hard work and contribute to loss of earnings, which is something nobody who works hard would want to go through, but I don't think the answer is to completely clamp down on the market, so this was a good move from Sony, especially with Microsoft's permutations on used games. There was also an utterly hilarious video uploaded by the official Playstation Youtube account on how to share games on the Playstation 4, which is linked to below;

This announcement was quickly succeeded by the statement that the Playstation 4 doesn't need an always online connection of any sort, or at any time scale, to be able to operate to full capacity, another decision that  was a blatant dig at Microsoft's earlier announcement of having to have the Xbox One connected to the internet at least once every 24 hour period, for the purposes of "game authentication". Who really wants fork out so much money for a console and have restrictions attached to it, just because you can't connect to the internet for whatever reason when required to do so? Another decision full of ill logic that Sony thankfully overlooked and opted against.

Anyway, shifting the focus solely onto the Playstation 4, the hardware seems to pack a meaty punch. Under the hood of the PS4 is, effectively, a mid-range gaming PC. You've got an 8-core AMD CPU with a Radeon 7870-derived GPU complete with 18 compute units and 8GB of RAM. However, it's hardly fair to compare the specs of the PS4 to a PC, because in reality, once developers start writing code that pushes the boundaries of the Playstation 4 and it's hardware, you can easily expect performances that will compare to the very highest standard of any console/PC.

Regarding the software, there wasn't actually much revealed, and in many respects, you can argue that the big announcement regarding the software was the fact that the console wouldn't need to be "always online", and thus, wouldn't need to read discs for authentication purposes. There will be an extensive social interface, where you can capture, stream and share videos with friends directly from the console, which is great for the immersion of gaming between mates, and we'll also finally see cross-game chat, which Playstation users have cried out for on the Playstation 3 for years now. It's a good sign that the social aspect of the console has been given close care and attention,  and involvement from Playstation users will hopefully contribute to greater things regarding internet and social networking.

The price point was always going to be an interesting revelation. The Xbox One was announced at the opening cost of £429 earlier in the day, and I personally expected a similar entry point for the Playstation 4. However, Sony surprised everyone for the better yet again, under-cutting Microsoft by a full £80, and announcing that the console would ship for £349. What can you say about that? It's hard not be happy about a lower cost for a console, and even more so when you consider the seriously increased freedom that the Playstation 4 will give the user in comparison to the Xbox One.

Of course, it would be pointless talking about all of this without mentioning the games. Sony produced a strong showing on the exclusives front, with Killzone : Shadowfall, Infamous : Second Son and a new IP in the form of The Order, all producing tantalising trailers, with the latest Final Fantasy title also revealed as a Playstation exclusive. The Playstation has never struggled for good exclusives, in my opinion, and it looks like they're set to carry on this trend, even going as far to announce there are at least 40 titles currently being developed solely for the Playstation 4. Massive.

"The Order". One of Forty exclusives being developed for the PS4.

The only real fly in the ointment came from the announcement that one of the biggest selling points of the Playstation 3 would now come with a mandatory charge on the Playstation 4. If you want to play online, you can no longer do it for free, however, Sony reached a nice compromise, only limiting the online services to Playstation Plus subsciptions, rather than having a stand alone fee. It's good to see they're willing to give users something back for their money, and Playstation Plus is fantastic value regardless, so it's another step in the right direction. With how well the conference went for Sony, they could have easily slipped in a stand alone subscription service, separate to Playstation Plus, and in reality, they probably could have got away with it, but this decision was testament to their customer driven decision making.

Overall, the conference was a huge success for Sony, and although it was never going to be an issue for me personally, as a life long Playstation user, it's nice to know my loyalties are with the company making all the right decisions for the average gamer. I can see the market Microsoft are going for, with the mass entertainment angle, but when I buy a console, games are the primary interest for me, and all the correct gaming related decisions were made by Sony and the Playstation 4. Pre-order. Placed.