Do ALL The Things!

How important is it for you to reach 100% completion on a game? I don’t just mean playing until the credits roll, I’m talking about RPGs and epic sandboxes that give you a nice little statistics page, where you can view how many of what you’ve completed/collected and a percentage of how much you’ve done.

I can honestly say that I’ve never done it. The furthest I’ve ever gotten was 96% or so on Red Dead Redemption. There was always that one mission I couldn’t complete or that one item I couldn’t find.

But I am so close to having that extremely satisfying achievement bloop-bleep up on my screen as I reach 100 percent completion on LA Noire. Those on my Xbox LIVE friends list will notice that lately that’s all I have been playing, and this is why. The closer I get, the more determined I am to get it.

50 film reels, 21 cases, 95 vehicles, 13 newspapers. All that’s left are a small handful of street crimes, and I’m there. It’s taken me months to do this and I swear you could set me down in LA and I could walk you anywhere you wanted without a map, I’ve driven around so much.

But then what, once that is achieved? What comes next? As Cole Phelps would say: “I’m at a loss.”

But all isn’t lost. It was at that time I realised I’d not yet downloaded the DLC cases, nor had I even touched upon the idea of attempting to get all of the achievements. Including the DLC achievements available, I currently have around 50-something percent of all achievements.

I hadn’t realised, as a (forgive the term) ‘hardcore’ gamer, just how satisfying it would be to say ‘Yeah, I quite literally beat the living shit out of this game.’ It will be a sad time when I realise that I have absolutely nothing else to do on LA Noire. It’s been a good run, and I’ll be spending as much time as I can milking it like the magnificent udder that it is.

Pray for me: I have a feeling that by the time I’m done I’ll have a map of LA burned onto my face.