December 2023 Stat Roundup and Year in Review

Really drug out the 12 Days of Christmas challenge this year...Well, that's a wrap for 2023. Time to see what the New Year brings. For me personally and professionally, 2023 was a good year, and probably my best year yet in terms of gaming. The world in general seems to be going the opposite direction, though, and with 2024 being an election year in which we'll inevitably be faced with another choice between the worst possible candidates, I'm not holding out much hope that society will suddenly return to a sense of decency and decorum. But let's ignore all that for now, and focus on my gaming stats! For the second month in a row, I really didn't need to think about Targets at all... they were pretty much all completed before Christmas, without me going out of my way from what I was already playing for the 12 Days of Christmas event. Pretty much every game was on sale at some point this year (Bargain Hunter), most of them were started in 2023 (A Year to Remember), and I earned achievements on 19 days of the month (Achievement Addict), all of which I would have done without the Targets.
Now 66/66 Gold Medal Targets!We lost two members of World's Best Gamers (100% Community Challenges) after the 12 Days of Christmas challenge, but from what I can see, all 49 members of the "All Challenges / All Golds" club-within-a-club finished the 12DoC challenge and earned all three December Targets, so it looks like we're still holding at 49 members:
January's Targets don't look difficult, but without a Community Challenge to spur me on, I'll probably have to be more intentional about completing them. I'm sure I can find three new games to start for the New Year, New Games Target (several Game Pass games have arrived since July that I'm interested in), I've got plenty of back-compat games for Backwards Day. Fifteen story-related achievements will probably require some intentional choices, but I might do something like Walking Dead: The Final Season to finish that off, if I don't get it naturally.

• 12 Days of Christmas

Another 12 Days of Christmas is in the books, and while it took me nearly the entire month, I happy with my results. As usual, I started with the goal of not starting any new games for the challenge, and to use as few games as possible. Unfortunately, the Day 12 goal kind of threw the latter restriction out the window, but I think I made up for it nicely.

Day 1 - A Gruesome Fatality

Day 1 was a genre bingo challenge, and unfortunately my board was impossible to do with just one game. I did manage to score a bingo down the middle column with just four achievements from two games, though:
The Blissful achievement in Far Cry 5 worth 67 pointsSave the Marshal from the Bliss (Solo Campaign only). (Secret)

Day 2 - Two Thousand Years

I carried on with Far Cry 5 for the next day, which required two achievements from games with completion time estimates >20 hours.
The Sewer Rat achievement in Far Cry 5 worth 19 pointsDestroy a cult water treatment pump and make them thirst for revenge (Solo Campaign only). The Peachy Keen achievement in Far Cry 5 worth 13 pointsBait Peaches into going back home (Solo Campaign only).

Day 3 - Three Gates of Baldur

Day 3 got a little bit harder, since we had to unlock achievements with increasing ratio (>1, >2, >3). I was still able to use Far Cry 5, but had to be a little careful not to accidentally unlock the "easier" 3.0+ ratio achievements before it was time.
The The Hurk Locker achievement in Far Cry 5 worth 22 pointsTruly bond with Hurk by destroying 15 vehicles together (Campaign only). The Ace Killer achievement in Far Cry 5 worth 33 pointsDestroy 10 planes while driving any aerial vehicle (Campaign only).

Day 4 - Four Corrupting Evils

Far Cry 5 wouldn't work for this one, so I had to switch games. Since this day was most likely referencing the Resident Evil 4 remake, I decided to use the only game in that series that I've started, the original Resident Evil.

Day 5 - Hi Five Rush

Since none of the three games I'd played so far had the Hack & Slash or Music genres, I had to go to a different game for Day 5, and since there weren't really any better options, I just went with the game that the day was themed after, Hi-Fi Rush.

Day 6 - Six Geese a-Fighting

Again, no cross-play games on the list so far. By the time I got to this day, though, most of the rest of the challenges had already been announced, so I picked a game I knew would be useful later on, As Dusk Falls.

Day 7 - Seven Retro Titles

I could've gone back to Resident Evil for this publisher challenge, but I decided instead to switch to a different game that I planned to use later on anyway, Star Wars Jedi: Survior.

Day 8 - Eight Banthas Milking

Carried straight on with Jedi: Survivor for day 8, which I assume was themed for that game.

Day 9 - Nine Planets Exploring

This was the first major challenge. The days so far basically just required unlocking any achievements in a particular game, so as long as I had the correct game, it didn't matter what I unlocked. For this day, though, I'd have to be careful what achievements I unlocked in what order, especially if I wanted to get them all in one game. And when I realized I had the necessary achievements still available in Starfield, that became the natural choice for the day (especially since it was also the TA Playlist game of the month). I had to play most of the main quest plus several side quests and objectives, while being careful not to accidentally unlock anything at the wrong time and leave myself without an available letter. Took more than a week to get it all done, so that was the longest time spent on a single day's challenge.

Day 10 - Ten Assassin's Leaping

I had sort of planned to go back to Jedi Survivor or maybe Resident Evil for this day, but by now it was December 28th, and I was worried I may not have time to finish the challenge if I just took my time working through those games. Instead, I decided to finally finish the Burial at Sea Episode 2 DLC from Bioshock: Infinite, which had exactly the right number of achievements. Plus I'd been meaning to get back to that before I forgot too much of Episode 1. The Dead Drop achievement in BioShock Infinite worth 23 pointsOn three occasions, knock out an enemy after silently dropping off a Freight Hook.

Day 11 - Eleven Puppets Lying

For secret achievements, it was back to As Dusk Falls. I finished my first playthrough of the story, so a lot of these achievements were done by backtracking to make different choices. The Cop Out achievement in As Dusk Falls worth 31 pointsBig Sam killed by Tyler at the Desert Dream (Secret)

Day 12 - Twelve Stars Connecting

Finally made it to Day 12, and it was December 29th, so I was really starting to feel the crunch. So far, I had completed Days 1-11 using only 8 games, but there was no way I was going to be able to do a 12-achievement Link Frog in a single game. It's possible that I could have found a way to link together that many achievements from games I'd already used, but it would be tough to be selective about which achievements I could unlock from some of those games, and I'm not sure I would have been able to pull it off anyway, given the options I had. Instead, I decided to try something different, and spell something with the links that show up on the right-hand side of the column. It took a lot of planning and a bit of luck, but I managed to finish the challenge before midnight on December 30, leaving a whole day to spare. The result: I came very close to not even trying to spell anything, and just getting a 12-link chain as quickly as possible, because I was very worried that I would run out of time, or that I'd spell "HAPPYNE-" and then accidentally unlock the wrong achievement and finish with a bunch of gobbledygook, but luckily, that didn't happen. It was a little bit dicey (no pun intended) when an achievement from Lost in Random failed to unlock, and I had to go replay the first hour of that game again, but overall, things actually went more smoothly than expected.

This brings us to a grand total of 31 Community Challenges, and I'm happy to still be in the 100% Club. Thanks as always to the Community Events Team who come up with all these crazy ideas and get them implemented. Looking forward to whatever comes up next!

• Completions

I had 344 completions coming into December, and for the first time I think since I started this blog, I didn't complete any games during the month. For 12 Days of Christmas, I was bouncing back and forth between a few fairly long games (Far Cry 5, Jedi Survivor, Starfield, etc.) and by the time I was done with 12DoC, there wasn't really time to go finish anything off. So I ended the month with the same 344 completions I started with. As of January 1, though, eastasiasoft dropped Title Updates for eight(!!) games that I previously had completed (most during last summer's GTASC push), so I'm starting the New Year with 336 completed games. Should be easy to get all of those back quickly, though.

• TA Playlist

Starfield was the Playlist game of the month, so I'm glad I found a good opportunity to use it for the 12 Days of Christmas. I didn't finish the game, but I managed to get a good way through the main quest without being distracted by base building, planet surveying, and side quests, and I really enjoyed it. I haven't read through the comments yet, so I don't know whether we had some good discussions, or whether it was just a bunch of trolls throwing rocks. Fingers crossed for the former, but I'll probably try to work my way through the rest of the main quest at least before analyzing the comments too much.

The first Playlist game of 2024 is THIEF. I remember playing some of the original Thief games on the OG Xbox, and I jumped on this reboot when it came out 2014, but I didn't really stick with it. 2014 was the year I got married, moved into a new house, and our first child was born, so I didn't have a ton of time for gaming back then, I think I bounced off this one before even finishing the main story. Hopefully I'll get back into it this month.

• Milestones

Two milestones during the month of December:

• 440,000 GamerScore - December 13, 2023:

• 15,250 Achievements Won - December 13, 2023:

• Bean Dive Recovery

Start completion % 54.49
End completion % 51.14
Final dive % 3.36
Current completion 53.49 (+0.33)
Recovered completion % 2.35
Achievements needed for recovery 287 (-95)

• 2023 Year In Review

Yodel-a-he yodel-a-he yodel-a-he-hoo!
2023 turned out to be my best year ever in terms of Xbox stats, although as you can see from the picture above, there was a sharp drop-off in scoring after July. That's because that's when the Four Desperados of the WBG were finally eliminated from GTASC in 18th place, ending our run and my highest-scoring months of all time. I scored more GS and TA from March to July than I have for entire years in my gaming history, and there's no way that pace was sustainable once GTASC was over, which is why my little Price Is Right Mountain Climber took a sharp dive off the cliff after July was over.

So, stats:

• Achievements: New record - 2,521 (previous best: 1,806 in 2022)

• Gamerscore: New record - 101,194 (previous best: 60,512 in 2022)

• Ratio: New record - 2.12 (previous best: 2.06 in 2021)

• TrueAchievement Score: New record - 214,432 (previous best: 115,744 in 2022)

• Games Started: 2nd place - 90 (record: 107 in 2022, thanks to a larger Bean Dive)

• Games Played: 2nd place - 191 (record: 201 in 2022)

• Games Completed: New record - 73 (previous best: 65 in 2022)

There is some discrepancy between my TA Year-in-Review graphic:
and the "official" one from Xbox: TA counts me as having an extra 65 achievements and 2,520 GS compared to Xbox's count, but it appears that's because Xbox is not counting the achievements I earned in the Nintendo Switch version of Minecraft back in June. At least, that accounts for the 65 missing achievements, but the GamerScore from those achievements only adds up to 1,560, so I'm not sure where the other 960GS went. Then again, I've looked at the Xbox graphic multiple times without unlocking any achievements in between, and somehow it keeps changing the numbers each time, so all in all, I trust TA's accounting better than Xbox's!
One good thing about the Xbox Year in Review... it's always nice to be reminded that, even though I'm still a filthy casual by the standards of most of TA's active users, I'm pretty high up in the ranks of the Xbox community as a whole!

Any way you slice it, though, it was by far my best year in gaming, and I've really enjoyed most of what I've played this year. Even back when I loaded up some shovelware for quick score in GTASC, I didn't mind the games I played, and we've had some smash hits as well. Alan Wake II is probably my favorite game of all time at this point, and I also really enjoyed the time I spent with Starfield, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, High on Life, Vampire Survivors, Relicta, and many others.

TA will probably release the annual leaderboard rankings in the next week or so. I doubt there will be anything too amazing for me, but I'll either update this blog or do a separate one when that comes out. Until then, I think that's all I've got. Hope you enjoyed your 2023 gaming as much as I did, and best wishes for a safe, happy, and fun 2024!

Posted by BetaSigX20 on 03 January 24 at 00:49 | Last edited on 03 January 24 at 01:11

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