I know, Miss Indestructible Cheerleader, that's how I feel about trophies too.

Author’s Note: This article was inspired by Greg Miller’s rant about trophy awesomeness at IGN’s Game Scoop podcast, episode 117.   Turns out, he later wrote an article about how he thinks trophies are better.  I wholeheartedly agree.

There, I said it.  Let the storm commence!

Let me explain.  I was a PC gamer until joining this site, and then I started off with a 360.  I started with a 360 because there weren”t too many games on the PS3 that weren’t on a 360, and I was turned off by the PS3 price tag (little did I know Microsoft was bilking me out of more in the end, but that’s another conversation).  I remember actually laughing out loud when I heard about Sony’s “trophy” initiative, which sounded like a cheap knock off of the Xbox achievement concept.

Now who’s laughing?

When I eventually broke down on my birthday and bought a PS3 in June, I started hesitantly with inFamous and Uncharted and got hooked pretty quickly.  As the host of the Single Player podcast, you should know by now that I wasn’t a big multiplayer Haloz kind-of-guy, so I started playing all my multiplatform titles on a PS3 for the single player.

After spending time with both systems and both e-penis bragging right denominations I declare that Trophies are superior.  Here’s why, after the jump!

Leveling the Virtual Playing Field: When you start off on Xbox Live with your annual $50 subscription fee (thanks Microsoft), your Gamertag is a wimpy little e-penis, limp and flaccid.  You play through a few games and rack up a few hundred points of achievements pretty easily.  But when you look at Gamertags of those people who have been thousand-pointing titles since the start, those 70-80K gamerscore numbers seem like impossible numbers to catch up with.

When I first started getting trophies, it only took a few games to gain a few PS3 “trophy levels”.  There are dozens of people in my friends list who range in level between 4-8, with a variety of trophy counts.  The highest trophy level in the world right now is 27, and now that I’m sitting at 11, I feel like I’m grind leveling some micro-RPG.  As impossible as it actually is, there’s a feeling like I could catch up if I really, really wanted to.  And when I say “really, really”, I mean get divorced and become a trust-fund baby when rich Uncle Morty kicks the bucket, never working a day for the rest of my life.

Platinum Trophies: Brilliant.  An achievement for getting all the achievements in the game, and it’s the biggest and hardest achievement to get.  While Xbox is working on getting their 1000 point avatar awards program working, if I manage to get 700 out of 1000 points on an Xbox title, there’s really no motivation other than that of being a perfectionist/completionist to get all 1000 points.  But when I’m looking at doing a single run through of a PSN title and getting 70% of the trophies, I immediately think to myself, “I’m so close to getting a platinum, I wonder how hard the rest of them are?”  Games I would typically shelve or return are getting second and third playthroughs for that damn platinum trophy.

Feeling of Accomplishment: Did you know that getting every ending in Dragon Age is worth 25 gamerscore?  Does that feel like an achievement to you, when I watched the credits for Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard and got 60 points? And even then, does that feel like you’re getting anywhere when you’re staring at people with 80,000 gamerscore?  Quick answer: no.

That same accomplishment in Dragon Age is a bronze trophy (which is actually crappy, hmph, thought this would be at least a silver), which you can display proudly as a separate achievement in your “trophy case”.  That level of distinction makes you feel like you’ve actually accomplished something, as opposed to just throwing a handful of points into the morass that is your gamerscore.

I know that the Xbots will come a-fraggin’ now, defending their beloved system as loud as their keyboard capslock can shout.  I actually would love to hear counter-arguments, but right now, I’m a platinum-plated whore.