So this weekend marked the third time I’ve gone back to a PS3 game to get the platinum trophy long after finishing the game, and I’ve set a new record that I’m unlikely to top any time soon.
Previous iterations of this were Assassin’s Creed II (7 years, 7 months) and Green Lantern: Rise of the Manhunters (12 years, 5 months).
This weekend’s was Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands, at a whopping 15 years 5 months:
PoP: TFS isn’t a particularly long game. Back in 2010, I apparently played it over a weekend as all of my trophies are from September 10th through 12th, and this time was… well, technically I did play through the entire game, collecting all remaining trophies, in one rather long play session interrupted only by a half hour walk in the middle when my Apple Watch started yelling at me about not getting enough exercise today.
But… before I played through the game in “trophy hunter” mode, where you’re meticulously checking guides to make sure you’re not missing any collectibles and trying to get some of the fun, but silly combat achievements (hop on 30 enemies’ heads in a row without touching the ground), I decided that I should play through it without any of that, just to see the story again, and for some reason I actually own it on Xbox 360 as well as PS3 so I booted that up and ran through it over the course of about a week.
So there’s some extra gamerscore. Gamerscore? GamerScore? I’ve never quite known where the capitalization goes in that. Microsoft’s guideline for developers seem to suggest it’s just “gamerscore” with no capital letters, so let’s go with that.
Fortunately, playing through the same game twice in a row wasn’t much of a burden in this case. I didn’t love ALL of the Prince of Persia games released in the 2000s, but the series had way more hits than misses and The Forgotten Sands is just a joy, if your personal concept of “joy” involves performing platforming challenges while avoiding spinning blades and other traps. It holds up decently in the looks department, as well. There are some weird bits of facial animation when characters are talking and the camera is in close, and I wasn’t stopping to take close looks at the textures, but I could definitely play games that look this good all day any day.
The other bit of enjoyment I got from the whole experience was sending pictures of my TV to friends my age and telling them I was “getting into retro gaming”. Look, the Xbox 360 is over 20 years old now. It’s retro.
I don’t own any current generation consoles, barring a Switch 2 which is kind of its own thing, and I’m pleasantly surprised by how well these old systems are holding on. You may not be able to buy games from an Xbox 360 any more, and it can’t watch purchased video content, but you can download your purchased games and it does connect up to Xbox Live to show you your friends list and upload achievement info. The PS3 has the same limitations with video content, but you can still buy games from its digital store if you’ve got some way to load money on to your account and don’t mind that the store is painfully slow.
Getting a screenshot of the achievements, though, that was fun. Neither playstation.com nor the Playstation app show you PS3 achievements, and the PS3 doesn’t have built in screenshot functionality. The eventual process I came up with was:
- Boot a PS Vita. Find out that the 64GB memory card I imported from Japan at great cost many years ago has died. This was a known problem with this cards, so it was really only a matter of time. Steal a memory card from a second Vita.
- Take screenshots of the achievements using the Vita.
- Copy the screenshots from the Vita to the PS3, which you can thankfully do without installing Sony’s Content Manager program anywhere. I’m not sure if the CMA is still available or not, or if it even works on modern macOS, and I’m nearly two months into my Year Without Windows and didn’t want to break that streak.
- Copy the screenshots to a USB drive on the PS3 and move them to my laptop that way.
As for why this is a record that I’m unlikely to top… well, honestly I don’t really have many PS3 games that would qualify as “finished years ago” left. Trophies weren’t a thing when the system launched and weren’t added to games until 2008, so many of the games I played pre-2010 simply didn’t have trophies. Some of them had trophies added retroactively (The Force Unleashed, for one) but I didn’t get trophy information when I played it the first time.
I guess I could do this for some of the older Xbox 360 titles. But the process of getting 1000/1000 in older Xbox 360 games could be quite… challenging, even ignoring the games that have multiplayer-only trophies that you simply can’t get any more. That’s probably a rabbit hole I shouldn’t go down.


