Video Game Collectibles: Do You Love Them or Hate Them?

video game collectibles

With all of the free time on my hands recently, I’ve found that I’m more willing to dive into the minutia of gaming, picking over stuff that I would have previously forgone had I been more engaged during the day with other activities (like working). Given GamerSushi’s recent obsession with a certain post-WW2 detective game, most of the article will center around that, but we can delve into other games that do this sort of thing as well.

While random collectibles are more endemic to sandbox games, it’s not unusual to see any manner of game in any genre throw in bits of random junk for you to accrue to either flesh out the story or just to have you hang on to your games a little longer instead of trading them in. Call of Duty has its Intel, which unlocks cheats, and Crysis 2 has dog tags, landmarks and emails which gave you more insight into what exactly was going on when you weren’t killing mechanical squids.

Now that I’ve finished L.A. Noire, I’m driving around in free roam trying to find all the golden film canisters and the street crimes. Rockstar has done this pretty well in their last couple of games, which is good after the horrible showing in GTAIV; it was kind of weird for them to stumble in this regard, Rockstar is typically great about extending the life of a game after the main story is done.

I’ve always been partial to completing games 100%, especially after the introduction of Achievements (not that the lack of them has held me back in PC and PS3 games…), but I’m wondering how you guys feel about them. Do you go for them, or pick up any that you come across? Do you like finding them, or are they the bane of your existence?