Xbox 360 Catalog Expansion

This one is another fun one :) CompletionLab just added 484 Xbox 360 games and 13,389 achievements, bringing the full catalog to: 12,970 games. 379,779 achievements. Before this update, CompletionLab had 290 Xbox 360 games. Most of those existed because somebody had actually played them and Xbox introduced the title through their account sync. Which worked, but also meant there were hundreds of perfectly valid Xbox 360 achievement games sitting right in front of us that CompletionLab couldn’t add on its own. Microsoft’s modern Store listings for backwards-compatible games gave me a missing link. Those listings can point directly to the Xbox 360 title ID of the game they actually launch. So I went through all of those relationships and found 546 Xbox 360 titles that weren’t already represented in CompletionLab. Then each one had to prove itself through Xbox. CompletionLab takes the exact Xbox 360 title ID, asks Xbox for the complete achievement list, asks Microsoft for the Base Game achievement group, and then makes sure the two actually agree before anything gets added. Out of 546 titles: 484 passed. 61 returned no Xbox 360 achievements. 1 was held because Microsoft’s Base Game data didn’t match the achievement list. That one is Beautiful Katamari. Xbox currently returns 40 achievements, while Microsoft’s Base Game data references 47 achievements and includes 10 IDs that aren’t in the returned list. So CompletionLab leaves it alone. No guessing. No filling in the blanks. If Xbox and Microsoft don’t agree, it doesn’t get added. The same goes for the 61 empty results. A lot of them appear to be original Xbox backwards-compatible games, but CompletionLab doesn’t decide that from a game name or Store listing. If Xbox doesn’t return a real Xbox 360 achievement list, it stays unresolved. Some of the new games include Catherine, Call of Duty 2, Brütal Legend, Crysis 2, Dragon Age: Origins, Divinity II, RAGE, Peggle, Costume Quest, Dante’s Inferno, and hundreds more. There was also another weird side effect of how backwards compatibility works. CompletionLab already had a few Store-based placeholder pages for some of these games. Once the real Xbox 360 version was verified, those pages didn’t need to exist separately anymore. So 19 of those old stand-in pages now lead directly to the real Xbox 360 game. Seven more are staying around temporarily because they already have imported content attached to them. I’d rather leave a duplicate visible for a little while than automatically move data I’m not completely sure about. And just like the other catalog work, none of this touches player history. When somebody who has played one of them syncs later, Xbox connects their history to the correct game using the exact title ID. So in one update, CompletionLab went from: 290 Xbox 360 games → 774 Xbox 360 games. And that still isn’t the whole Xbox 360 catalog :) This pass only covers games Microsoft currently exposes through its backwards-compatible Store relationships. Delisted games, regional versions, games without a current Store listing, and a bunch of other historical Xbox 360 titles are still out there. Which means there’s plenty left to find.