I've completed all Dead Rising single player achievements, a process that my achievements tell me took 7 months to complete. Dead Rising took half a month to 100%, Dead Rising 2 and all of it's episodes took 2 and a half, Dead Rising 3 took 3 months and Off The Record took one. I've already talked about these in more detail, but in case someone would like to complete all Dead Rising achievements as well(and you should), I would like to talk about a few that caused me trouble. Not in the sense that they were hard, but the ones I had technical problems with, so you can potentially avoid them yourself.
-Dead Rising went smoothly, just follow the guides and everything should be fine. Make sure to set aside an entire day for 7 Day Survivor and follow your guide of choice to the letter, don't forget that there is a nasty bug that leads to a crash in the Food Court on day 4 or so.
-Dead Rising 2 also went smoothly, for the most part. Zombie Genocide Master took me quite a few playthrus to complete, it requires you play perfectly with milestones you need to meet by the hour, but it's doable. This is where the first technical problem started, however. In Case West, there is an achievement called "Handy Man". It requires you to make all the new DLC combo weapons...except that most players will never trigger it, as it is notoriously bugged. The game only counts this achievement if every single NEW combo weapon was made in a row, if you made even one returning combo weapon(like the Hail Mary that you can make before you even make it to the Security Room) then the achievement is impossible to complete. I had to start a brand new save to complete this one, and only make the new combo weapons for that playthru before making the old ones. Be aware of that if you try to 100% Case West.
-Dead Rising 3 was a doozy, most of the achievements I was missing were simple collectathon ones I could knock out in a single playthru, but the one that took most of the 3 month period was PP Hound. Dead Rising 3 has "PP Trials", passive challenges you can earn in the background across multiple playthrus to earn extra PP, if you played something like Fallout New Vegas you're already familiar with this system. Problem is that most of these challenges aren't very interesting, they come down to making 50 of select combo weapons, a task that will require more than one full playthru, which if you recall is over 6 hours long. You can shorten the time by making the weapons at a combo locker as often as possible and learning where the components are around the map to make more when you have to wait for the locker to recharge, but it still takes forever. Still, this isn't what gave me real problems, that was several DLC collectathon achievements: Stick it to the Man, Burn Baby Burn, Bootleg Collector and Ashes to Ashes(most infamous one). These are notoriously bugged as well and required me to start my profile over from level 1, twice, which meant that in these three months, I leveled up all the way to level 50 just as many times. Unfortunately, I choose to do PP Hound last, so that meant my progress for that achievement was completely reset as well. The way I understand it, much like with Handy Man, if you don't destroy the objectives or collect the objects all in one playthru, the collectible counter screws up or the objects don't spawn properly in the next playthru, making the achievements impossible to complete. My suggestions is to not touch these 4 until you are ready to complete them, then destroy or collect every single objective in one playthru. They are all marked on your map and DLC episodes have no time limit, so it all comes down to making sure you destroy every single objective per zone and move on to the next one.
-Off The Record didn't require me to restart my save, but there was one achievement that gave me trouble and that's the one I just completed: Purewal Memorial Cup. The objective is simple, do not eat or drink any dairy, meat or alcohol until military arrives in Case 7. Problem with that is that whoever marked items you can eat or drink did a poor job of it, as I met the achievement requirements and it didn't pop up, prompting me to try again. This time, I only drank Orange Juice and Mixed Drinks(which all work no matter what you put in them, this is about the only debunked claim about this achievement since there isn't a proper list of what food you can or cannot consume made by anyone). If you ask me, I think some joker simply flagged all fast/junk food as ineligible for the achievement, which makes no sense. Snacks, Onion Rings and French Fries still work within the confines of this achievement, but if you're going for it yourself, I suggest you stick to the liquid diet like I did. Make sure to give survivors only OJ as well, just to be sure.
I only have three achievements total left: Two of them relate to the TIR online mode in DR2 and the third requires me to get all gold medals in co-op in OTR's sandbox mode. I'm not going to complete these right now, but I assume these aren't all that hard, provided you actually have people to play with.
This one was a blast to do, reminded me why I fell in love with these games in the first place. Great trilogy of games, you can easily discount the fourth one and the shitty demake and you still have a fantastic set of games you can always replay. I know I have dozens of playthrus between all these games I listed and I could certainly go for a few more right now, if I wanted to.