RetroAchievements - Modern E-Peen Measuring Tools for your Retro Vidjas

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PipTheAlchemist

PipTheAlchemist

kiwifarms.net
Joined
Jul 13, 2020
Recently got RetroArch set-up, to better organize all my vidja ROMs and emulators, and saw that RetroArch had an option for enabling RetroAchievements.

I was vaguely-aware of RetroAchievements prior to this, I just was never too interested in the whole concept. With me not being much of an achievement hunter, or one to 100% most games to completion. Despite this, I though "ehh, fuggit" and made myself a RetroAchievements account, just to try the whole thing out.
After playing a few retro games w/ RetroAchievements, I have to say they're pretty fun. Even though I'm far from a big achievement hunter, many RetroAchievement sets encourage you to play old games in entirely new ways and gives you a reason to 100% games (that reason being to brag to other virgins about how better of a virgin you are compared to their gay asses).

Anyone else on the farms into RetroAchievements? Tell your stories and discuss ancient cheevos in this bread.
 
I was initially skeptical when I first heard of RetroAchievements. I wasn't against the idea perse, but it being so tied to the RetroArch ecosystem made me wary. Mainly because of how much I loathe RetroArch's clusterfuck of PS3 dropdown menus and esoteric fiddling you have to do for something as simple as wanting to remap your controller for a certain core. Also because when I did have an Xbox 360, achievements were something I rarely cared about and the people who bought and played games solely to get all the achievements in it I thought were kinda gay.

But I recently learned that one of my favorite emulators, Duckstation, has support for RA and I tried it out of morbid curiosity and was surprised at how fun it is going back and replaying old games I already love with achievements for all the silly things you can do in them; like finding the Secret Boots in Symphony of the Night that makes Alucard like 3 pixels taller:

boots.png

I also like for certain games, it'll give you an in-game status on your profile as to where you last were in that game, as well as tracking your progress:

monke.png
sotn3.png

Overall, it's a pretty neat. It's fun going back through my old favorites, especially from the 5th gen since I think a standalone N64 emulator has RA and I can wrangle RetroArch for Saturn games. It's a fun way to have an external motivator to play games that have been in my backlog forever, too.
If for whatever reason you want to see how awful I am at old vidya, here's my profile.
 
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I uses to be pretty into trophies but then realized they can ruin games if you give a shit about them. I don't even care about official trophies, so I'm not interested in unofficial ones.

I do admit it's neat though, and if you've already played a game to death but still play it anyway, then why not go for these achievements.
 
Dan of Steel said:
I was initially skeptical when I first heard of RetroAchievements. I wasn't against the idea perse, but it being so tied to the RetroArch ecosystem made me wary. Mainly because of how much I loathe RetroArch's clusterfuck of PS3 dropdown menus and esoteric fiddling you have to do for something as simple as wanting to remap your controller for a certain core. Also because when I did have an Xbox 360, achievements were something I rarely cared about and the people who bought and played games solely to get all the achievements in it I thought were kinda gay.

But I recently learned that one of my favorite emulators, Duckstation, has support for RA and I tried it out of morbid curiosity and was surprised at how fun it is going back and replaying old games I already love with achievements for all the silly things you can do in them; like finding the Secret Boots in Symphony of the Night that makes Alucard like 3 pixels taller:

View attachment 4520505

I also like for certain games, it'll give you an in-game status on your profile as to where you last were in that game, as well as tracking your progress:

View attachment 4520514
View attachment 4520525

Overall, it's a pretty neat. It's fun going back through my old favorites, especially from the 5th gen since I think a standalone N64 emulator has RA and I can wrangle RetroArch for Saturn games. It's a fun way to have an external motivator to play games that have been in my backlog forever, too.
If for whatever reason you want to see how awful I am at old vidya, here's my profile.
Click to expand...
I think that SOTN thing was a cheevo in one of the legit re-releases?
 
I was massively into RA a couple of years ago. I stopped when the achievements started getting ridiculous (and against the guidelines in the wiki). It's too bad; it's a fun idea.
 
I have an unhealthy PS trophy addiction. I don't need more shit to activate my autism.

TheDarknessGrows said:
I got the paladin shield in FF6.
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I remember helping a friend grind for that in Narshe. We actually used the multi-player option in the game; he took two characters, I took the other two, and we just grinded and talked. Was pretty fun, not gonna lie. Also never met anyone else who ever used the multi-player function.
 
Kheapathic said:
I remember helping a friend grind for that in Narshe. We actually used the multi-player option in the game; he took two characters, I took the other two, and we just grinded and talked. Was pretty fun, not gonna lie. Also never met anyone else who ever used the multi-player function.
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Oh neat! Yeah I don't think I met anyone that did multiplayer FF6. I did it maybe around 2012? Was a lot of fun! And yeah much what you say. Hung out and talked and played vidya.
 
Don't join their discord (first mistake). Genuinely some of the most retarded shit imaginable. I wanted to talk about playing video games, and instead had to deal with people talking about an internal cold civil war over some hypersensitive tranny non-stop. Just use the front-end website and don't interact with the userbase. It's literally the exact thing you would expect when you picture "video game discord", I.E. this pic.
1722121586188.png
 
The community part of RetroAchievements is a honeypot of fairly uninteresting drama. They have a high population of minors and strong personalities from all across the internet, so stupid crap happens nearly every day. Be it StingX2 being an early 90s meganerd that can't just act like a normal person, or Maddie, a 25+ year old man who larps as a 15 year old girl, making lazy achievement sets and calling people transphobic for not kissing ass or just the youngest users going ape shit any time someone mentioned AI, RA has something boring for everyone. Funny thing, though, while there is a high furry population, the majority of them are the not annoying kind. Just have an avatar and some off server stuff, but are otherwise not weird about it.

Just play the games, don't talk to the people.
 
In my experience the main server has a handful of regulars, but half of the time it's impossible to use because voice calls get flooded with mushmouths. People use the main discord rarely and migrate to side servers to actually talk. My entire time in a side server was me trying to talk about vidya only for homosexuals in their 30's to interrupt so they could blather about the tranny. It got to the point they were holding discord tribunals trying to figure out who was leaking what messages to the troon and dragging it into the main server when the entire poof platoon wouldn't assemble, then the very next day a different tranny kept talking about how they sell troonshine out of their house with that devolving into them all posting pictures of themselves and talking about how they wanna fuck each other "ironically". Wish I was joking. It would be fun to watch if you didn't at least need to be partially entangled to gain access to one of their servers.
Soda Can said:
Funny thing, though, while there is a high furry population, the majority of them are the not annoying kind. Just have an avatar and some off server stuff, but are otherwise not weird about it.
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I've noticed that too, they keep almost entirely to themselves. One of my buddies on the site did some digging into one of them though and, well... IYKYK
1731030775.png
 
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SSj_Ness (Yiffed) said:
I uses to be pretty into trophies but then realized they can ruin games if you give a shit about them. I don't even care about official trophies, so I'm not interested in unofficial ones.

I do admit it's neat though, and if you've already played a game to death but still play it anyway, then why not go for these achievements.
Click to expand...
That's my thought too. Honestly, as much as I loathe how achievements effectively decapitated bonus content and unlockables in newer videogames, I'm really enjoying playing older games with them added retroactively. I don't care for achieving 100% in most games unless it's one I'm  reeeally in to, but there is a level of autistic pride to getting some awkward or rare achievements and having a big shiny badge on your profile with "Only 1.4% of players got this one!" beside it.

It really helps also that older games were designed without achievements in mind, so completing those big in-game tasks was usually rewarding in it's own internal, gameplay-orientated way, because otherwise why would you bother?

You get the best of both worlds with retroachievements:

Playing games that were designed to be fun to complete without achievements.
+
Achievements!

What a time to be alive.
 
I like achievements and 100%ing, but the sets on RA are way too autistic (at least the ones for the games I want to play that I checked out), and if I'm playing a game I like to go for all achievements unless it's a game that I didn't particularly enjoy.

I did get two games to 100%, but after talks of reworking a set by adding retarded achievements I dropped RA, as I'm not a fan of chasing a set mastery built by autistic nolifers for autistic nolifers
 
I've been into trophy hunting since PS4, but I don't take it too seriously. Found out about RA, and created an account. It's a really fun concept, and adds replayability to older games. Some of the sets with Spedrunning, or low level caps achievements are tedious, but I just ignore the ones I don't like.

I find most of the drama on the site is a nothingburger, and amusing to watch. Some does trigger my autism though. Like when the name for the "Autism" achievement in Resident Evil 2 PS1 got changed because someone cried about it being offensive. I legit Loled when that popped for me, and to see them bend the knee, and change it really irked me. Also the new support for the emulator "Afterplay" drama is amusing, but deters me from actually participating in discussion. Always seems like some people can sperg about anything, and others who try to argue valid points get muted. I could be misinterpreting it, and it's hard to confirm since they seemed to close both threads so far, but that's how it seemed to me.
 
Retroachievements has probably been one of my favorite things as of late. Just having the site's game lists have allowed me to find fun games I would have never of played otherwise like 7th Dragon. I'm mostly chipping away at the Classic Mega Man games, its been fun. I haven't ever really cared much about gaming achievements outside of the ones in TF2 so this has been a treat. I don't really find any achievements super annoying but I also tend to stray away from long RPGs that have missables.
 
I'm still playing catchup here, but they had themselves a spot of drama. Pokemon Clover has been one of the most requested games to have an achievement set made across all 10 of RA's years and one finally dropped the other day. And it blew up their general discord channel, with the set maker getting death threats and doxing attempts. It got bad enough that the set was removed, the game was added to the banned sets list and the mods are moving through all the comments everywhere to issue bans for being fucking idiots.

They then made a big needful post about it and, for some galaxy brain reason, decided to push it as a site-wide notification and @here in the discord.

And a follow up to that thread:
 
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Okay, I'll give you a quick rundown of what happened with Clover.
Pokemon Clover has been one of the most requested sets, always being on the top 10, on the site for years.
Over the course of years the comments and thread about Clover have been brigaded with people demanding it not be platformed for being "hate speech". This has been a large sticking point as much of the modern retro community are made of troons, however every time someone ranted about how evil Clover was the game would get another 20ish requests. It had around 500+..
For the past year or so a lot of big speedrun youtubers have been making videos playing RA sets of games they play which get 100k+ views and as a result RA has been trying to maintain more of a public image than it has in the past.
There is another game which had a set since 2022 that is a literal rape porn game, 177 (https://retroachievements.org/game/6978?v=1), and it had less controversy over being platformed than Clover ever did.
The admin account made an announcement in the thread for Clover clarifying their position on "hateful content" why it was being allowed to have a set. (https://retroachievements.org/forums/topic/32644?page=1). They make the mistake of stickying this announcement to the front page and coupling it to Clover specifically.
Troons rush our in droves to do what they do best and argue non-stop about how this is literally a fascist genocide against trans poc folx (the thread is 46 pages for fuck's sake), they go on bluesky and bitch constantly. There's probably a lot of funny shit to harvest on that end, I haven't had the time to check myself.
About two hours ago the site's owner Scott himself locks the Clover thread and says there will be an updated announcement shortly.
Both the Clover and 177 pages are blanked out and banned from getting a set in the future, this is signified by a Z icon next to its name and being in the RA graveyard hub.
A new announcement is made apologizing and capitulating to the troons that can be summarized as "hate speech... le bad!" (https://retroachievements.org/forums/topic/32648), this one is locked immediately.
The entire discord is put into slow mode, you can only reply every five minutes. But of course while the initial thread had tons of people coming out of the woodwork to support their first standpoint on a Clover set, the same handful of troons are throwing a victory lap now.
One of the hash maintainers and a prominent developer tele quits directly because of this decision leaving a message in their discord which was deleted, quote here:

"I'm getting this out of the way since I'm already getting DMs about my disappearance:

I left the admin/moderation teams and have temporarily left the Discord servers. I cannot support caving into an idiotic vocal minority over doxing, harassment, threats, etc. instead of outright banning them or fighting back. I've said it countless times: it is absolutely no one's business what other people play and people who want to make it their business can just fuck off.

I personally don't give a shit about any of the games in question, but I defend their existence on the site because RA is a supplementary service. The implication and accusations that we are supportive of RApe, RAcism, etc. over allowing games that include such things is fucking absurd and I think is impossible to take seriously. If it's not those things, it'll be something else. The likelihood of a domino effect in asskissing is something that I'll have no part of, so good luck with that mess. I imagine the ridiculous UWC reports will also end up working since all it takes is threatening our "staff" for people to get their way and it's incredibly easy to do. Thanks, internet.

I'll continue doing hash management and maintaining RAPatches, if allowed, but I believe that will be the extent of what I do. Who knows how long that will last, though. I think continuing as a developer is up in the air at the moment, but that could fizzle out and leave no point to me contributing altogether. In the meantime, I'll need others to take over DevJam, DevQuest 004, and a few other things. I'll be in touch soon(tm).

For now, I'm taking a break from dealing with anyone.

- tele"
 
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Now the community gets to decide what I get to play. What I am allowed to experience. Games do not hurt people. I really, really hope this is not a precident set for the future.

All we can do at this point is get Clover to be the most requested game on the website. Until then, it's offically ClOVER.
 
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Soda Can said:
I'm still playing catchup here, but they had themselves a spot of drama. Pokemon Clover has been one of the most requested games to have an achievement set made across all 10 of RA's years and one finally dropped the other day. And it blew up their general discord channel, with the set maker getting death threats and doxing attempts. It got bad enough that the set was removed, the game was added to the banned sets list and the mods are moving through all the comments everywhere to issue bans for being fucking idiots.

They then made a big needful post about it and, for some galaxy brain reason, decided to push it as a site-wide notification and @here in the discord.

And a follow up to that thread:
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Yeah they locked the discussion. But the actual rom page still allows comments.

 
>tele quits
Good on him for standing up for his principles, but I think he's forgotten that RA is run by the pettiest fuckers on the internet. He'll only be allowed to do those jobs he specifically mentioned because no one else wants to do them, same argument made after they fired Sting the first time and then had to beg him to come back as not-staff staff. There is now a power vacuum that will be filled by one of the same screaming harpies he left over.

>"I'll need others to take over DevJam, DevQuest 004, and a few other things."
He means Sting, he can just say Sting, we already know. The staffs whipping bitch gets more bitch work, sun rise, sun set.

It was just brought to my attention that tele was a prime dev involved with the upcoming addition of Wii games for achievement sets. Wonder if him leaving will push that back again.
 
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