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

[PipTheAlchemist]

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.

 

[Dan of Steel]

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:



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:




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.

 

[TheDarknessGrows]

I got the paladin shield in FF6.

 

[SSj_Ness (Yiffed)]

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.

 

[XYZpdq Jr.]

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.

I think that SOTN thing was a cheevo in one of the legit re-releases?

 

[Friendly Primarina]

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.

 

[Kheapathic]

I have an unhealthy PS trophy addiction. I don't need more shit to activate my autism.

I got the paladin shield in FF6.

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.

 

[TheDarknessGrows]

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.

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.

 

[Peter Muskrat Gaming]

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.

 

[Soda Can]

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.

 

[Peter Muskrat Gaming]

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.

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.

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

 

[TheArtilleryman]

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.

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.