Hello everyone. Its time for another Gaming Sunday. This week I finished the base game of Elden Ring for the seamless co op playthrough I was doing with my brother. We then dipped our toes into the DLC. Also, I have gotten into 3DS emulation have started a playthrough of the Gen 3 pokemon remakes. I remember those coming out when I was in high school, and I deeply contemplated buying a 3DS to play them, but for some reason I never ended up pulling the trigger. Anyway, I have beaten the first gym. Hope you all have a great week ahead!
I’ve gotten sucked into a handful of PS2 games for nostalgia because I learned about Retro Achievements. Just logged into my account on PCSX2 and started up some Guitar Hero and Dynasty Warriors 3. It’s a neat way to encourage playing older games like this because I get dopamine hits whenever I get an achievement and it tells me my placement on leaderboards. Some people on the site are too hardcore for me though, I’m not grinding 9999 kills on a DW3 level to get top leaderboard position for kills in that level.
Can I ask what you get out of achievements bar what you’ve already said?
Well if you want to actually fully engage with the site itself, it’s full of retro game enthusiasts who like squeezing every ounce of content out of older games. There’s a large community of people on the forums discussing older game series, collectively cooking up achievement sets that fans of those games would appreciate so they’re a lot more unique than “Complete X level”, talking about self-imposed challenges that can become subsets of the main achievements. They’re all community developed and you can easily become an achievement developer yourself. I have several friends who are on the site and so it becomes a bit of a friendly competition to see who can beat each other on leaderboards, earn the most points during an event, master some funny/obscure meme game, etc. You can also earn some in co-op.
There’s also a ‘softcore’ mode that allows you to play with rewind, save states, and other features of emulators. Most people play on ‘hardcore’ though and there are exclusive rewards to doing so, which means you have to play the game as the game itself allows. Close to how you would have done it on the original system. Which is neat in its own way, because I am always tempted to abuse save states. It gives me either a new appreciation or new level of disdain for a game when I have to engage with all of the design decisions instead of skipping over them with emulator features. They do still allow you to use fast forward in hardcore mode though.
Outside of that, I like that achievements give me something concrete to work toward that isn’t just “beat game” or “100% game”. You can of course set your own goals, but I’m someone who tends to complete games, almost never replays them, does very little side content because I think minigames are always bad or the content is often boring, etc. Achievements reign that in a little by giving me a reward for doing things that I might otherwise not find enjoyable for their own sake. But not in like an unhealthy way to where I’m obsessing over the achievements and getting frustrated by what I have to do to earn them either.
I like showing off a little even though none of it matters.
Thanks for the write up! ദ്ദി(╭ರ_•́)