Rediscovering Old Games through RetroAchievements
Boku no Natsuyasumi 2 for the Sony PlayStation 2
I've never cared about video game achievements before.
My first console, a thick Sony Playstation 2, didn’t have achievements. Instead, my first videogame memory is fumbling around the memory card manager and accidentally deleting my dad's save file for Midnight Club 2. He’d finished the game some twenty minutes prior, celebrated by parading around in his favorite vehicle, and set down the controller to go mow the lawn; half of his memory card was gone when he returned. In middle and high school, gaming meant multiplayer PC titles where achievements made little sense: Dota 2, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Garry’s Mod. The goals tended to be either incredibly easy or frustratingly excessive, so I ignored them entirely.
This all changed when famed internet micro celebrity and overall good guy SmasherMagazine introduced me to RetroAchievements in early February. It instantly rekindled my hot nostalgia love for sixth-generation consoles and pushed me to play a bunch of games I'd never played before. RetroAchievements is a community-supported achievements platform with deep emulator integrations: you create a profile, log into the RA plugins in your favorite emulator, and compete with friends on your favorite classic games. Once you’re logged into an emulator’s RA plugin, launching a supported title quickly displays your overall achievement progress and the current achievement mode. The default RetroAchievements experience, labeled “hardcore mode,” disables save states and cheat patches in exchange for access to timed, speedrun-esque leaderboard challenges and shiny gold frames on all achievements and badges earned during play. Since RA plugins read the game’s memory addresses to track progress, you are also notified of any in-progress achievements with a floating icon of those achievements in the lower right of the screen.
It kicks ass and makes progressing through games feel great.
I don't really have a point here aside from telling you to sign up for a RetroAchievements account – so go do that. If you'd like, you can take a peek at my profile by clicking here.