RetroAchievements
December 22, 2015 8:15 PM   Subscribe

RetroAchievements provides customized emulators and an account structure to add Achievements to hundreds of old-school video games on the NES, SNES, MegaDrive/Sega Genesis, GameBoy, GameBoy Color, GameBoy Advance, and PC Engine/TurboGrafx-16. Browse the most commonly won achievements, the games with the hardest achievements, and the most popular games. Or if you're more into coding than gaming, you could always just check out the GPL-licensed source code for the emulators.
posted by Pope Guilty (11 comments total) 35 users marked this as a favorite
 
I hate what achievements have done to modern game design and developers' willingness to allow mods and savegame editing.

But none of the problems I have with achievements applies to this at all. This is the all the good and none of the bad. At their best achievements encourage you to try playing the game a different way, find something cool you missed, or dig in and master new skills and challenges.

And of course a lot of these games already had something like this by keeping track of what percentage of the map you had uncoverered or how many coins, blue coins, stars, and secret stars you had collected.
posted by straight at 8:59 PM on December 22, 2015 [1 favorite]


I'm pleased to see how difficult Bubble Bobble's challenges are. That game was an adorable ballbuster.
posted by boo_radley at 9:12 PM on December 22, 2015 [4 favorites]


Bubble Bobble is one of those games where I'm good right up until the point where I'm useless.
posted by Pope Guilty at 11:21 PM on December 22, 2015 [6 favorites]


This is extremely cool! I'm a bit amazed that this is even capable of being implemented without serious programming effort for each game.
posted by naju at 11:26 PM on December 22, 2015


Fucking The Goonies II. Eleven-year-old Rock Steady hated that game so much.
posted by Rock Steady at 6:58 AM on December 23, 2015 [1 favorite]


*Fires up Retro Achievements DosBox*
*> vim sonic_fanfic.txt*

Let's grind some chivos!
posted by mccarty.tim at 7:18 AM on December 23, 2015 [2 favorites]


Pope Guilty: "Bubble Bobble is one of those games where I'm good right up until the point where I'm useless."

"You've gotten a quarter's worth, kid. Now let's see what you're made of. Oh, you're playing by yourself? Haha, have fun."
posted by boo_radley at 8:58 AM on December 23, 2015


Not to mention what you had to do to get the good ending.
posted by lkc at 9:04 AM on December 23, 2015 [2 favorites]


This is extremely cool! I'm a bit amazed that this is even capable of being implemented without serious programming effort for each game.

When you think about it, I guess it's kind of like a Game Genie plugged in backwards.
posted by blue t-shirt at 10:09 AM on December 23, 2015 [5 favorites]


A Game Genie that let you peek/poke at memory addresses through gpio would be pretty cool. And a real boon to ambitious modders. Imagine building a dashboard complete with gauges that followed in-game variables.

I have no idea how feasible that would be with an actual console, though. A raspberry pi or something could probably get close to what I'm thinking of if it's emulating. Or any computer with an Arduino.
posted by mccarty.tim at 9:07 AM on December 24, 2015 [1 favorite]


mccarty.tim: Check out what people do to get RNG'd perfect shiny pokemon! Thats for a cart. The emulator tools, I think are a bit more elaborate. Also, I think there are some minecraft/dwarf fortress PC tools for similar instrumenting.
posted by lkc at 1:28 PM on December 24, 2015 [1 favorite]


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