RetroAchievements

I'm a HUGE fan of trophies and achievements in video games and RetroAchievements has made it where I can get that same experience with games that were made well before achievements became commonplace in the industry.

Don't ask my why I like achievements and trophies so much. I genuinely don't know, I just get a little dopamine hit every time I see one pop up. And I realize that a lot of people don't really like achievements, some even go so far as to hate them, so systems that allow you to turn them on or off really are the best of both worlds. 

Furthermore, I do want to explicitly say that these games were not incomplete or inferior WITHOUT achievements. I'm not going to tell you that Super Mario World became a better game with achievements. It's just a neat thing for me to be able to see individual accomplishments listed together in a single place across all my games on that platform.

So what IS RetroAchievements? It's a site that tracks tasks for older games when played from certain emulators. You make an account on the site, log in on your emulator software, and then you just play. The UI will let you know when you unlock an achievement with a pop-up, just like modern consoles.

RetroAchievements is a community effort, so individuals will create achievement sets and the community will vote on them. No, it isn't first party official in the way that today's achievements are, but it's about as close as you can reasonably get in this situation. It's like speed running communities and what is or is not acceptable for a given category.

RetroAchievements has two main modes: softcore and hardcore. Softcore is what you would traditionally expect of an emulator; you can save state and load state, run the game in slow motion, or even advance frame by frame. Obviously, this makes the game much easier. Hardcore is true to the original game. There are no save states, and you cannot slow the game down. You can play on fast forward, but that's more for quality of life rather than making the game easier. Those functions are restricted at the emulator level if hardcore mode is enabled. Some achievements are limited to exclusively hardcore mode, so you have to play the game without assistance to get those.

I've deliberated before on whether I considered save states as acceptable to use anyway. In my old age, I've come to accept that accessibility is always a great thing, and that people should just play games the way they want to play the games. If that means easy difficulty, save states, and slow motion, go for it! If you want to be true to the original, turn on hardcore mode and struggle like it's 1996. If you decide a game is too hard after the fact, you can just disable hardcore mode. RetroArch will even let you create save states on hardcore, you just can't load the state. More options is ALWAYS a good thing.

Lately, I've kept hardcore mode on by default on my Steam Deck. I've certainly been tempted to use save states here and there, but it is an amount of work to disable hardcore mode and it disqualifies me from getting achievements. I was concerned that some games would be prohibitively difficult, but I got through all the Special levels and cleared Super Mario World 100% without any emulator help. It's been challenging and refreshing, but in a good way.

Since ROMs and emulators don't have built in achievements like Steam and PlayStation, it's traditionally been difficult for me to track what I've been playing and how far I got. With RetroAchievements, hardcore mode or not, I have a running record of what games I've been playing and what I accomplished in those games. It isn't quite as social as Steam, where I can share screenshots and videos, but there are leaderboards and ranks. It's definitely better than nothing.

I think maybe the best part of RetroAchievements is that it is completely optional. For people who hate trophies and achievements (y tho?), they don't ever have to make an account or see a pop-up. That level of customization is huge, because I really do want people to be able to play games as close to their personal preferences as possible.

For me, RetroAchievements has breathed new life into old gaming for me. It has given me incentive to go back and revisit some old favorites, and I like looking at the achievement list for whatever game I'm playing to see if there are some low hanging fruit that I can knock out easily. For anyone who grew up with these older games and tends to be very achievement-driven like myself, RetroAchievements is superb.