Post by Moulinoski on Dec 16, 2022 15:02:31 GMT -5
Something I’ve recently done is to sign up for retroachievements.org/ and link it to my emudeck installation on my Steam Deck. I have now revisited Ocarina of Time and Super Mario World with retro achievements on and I’ve done some things in them that I normally wouldn’t do. It’s an interesting way to revisit old favorites. With new retro games, it’s sometimes a neat sort of validation that I’ve progressed in the game, such as in Faxanadu when I finally reached the first tower (the place where you need to turn the three springs on), I got an achievement “the real adventure starts here”. It’s inconsequential and yet it felt nice. Like being told “good job, you’re going the right way.”
There are some games that already had a feature like this. For example, one of my favorite games- if not my favorite- Link’s Awakening DX has a photography side quest that merely rewards you with photographs you can later view over and over to your heart’s content. If you play Link’s Awakening on either Gameboy or Switch, you might play it a different way than on the DX version thanks to these photographs. Now with retro achievements, there’s even more things I’ve done differently as well. The Metroid Prime Trilogy on Wii added its own internal achievements system as well with actual in-game unlockables tied to it which behave more like my example from Faxanadu above.
This isn’t just limited to old games that didn’t natively have achievements or had them as an internal part of the game. I first played Ys without paying much attention to the Steam achievements but I just recently played through it again on a harder difficulty (easy to normal, go ahead and laugh) and I paid more attention to the achievements this time and did some things I wouldn’t have done if I never looked them up. Turns out, there’s a whole side story with Luta Gemma that you can do that’s completely optional and missable. This felt more like the photographs rewards from Link’s Awakening DX in that I wasn’t just rewarded with an achievement for playing differently, but got to see something new as well. Of course, there’s also the other stuff I normally wouldn’t have done like creep Feena out 8|
Anyway. The point of this thread was mainly to gush about how achievements have changed the way I play a game I may have already played through before and how it changes the experience. I want to stress that I’m not going out of my way to hunt down achievements , especially not the ones that ask me to do some mundane task (but that itself is a subjective opinion).
Has anyone else dabbled in retro achievements or played a retro achievement-enabled system and found themselves playing differently just because they see an achievement they think they can get and just go for it? Or because they think they can get all of those achievements?
Side note: anytime I play on a “dumb” system like an actual SNES or an emulator device like an RG280V, I kinda miss them retro achievements.
There are some games that already had a feature like this. For example, one of my favorite games- if not my favorite- Link’s Awakening DX has a photography side quest that merely rewards you with photographs you can later view over and over to your heart’s content. If you play Link’s Awakening on either Gameboy or Switch, you might play it a different way than on the DX version thanks to these photographs. Now with retro achievements, there’s even more things I’ve done differently as well. The Metroid Prime Trilogy on Wii added its own internal achievements system as well with actual in-game unlockables tied to it which behave more like my example from Faxanadu above.
This isn’t just limited to old games that didn’t natively have achievements or had them as an internal part of the game. I first played Ys without paying much attention to the Steam achievements but I just recently played through it again on a harder difficulty (easy to normal, go ahead and laugh) and I paid more attention to the achievements this time and did some things I wouldn’t have done if I never looked them up. Turns out, there’s a whole side story with Luta Gemma that you can do that’s completely optional and missable. This felt more like the photographs rewards from Link’s Awakening DX in that I wasn’t just rewarded with an achievement for playing differently, but got to see something new as well. Of course, there’s also the other stuff I normally wouldn’t have done like creep Feena out 8|
Anyway. The point of this thread was mainly to gush about how achievements have changed the way I play a game I may have already played through before and how it changes the experience. I want to stress that I’m not going out of my way to hunt down achievements , especially not the ones that ask me to do some mundane task (but that itself is a subjective opinion).
Has anyone else dabbled in retro achievements or played a retro achievement-enabled system and found themselves playing differently just because they see an achievement they think they can get and just go for it? Or because they think they can get all of those achievements?
Side note: anytime I play on a “dumb” system like an actual SNES or an emulator device like an RG280V, I kinda miss them retro achievements.
