Achievements, you either hate them or love them. My first encounter with this phenomenon was in the world of Warcraft. Hours and hours were spent on obtaining hard-to-get pets and mounts, unintentionally gaining achievements attached to them. At first, I thought, ‘Okay, what is this thing?’ and it didn’t really catch my attention. But then came the year 2008. The year I bought an Xbox 360 along with Ninja Gaiden 2, Grand Theft Auto 4, and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. It was at this point that my love for achievements finally ignited.
100% it
I still remember the first time I saw someone with a full 1000 gamerscore in a game, and I thought, ‘I can do that.’ I booted up Modern Warfare 2 and not long after, I reached 980 gamerscore with only one achievement left: the notorious Mile High Club achievement. Many people consider this one of the harder achievements in the game, as you had to play through the final level in record time on the highest difficulty available. It took me several attempts, but I finally managed to accomplish it. It felt so euphoric, knowing I did something not many others could achieve at that point.
After that first completion, many would follow. Some were hard ones, like R-Type Dimensions, and some were easy ones like Peppa Pig (hey, don’t look at me like that, my kids wanted to play it 🤭) and even some time-consuming JRPGs like Blue Dragon. My completion count at this moment is a whopping 427 completions and still growing throughout the years on Xbox. However, in the last couple of years, my love for achievements lost some of its flame. I became demotivated more and more by publishers like Xitilon, Ratalaika, and Eastasiasoft. They took the publishing of achievements to a whole new level with their title updates, which granted you 1000 gamerscore in less than 5 minutes. The whole challenge of showing how good you really are is being destroyed by easy gamerscore like that.
Making achievements fun again
But about a year ago, I came across retroachievements.org. A site that is being maintained by retro enthusiasts and is all about showing how good you are in a retro games. They have a large library of supported games, from Atari to NES, and just recently, PlayStation 2 support. Achievement lists are made with the help of the community and aim to showcase every aspect of what the game has to offer. They even split lists into subsets to create additional challenges for a game, mostly centered around speedruns, no-hit runs, and more. You might understand why I regained my interest in achievements. I love how they push you to outdo yourself and take paths you would have never considered otherwise. I like a challenge, and that’s why I am so hyped about this site.
To name a few I tried myself, starting with 1942, this upwards-moving arcade shmup made you play through all 32 levels with only 3 lives (you can get more through scoring), gain a total of 9 lives, and achieve a score of 990,000. Considering this is a game especially made for coin-up machines, you understand this wasn’t an easy task.
On the brink of insanity
Another one of my proudest completions is the Timesplitters 2 subset. This one almost made me lose my mind. The subset is all about getting platinum awards in the challenge mode. If you ever played Timesplitters 2, you know this is one hell of a job. Some of these challenges require you to kill a certain number of enemies within a time limit, and if you’ve tried this, you know some can be extremely frustrating due to RNG enemy spawns. There was this one particular challenge that was so hard it took me a total of 10 hours to finally get the platinum. But it felt so good when I finally achieved it.
And then there’s a game I’m still working on but have been struggling with the last boss fight, God of War for PlayStation 2. The no upgrades run is so hard because you have to play through the game with just your basic health and skills. I think I’ve invested about 30 hours so far, but I won’t give up until I have done it.
I could go on and on about all the sets, but I challenge you to try it yourself. If you like achievements and retro games, you will definitely enjoy this website. At least for me, it has reignited my love for achievements and what they should be all about. Something to be aware of is that some of these challenges can be truly tough and require determination.
Disclaimer
Retroachievements.org only works through emulation. You need an emulator like RetroArch or PCSX2 and ROMs to get it to work. We don’t encourage any form of illegal distribution of games and won’t share any sources for this.
