Hello everyone! As most of you who’ve been following my blog will know, I love playing videogames and while I love modern day games, I’m also a big fan of playing old games. I suppose it’s sort of a combination of nostalgia, but also a keen interest in game design and the evolution of both story telling in videogames and the (r)evolution of videogame music. Lately, I’ve been taking a great liking to replaying classics with Retro Achievements and in this blog I’ll try to explain a bit more about it.

Retro Achievements give a new lease on life on the classics

Achievements in videogames have been around quite a while. The systems were introduced around the time the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 were on the market and a lot of gaming platforms have some sort of achievement system, with the exception of Nintendo consoles. There’s something to say about not wanting to implement a system like it, because I have to admit that achievement hunting can really ruin the fun in some games. Especially if some of these achievements or trophies are really obscure and hard to pull off, or are nothing but endless grindfests.

Retro Achievements aims to give retro games achievements when you play them using emulators. A friend of mine helped me to build and install my Retroflag GPi Case 2, which is an awesome handheld emulator that looks exactly like an old fashioned Game Boy.

I’ve been having a blast with this handheld, which can also be hooked up to a screen with a docking station similar to that of a Switch. Except that it doesn’t work as well and you have to put the Retroflag into the dock first and then turn it on it order for it to work properly. Still, it’s a great little machine that does a lot of things perfectly right.

After I created my account on Retro Achievements I started a couple of games to see which I would like to master. And recently, I finally managed to master one of my old time favourites Gargoyle’s Quest for the Game Boy. The achievements were too spicy, but offered enough of a challenge to pursue the mastery for it. What it did for me was show me just how well I still knew this game by heart and it really did offer a newly added challenge as well.

Retro Achievements is a fan community

As the achievements for these games never existed back in the day and Retro Achievements is a fan community, sometimes the achievement sets can be a bit excessive, so I try to take a good look at the set before taking them on and deciding if I really want to master the game, or not. Because if one thing achievements can ruin it’s the fun in playing a game. But a good, well thought out set can really enhance your experience of certain games and make you play them in ways you otherwise might not have considered and those are the best sets, if you ask me.

Taking on new old challenges

Lately I’ve been trying to get into old skool RPG games and since I have my own room in our new house, I’m also considering live streaming them in the future. I’m not entirely sure what I’ll need in order for that to happen, but I’d really like to give it a go and see if I can stream games, while also entertaining people who are watching. The best way for me to do that is probably by replaying games I already know well and tell people about it as I play, but discovering old, hidden gems I never had the chance to play before is also pretty awesome. So I’m trying to think about a plan for that now as well and I’ll have to decide if I’m going to do this at a set time each week (if possible) or just whenever I feel like it.

Do you like playing retro games? Please let me know in the comments below!

Happy gaming!

Jeffrey