RetroAchievements: Adding Achievements to Retro Games

Re:RetroAchievements: Adding Achievements to Retro Games by Chabsff on Tuesday September 12, 2023 @02:51PM (#37485929)

> Although I do dislike that there's a large category of "achievements" nowadays that are nothing more than telemetry for developers.

That's always been the case. Some XBoX360 games went as far as having "reached the main menu" achievements in order to create a baseline user count that didn't include demo terminals running the attract mode on loop.

I agree that cheevos-as-telemetry sounds bad at face value, but consider it the other way around:

Getting pain-free already anonymized telemetry stats via achievements through platform holders has long been a bulwark against intrusive bullshit telemetry by way of making the effort-to-reward ratio of the later just not worth it. This is not unlike the classic "The way to stop piracy is to provide a better UX" argument.

It also has the very important added benefit of making what is being collected extremely transparent to users.

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Re:RetroAchievements: Adding Achievements to Retro Games by thaumasiotes on Tuesday September 12, 2023 @08:44PM (#37490718)

There was a series of Flash games made responding to this trend: https://jayisgames.com/review/achievement-unlocked-2.php

> To say Achievement Unlocked 2 can be a bit disorienting is an understatement. Upon loading the game up for the first time, I was instantly flooded with achievements, including one that was bestowed, apparently, because my system clock was divisible by three. (I knew that would pay off one day!)

They were very well received. It appears they are being repackaged for the world without Flash: https://www.gog.com/en/game/the_elephant_collection

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Re:RetroAchievements: Adding Achievements to Retro Games by cableshaft on Wednesday September 13, 2023 @09:57AM (#37496824)

Brilliant. Those were standout games from Flash, and so clever. They deserve to come back. I look forward to that release.

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Re:RetroAchievements: Adding Achievements to Retro Games by pcchristie on Tuesday September 12, 2023 @09:37PM (#37491118)

I also just plain old like it... It makes sense to me. I never got hugely into achievements but I liked the Gamerscore on the 360, it was a good proxy for how much you had achieved overall on the console, and how far towards 1000 you got on a game. Most games you'd get ~ 500-600 out of 1000 just for beating the game, and then you could go out of your way to master it and push towards 1000.

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