Doing it for the cheeves
Jul. 17th, 2024 17:15For awhile I was forced to use Linux as my home OS, since every windows-capable computer I owned had some sort of problem. Eventually tax refund season came around and I had an extra $20 to gamble on a third-party replacement power supply for my Thinkpad x250, and that brought it back to life. So I'm back on good ol' windows 7 for as long as it's still viable. I expect eventually I'll have to go with linux permanently, which will be a bummer.
During my linux year, I used retroarch to play games, which is an awful program made by shitty people, but it seemed like the most viable option for an easy all-in-one emulation solution on linux. As long as I was forced to use retroarch, I signed up for an account with retroachievements.org, a site where people create fan-made unofficial "achievements" for old video games.
I'm lukewarm on the concept of achievements on the whole. I think when done well, they have the potential to add more value to a good game. I often go back and play games in unconventional ways, particularly RPGs, and having a system in place to track these unconventional play styles isn't inherently a bad thing. It's quite an old concept—Microsoft was the first to use the term "achievement" when the Xbox 360 came out, but as far as I know, the first game to track these kinds of meta-challenges was Nethack, whenever they introduced the conduct system.1
Of course the idea of adding self-imposed challenges to a game is probably as old as games themselves, and developers factoring in these challenges when they design games is older than Nethack (Shigeru Miyamoto suggested Super Mario Bros. players who mastered the game could try playing without collecting a single coin.)
But when Microsoft systematized this idea on a platform level, and made them mandatory, that was a mistake. Suddenly, developers who hadn't given a lot of thought to optional challenges, or who were designing a game that's just not well-suited to them, had to come up with some bullshit.
The easiest solution, and in my opinion the most sensible one, is progression-based achievements. Achievements that unlock for completing a level, defeating a boss, seeing an important story cutscene, anything that's a part of simply progressing through the game. If you're required to come up with 20 achievements to publish your game, and design them such that anyone who completes the game gets all 20 achievements, that is totally ok. It can be useful to have a metric by which to judge how much time is left in a game, or players can just ignore them.
Unfortunately, the need to come up with bullshit achievements has created a few dark patterns that have carried over into the fan-made retro achievements. Here is a non-exhaustive list with examples:
In Earthbound, the last character you recruit to your party is an eastern monk prince who can't use most of the modern western equipment in the game. However, there is one weapon he can use: the Sword of Kings, a fun reference to Dragon Quest 3 for the true RPG-heads. It can only be obtained as a random drop from one enemy in one location late in the game. It has a 1 in 128 chance of dropping. It was clearly designed as a fun easter egg to surprise and delight the small handful of players who get lucky enough to roll it, because it's not even very good. It's the only weapon in the game the character can use, and it's barely better than fighting bare-handed. Do the retro achievements expect you to walk back and forth fighting random battles for potentially hours to obtain this pointless item? You bet they do!
I love Fatal Labyrinth for the Megadrive. I loved it as a kid and I possibly love it even more now. It was my first roguelike, before I had ever heard of Rogue or understood what it meant for a game to be like it. I'm an expert at the game, and looking for new challenges and conducts. One of the retro achievements is called "I Think I'm Lost", and the "challenge" is to "explore 50 floors in a single playthrough". The labyrinth only has 30 floors, so the only way to get this achievement is to fall into a pit 20 times, something I've never done, not even when I was a kid and knew nothing about the game. It would be impossible to play this badly accidentally, and it's extremely not fun to do it on purpose. The best way I can think to get this achievement would be to repeatedly fall through the first pit you encounter. For example, if I find a pit on level 4, I would have to fall through it, replay level 3, and get back to the level 4 pit; then repeat this 20 times. Then finish the game. Surprise! It's secretly another "mind-numbing tedium" achievement!
Shadowrun for the Megadrive is one of my favorite action RPGs. I've replayed it a dozen times over the years, because there are many different ways you can approach it and each of the approaches is interesting in its own way. But one way you can't approach it is as a stealth game. One of the major game modes involves raiding corporate offices, including a couple mandatory missions, and with one exception (more on that later) any approach you take with these missions is going to involve constantly triggering alarms and gunning down guards. There are mechanics that make you think they would've liked to have included some sort of stealth system. There are security cameras you can sort of avoid, or shut down if you're able to hack into their computer system. You can get a silencer for your gun, which prevents an alarm from triggering when you shoot—but there are no stealth kills, every guard is going to take at least 2 shots to deal with, and guards always appear in groups of at least 2, so in practice the alarm is going to trigger when they immediately shoot back at you anyway. You can see the skeleton of something that might've been a stealth system, and maybe they just ran out of time to implement it.
Still, the set for Shadowrun has achievements like:
and
So, it's interesting that they add that "no invisibility" qualifier, because the invisibility spell is the one actual mechanic with which you can engage with the game stealthily. Here's what happens if you enter a building and you're not invisible: a guard is standing there. A guard asks to see your ID. You either present the fake ID you can have made for a lot of money, or try to talk your way out. If the guard sees through the fake ID or doesn't buy your story, he attacks. Achievement failed. Reload the game and try again. The fake ID can certainly increase your odds of encountering a guard without triggering an alert, but without invisibility, you're proccing random events that may or may not trigger an alert all the time. Even with the 20,000 nuyen fake ID and a level 5 maglock passkey and maximum charisma for smooth-talking the guards, it's still just a series of die rolls; your preparation just helps the odds be slightly less in the corporation's favor. There is no skill involved. It's just loading your game over and over until you happen to win all the die rolls. At the risk of editorializing, one might think of this process as a kind of "mind-numbing tedium".2
There's a retro achievement for Final Fantasy 7 called Ancient Steps Retraced. The description is:
Okay, kind of nonsensical, but it doesn't sound too bad. There are five types of materia: Magic, summon, support, command, and miscellaneous. I guess you have to use nothing but materia that lets you cast spells, right? No special commands or summoning?
Well, no, what there isn't sufficient space to explain is that you have to complete the dungeon using nothing but magic materia. No items equipped, no attacking, no using potions, just magic.
In fact, there's a whole laundry list of secret rules you have to follow that you can only know about if you read the description posted by the author in the forum for the achievement. Here's the full list of requirements:
( Ancient Steps Retraced )
What we have here is a nerd finally getting to exert dominance over those he perceives as his lessers. Everyone's going to fail on their first go, because they're going to interpret the challenge in good faith, as if it were written by a normal person trying to add value to an old game they love. Only when they get through the dungeon and have not unlocked the achievement will they maybe check the forum to see what's up, and discover that they've been pranked, and they're going to have to lick some nerd's boots if they want to complete the achievement set and get that shiny gold emblem on their profiles. An emphatic no thank you!
All that said, I recently learned that Bizhawk added retro achievement support, so I logged in and I've been messing around with achievements again. My profile name is dukeofthebump if you want to follow my progress. I'm mostly using it as kind of a video game diary, tracking how much of which games I've played, and which ones I've finished... but if the achievement set for a game I like is fun and doable, I'm not opposed to getting some of those shiny gold emblems. Because they're gold... and shiny 🦝
---
1. I've tried to figure out when conducts were added to the game but I haven't had much luck. The old versions page only goes back to 3.2.3, which doesn't have much information about it. The guidebook for version 3.3.0 talks about conducts, so they were formally in the game at least by 1999. I assumed that conducts were an informal player-imposed challenge until the developers decided to formally acknowledge them, but I can't figure out when this would've happened. It's possible they were in there in some form as early as 1985.
2. And besides, if Solid Snake had access to literal magic that made him literally invisible, don't you think he would've used it? Special Operations are all about getting the job done by any means necessary with whatever tools are available. I don't think Solid Snake would approve.
During my linux year, I used retroarch to play games, which is an awful program made by shitty people, but it seemed like the most viable option for an easy all-in-one emulation solution on linux. As long as I was forced to use retroarch, I signed up for an account with retroachievements.org, a site where people create fan-made unofficial "achievements" for old video games.
I'm lukewarm on the concept of achievements on the whole. I think when done well, they have the potential to add more value to a good game. I often go back and play games in unconventional ways, particularly RPGs, and having a system in place to track these unconventional play styles isn't inherently a bad thing. It's quite an old concept—Microsoft was the first to use the term "achievement" when the Xbox 360 came out, but as far as I know, the first game to track these kinds of meta-challenges was Nethack, whenever they introduced the conduct system.1
Of course the idea of adding self-imposed challenges to a game is probably as old as games themselves, and developers factoring in these challenges when they design games is older than Nethack (Shigeru Miyamoto suggested Super Mario Bros. players who mastered the game could try playing without collecting a single coin.)
But when Microsoft systematized this idea on a platform level, and made them mandatory, that was a mistake. Suddenly, developers who hadn't given a lot of thought to optional challenges, or who were designing a game that's just not well-suited to them, had to come up with some bullshit.
The easiest solution, and in my opinion the most sensible one, is progression-based achievements. Achievements that unlock for completing a level, defeating a boss, seeing an important story cutscene, anything that's a part of simply progressing through the game. If you're required to come up with 20 achievements to publish your game, and design them such that anyone who completes the game gets all 20 achievements, that is totally ok. It can be useful to have a metric by which to judge how much time is left in a game, or players can just ignore them.
Unfortunately, the need to come up with bullshit achievements has created a few dark patterns that have carried over into the fan-made retro achievements. Here is a non-exhaustive list with examples:
Mind-numbing tedium
In Earthbound, the last character you recruit to your party is an eastern monk prince who can't use most of the modern western equipment in the game. However, there is one weapon he can use: the Sword of Kings, a fun reference to Dragon Quest 3 for the true RPG-heads. It can only be obtained as a random drop from one enemy in one location late in the game. It has a 1 in 128 chance of dropping. It was clearly designed as a fun easter egg to surprise and delight the small handful of players who get lucky enough to roll it, because it's not even very good. It's the only weapon in the game the character can use, and it's barely better than fighting bare-handed. Do the retro achievements expect you to walk back and forth fighting random battles for potentially hours to obtain this pointless item? You bet they do!
Playing badly on purpose
I love Fatal Labyrinth for the Megadrive. I loved it as a kid and I possibly love it even more now. It was my first roguelike, before I had ever heard of Rogue or understood what it meant for a game to be like it. I'm an expert at the game, and looking for new challenges and conducts. One of the retro achievements is called "I Think I'm Lost", and the "challenge" is to "explore 50 floors in a single playthrough". The labyrinth only has 30 floors, so the only way to get this achievement is to fall into a pit 20 times, something I've never done, not even when I was a kid and knew nothing about the game. It would be impossible to play this badly accidentally, and it's extremely not fun to do it on purpose. The best way I can think to get this achievement would be to repeatedly fall through the first pit you encounter. For example, if I find a pit on level 4, I would have to fall through it, replay level 3, and get back to the level 4 pit; then repeat this 20 times. Then finish the game. Surprise! It's secretly another "mind-numbing tedium" achievement!
"This game is cool, but remember this other game?"
Shadowrun for the Megadrive is one of my favorite action RPGs. I've replayed it a dozen times over the years, because there are many different ways you can approach it and each of the approaches is interesting in its own way. But one way you can't approach it is as a stealth game. One of the major game modes involves raiding corporate offices, including a couple mandatory missions, and with one exception (more on that later) any approach you take with these missions is going to involve constantly triggering alarms and gunning down guards. There are mechanics that make you think they would've liked to have included some sort of stealth system. There are security cameras you can sort of avoid, or shut down if you're able to hack into their computer system. You can get a silencer for your gun, which prevents an alarm from triggering when you shoot—but there are no stealth kills, every guard is going to take at least 2 shots to deal with, and guards always appear in groups of at least 2, so in practice the alarm is going to trigger when they immediately shoot back at you anyway. You can see the skeleton of something that might've been a stealth system, and maybe they just ran out of time to implement it.
Still, the set for Shadowrun has achievements like:
Solid Snake
Complete any Shadowrun in the Renraku Office without raising an alert or using invisibility
and
Kept You Waiting, Huh?
Get into the Fuchi building, get the Cyber-Heart and get out without raising an alert or using invisibility
So, it's interesting that they add that "no invisibility" qualifier, because the invisibility spell is the one actual mechanic with which you can engage with the game stealthily. Here's what happens if you enter a building and you're not invisible: a guard is standing there. A guard asks to see your ID. You either present the fake ID you can have made for a lot of money, or try to talk your way out. If the guard sees through the fake ID or doesn't buy your story, he attacks. Achievement failed. Reload the game and try again. The fake ID can certainly increase your odds of encountering a guard without triggering an alert, but without invisibility, you're proccing random events that may or may not trigger an alert all the time. Even with the 20,000 nuyen fake ID and a level 5 maglock passkey and maximum charisma for smooth-talking the guards, it's still just a series of die rolls; your preparation just helps the odds be slightly less in the corporation's favor. There is no skill involved. It's just loading your game over and over until you happen to win all the die rolls. At the risk of editorializing, one might think of this process as a kind of "mind-numbing tedium".2
Revenge of the nerds
There's a retro achievement for Final Fantasy 7 called Ancient Steps Retraced. The description is:
Beat the Temple of the Ancients in one session using magic materia only and without escaping or restoring MP.
Okay, kind of nonsensical, but it doesn't sound too bad. There are five types of materia: Magic, summon, support, command, and miscellaneous. I guess you have to use nothing but materia that lets you cast spells, right? No special commands or summoning?
Well, no, what there isn't sufficient space to explain is that you have to complete the dungeon using nothing but magic materia. No items equipped, no attacking, no using potions, just magic.
In fact, there's a whole laundry list of secret rules you have to follow that you can only know about if you read the description posted by the author in the forum for the achievement. Here's the full list of requirements:
What we have here is a nerd finally getting to exert dominance over those he perceives as his lessers. Everyone's going to fail on their first go, because they're going to interpret the challenge in good faith, as if it were written by a normal person trying to add value to an old game they love. Only when they get through the dungeon and have not unlocked the achievement will they maybe check the forum to see what's up, and discover that they've been pranked, and they're going to have to lick some nerd's boots if they want to complete the achievement set and get that shiny gold emblem on their profiles. An emphatic no thank you!
All that said, I recently learned that Bizhawk added retro achievement support, so I logged in and I've been messing around with achievements again. My profile name is dukeofthebump if you want to follow my progress. I'm mostly using it as kind of a video game diary, tracking how much of which games I've played, and which ones I've finished... but if the achievement set for a game I like is fun and doable, I'm not opposed to getting some of those shiny gold emblems. Because they're gold... and shiny 🦝
---
1. I've tried to figure out when conducts were added to the game but I haven't had much luck. The old versions page only goes back to 3.2.3, which doesn't have much information about it. The guidebook for version 3.3.0 talks about conducts, so they were formally in the game at least by 1999. I assumed that conducts were an informal player-imposed challenge until the developers decided to formally acknowledge them, but I can't figure out when this would've happened. It's possible they were in there in some form as early as 1985.
2. And besides, if Solid Snake had access to literal magic that made him literally invisible, don't you think he would've used it? Special Operations are all about getting the job done by any means necessary with whatever tools are available. I don't think Solid Snake would approve.