Achievements & Emulators

A few weeks ago (July 14th, 2024), the world-renowned Gamecube and Wii emulator Dolphin received achievement support through a service called RetroAchievements (RA). This means that players can now unlock achievements in a bunch of Gamecube games (Maybe Wii games will get achievements in the future?) as long as they’re signed in to RA on Dolphin. This is huge news because Dolphin is not only the most popular GC and Wii emulator, but probably the most popular emulator in general. Also, RetroAchievements only supported emulators up to the fifth console generation before Dolphin support was added, but not the sixth generation has representation in the form of the GC.

As a longtime user of Dolphin, while having only been using RetroAchievements for a few months, adding support now was perfect timing for me. I personally was extremely happy to hear the news because RA will probably have a huge influx of new users now. “Why does adding achievements for games that never even originally had achievements in the first place even matter?” I hear you asking. Well, I see the potential in building community around beating games and hunting the achievements. Achievement hunting has been around for a very long time, and is a fairly popular thing on Xbox, Playstation and Steam. Epic gamers around the world would spend septillion hours 100%ing their entire library as a virtual dick-measuring contest. And it was good because it brought people together. Despite the fact that no Nintendo console has ever even supported achievements, RA manages to bring this sense of achievement hunting community to those consoles.

RetroAchievements, by default, allows you to load savestates, which can be abused in a number of different ways to cheat in games and make them much easier. This is fine, though, because they also offer an optional “Hardcore” mode, which just disables save states and gives you more experience on RetroAchievements. This is the best decision they could’ve made and accommodates both casual gamers who like to load save states and make things easier and HARDCORE gamers such as myself who prefer living life on the edge. Before RetroAchievements, I often found myself abusing save states because there was no reason not to. This actually negatively affected my experience playing emulated games and took away from a lot of the joy I would get from overcoming hard games and beating them. RetroAchievements gave me an incentive not to abuse save states and beat them the old fashioned way, with a little bit of elbow grease and a lot of free time.

I didn’t originally sign up for RetroAchievements to play GC games (although I’ll now undoubtedly be doing that), I originally began using RA for getting achievements on older games on my phone, mostly NES, SNES, GB and GBA games. I tried out a few emulators before ultimately settling on RetroArch, which is an all-in-one option which has individual “cores” that are used to emulate each console. A few cool things about RetroArch that I liked were of course that it is an all-in-one emulator and it supports RA, but also that you can use custom overlays for the on screen controller buttons. If you’re one of those people who doesn’t like to use touchscreen controls for console games (most of the population), you can also use a controller instead! I sometimes connect my Xbox One controller to my phone via Bluetooth, but it can be pretty impractical and embarrassing to bring a controller with you on the go, so I usually get by using touchscreen controls with whatever custom overlay I feel like and haptic feedback enabled. Another cool feature of RetroArch that turned me onto it was that it’s actually very easy to sync save data between multiple devices (in my case PC and phone) using Syncthing. I won’t try to explain how I set it up here, but it was very easy and can all be learned with a quick google search.

Anyway, that’s about all I wanted to say in this post. I just really enjoy emulating games and unlocking achievements on them. You should sign up for RetroAchievements and try it out for yourself. Thanks for reading.