(Reposted from Cohost: September 9, 2024)

If you haven't heard of RetroAchievements, they're a site that uses emulator functionality to add achievements to games for a bunch of different consoles. I'd heard of them for a while, but always kind of had the vibe that they were for sickos: every achievement set always had That One Achievement for beating that really annoying boss damageless with a chicken on your head, and most of the site cares about which sets you've "mastered" by completing all the achievements, including that one.

But they have added (I guess relatively recently) tracking for games you've "beaten", so there's more support for playing through games relatively normally and picking up whatever extra achievements look like fun. That's more my jam. Plus, they just added GameCube support, and have been doing an event where you get a badge if you beat/master some games in the first couple months. There are three badge tiers for that, and I've gotten to the first of them so far with a mix of games I enjoyed back in the day and ones I missed but was always curious about.

Sort of inspired by the mastery writeups @Lizstar has been doing, here's the games I got there with, if you're curious: