Lately, I have been super into retro gaming and emulation. As in, I am still working my way through FFVII Integrade and Indy and Stalker 2, but they share equal - if not lesser - space with retro stuff that I'm doing.
Retroachievements is the website of the gods. It breathes new life into old games. It makes them feel fresh and fun and alive again. Achievement hunting in THPS-THPS4 has been like a perfect, blissful gaming elixir. I can sit and maniacally grind through achievement lists in the arcade version of Burger Time, or Symphony Of The Night, or Radiant Silvergun. I can play Pokemon Emerald with a whole new set of priorities and objectives. It plugs perfectly into Retroarch, or PCSX2, or Duckstation,and you get notifications, bells, and a brilliant community.
Twin Galaxies also exists for those times when Retroachievements is not enough. That's a place I go when I want to know how shit I am at video games, and it's extremely fun. Voting on people's record attempts, viewing people's attempts to be etched into the annals of history as immortal gaming warriors, and getting a real score-based indication on how I stack up against the world record holders. Do I want to know if I compare to the rest of the world in the Commodore 64 version of Yie Ar Kung Fu? Yes, I very much do.
Fightcade is another retro gaming app which lets me know just how shit I am at video games, this time by allowing full multiplayer access to a broad range of fighting games - both arcade and console - and allowing me to compete for ELO by having my brains kicked in by the most autistic members of the FGC. Insanely fun.
Speedrun is where I go to find out just what the autistic mind is capable of when truly released from the suffocating shackles of polite society. I spent three hours the other day trying to beat the speedrunning record for the Commodore 64 version of Ghostbusters. I failed. It was unbelievably fun. More fun than Concord. More fun than Genshin Impact. More fun than whatever AAA slop Phil Spencer is shitting in my direction.
Launchbox is a frontend for your emulated retrogaming library, but one of the lesser known features is the arcade score leaderboards. It's simple, but effective. There are all time, yearly, and monthly leaderboards for a few hundred games, and you compete to be the best. No frills, no badges, just you putting in your three letter name on the high score table and waiting to be immortalised in the halls of the digitally gifted. Do I really want to spend three hours trying to beat some random's score in Bomb Jack? Fuck yeah, I do.
So, since modern gaming sucks so much horse cock, retro gaming is no longer just a novel side project for me to play around with when I'm feeling bored and nostalgic. No, it is on the same level as the rest of my gaming diet, often exceeding modern gaming and is driven by a whole range of platforms, services, and communities which take video games that I loved - from the era before gaming became a microtransaction and battle pass infested scam - and turns them into new, compelling, and unbelievably fun experiences.
Highly recommended. That's what I'm happy about in gaming right now, OP.
. Happy to see my kids smile full of wonder playing Astrobot. Happy that VR modding is letting me play all best games. Happy that at 50, after 45 years of gaming, I still enjoy and love the medium
