Throwback Achievements Developed for Retro Wing Commander Games (February 23, 2020)

ChrisReid

Super Soaker Collector / Administrator
Here's a neat option for fans thinking about another playthrough of the console ports. Matt Harmon has put together an elaborate achievement slate for WC1 and Secret Missions on the SNES as well as Wing Commander 3 on the Playstation. He hopes to do WC4 in the future as well. Although I'm not quite clear on the exact details, RetroAchievements seems to have emulators available that can measure and record these milestones. Emulation might not be for everyone, but players on the original hardware might also find these fun. It's easy enough to just consider them a nice set of goals to accomplish and check off each one you hit. You can find all the games that Matt's built achievements for here.




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Original update published on February 23, 2020
 
It seems a little strange to call it an achievement when you are defeated, but I guess it would encourage people to play the losing path missions.
 
Why should only achievements with the console version be valid? I could use the platform even if I play the DOS version, couldn't I?
 
Why should only achievements with the console version be valid? I could use the platform even if I play the DOS version, couldn't I?

Theoretically! It's a matter of needing to figure out how to hook each version of the game into their system. When you build a game from the ground up today you plan for achievements in advance by leaving specific values that change in the game's memory... when the player does X, a stored number changes (for example) from 0 to 1 and the framework knows you've managed that achievement.

When adding achievements back to retro games folks have to use a program like Cheat Engine to see what actions impact a game's memory and then look for unique hooks. So in this case the guy has played Wing Commander SNES and found that when you move from Enyo to McAuliffe there's a specific memory address that changes values... and then he's set that to trigger an achievement. That's why a lot of these "old game achievements" are fairly simple... it's very easy to figure out where the game stores your kill count or what mission you're on while something like the suggestion above about asteroids would be much harder (because Wing Commander likely doesn't need to store a record of what it was that killed you.)
 
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