Rack It Up: Editorials

Rack It Up is a new event that lasts throughout the entirety of 2024. In this event each player is assigned a random page from a classic magazine. With that page comes a task you are assigned from beating a level, beating a boss, beating a game, drawing, or maybe you will end up having to write some Metroid fanfiction. Whatever the pages of the past dictate is what you will need to do. The users below were tasked to send in an editorial to RAnews, which we will proudly showcase below!

Useless Semantics: The "Retro" Debate

Write-up by: {% rauserpic orchidcnr %}

When the prospect of a new console gaining RetroAchievements support gets brought up, one of the biggest conflicts of interest is whether or not that console is "retro" enough. People have different ideas for what qualifies as retro, but the general consensus revolves around whether or not that console is still getting retail support. This still isn't always reliable however, as taking the Master System for example, that console is still getting support in Brazil to this day. Of course the Master System is retro, but that just goes to show how there really isn't one definitive qualification. Personally, I don't think any of it matters. To quote the Old Man from Final Fantasy VI, it's all just useless semantics anyway.

To me, the natural evolution of this site is to support what we consider more modern consoles. The Wii U isn't considered retro by many, but I think achievement support would be stellar for that platform. Of course, this is much easier said than done, as modern consoles have more complicated memory and emulation issues. Point being, I think that once some members of the community stop worrying about what qualifies as retro, the more evolution RetroAchievements as a platform and community can undergo. I do understand that retro is quite literally in the name of RetroAchievements, but one of the main draws of this site is adding achievements to platforms that never had them. I'm sure that back when RetroAchievements was just a concept, if Wii U achievements were as easy to make as Mega Drive achievements, it would've been a valid talking point.

While the main goal of RA is adding achievements to retro platforms (obviously), it feels like an honest waste for some modern platforms to just be completely dismissed due to them not being retro enough. If a console never had achievement support, why not add them? Even for consoles that do have achievements, community made achievements are generally preferred due to them not locking online content and such behind masteries. (Of course, none of this is taking into account the difficulty of developing achievements for modern platforms, rather just how the community thinks about it.) To put all of this into one sentence, I believe the more modern consoles are considered for achievement support, the more the RA community can continue to grow and thrive.

When Sports Games Go Extreme

Write-up by: {% rauserpic daroachie %}

There’s one genre of game just about any gamer fears more than anything, and that’s the sports game. The same game every year and they never get any better? Truly, this is a genre to stay far away from. Normally that’s pretty good advice, but sometimes genres can have subgenres and sometimes those subgenres can shine brighter than the thing they came from, and that’s the extreme sports games. But what makes a sport so extreme? Normal sports are typically about getting an Object to an Area to get Points while extreme sports most often revolve around some unique transportation device to then make your body do cool stuff to get points, which means that any video games about them just might end up being a lot more interesting…

The extreme sports genre of video games have been around since the Atari days, but really weren’t anything special (and often times not even good). It took until a certain Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock developer Neversoft and a certain guy that kind of looks like professional skateboarder Tony Hawk in 1999 to really really make quite the impact. By making it not play so realistic like just about every other sports game out there and instead decide to make it more arcadey, who would have guessed the game got popular? Oh, and the soundtrack probably helped with that too, but my taste in music isn’t the focus of this editorial so we’re going to ignore that. Most of my extreme sports game experience came from the Playstation 2 so from here on we’re mostly going to focus on those releases because boy, the PS2 sure has a lot of extreme sports games.

The Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater series continued basically every year releasing certified banger after banger every year until Tony Hawk’s American Wasteland which was bad. My favorite is Underground 2 but only on the gameplay side of things because this was the mid-2000s now and boy were things trying real hard to be really edgy. It’s basically if there was an official Jackass the video game if you pretend Jackass: The Game didn’t exist. It probably plays better too.

If you didn’t know, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 happens to be one of the highest rated games on Metacritic. These glowing reviews got Activision interested in that time period to also make more extreme sports games under a new label of Activision O2. There really are a lot of them, so I’ll list them for fun. Mat Hoffman’s Pro BMX 1 and 2, Shaun Palmer’s Pro Snowboarder, Kelly Slater’s Pro Surfer, Shaun Murray’s Pro Wakeboarder, and Travis Pastrana’s Pro Moto X. Most of these games were all sorts of mediocre. And also I lied a little, Pro Wakeboarder and Pro Moto X don’t exist, they got renamed to Wakeboarding Unleashed and MTX Mototrax. I do hear Wakeboarding Unleashed is actually pretty fun though.

You ever heard of SSX? No, there’s no E in there, everyone else has already made the exact same joke before, even one of the voice actors. It’s a snowboarding series and it rules except when it doesn’t. The main appeal of these games is doing wildly unrealistic tricks with all the style and flavor you could ever want in an extreme sports game. SSX Tricky is probably what most people remember and it’s an absolutely wonderful experience, but my personal favorite is still SSX 3. I may like Super Monkey Ball a lot, but SSX 3 is probably my favorite non monkey-related video game of all time. Play it. Or Tricky. Play both.

Other skateboardy and snowboardy series probably didn’t make as many waves as Tony Hawk and SSX but there’s still interesting things out and about that are still fun and also maybe bad. Nintendo has its 1080° snowboarding games and then there’s also Cool Boarders. I had Cool Boarders 2001 as a kid on PS2 and it was definitely not good. I’ve heard only good things about the inline skating game Aggressive Inline, so it sounds like it’s worth a play. Downhill Domination is a mountain bike racing game where you can throw bottles at your opponents so I’d say that’s also pretty rad. It’s also very fun.

Speaking of racing games, those are sort of extreme sports in a way. The ones that are definitely more extreme sport than not are the ones where you race something that’s not really a car. Or if it’s rally, that’s kinda like the extreme sports of real life racing too. Look up Group B when you have the chance, it’s wild. Rainbow Studios made a few of these sorts of racing extreme sports games with the ATV Offroad Fury series and the Splashdown games for all your ATV and Jet Ski fun. Eventually the ATV games got merged with their MX games into MX Vs. ATV, but I only really played one of those on the PS3 and not enough to know what it was like. MX Unleashed was awesome though.

There’s a lot of diverse extreme sports games out there and I only did like a basic overview of the ones I thought were fun and some that I thought kinda sucked but I think that’s enough to get a little interested in giving some of these games a try. Definitely play Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 and SSX 3, with Tony Hawk’s Underground and SSX Tricky a good equal recommendation. And hey, if you ever wanted to learn about something so obscure like Jonny Moseley Mad Trix, you know who to consult. Give extreme sports games a look! You’ll probably have a great time!