Wish This Set March 2024
Guess what's back, back again? Wish This Set is back, tell a friend!
Wish This Set is a showcase for our passionate community members to write about the games they love that aren't yet represented on the site. Is there a game you'd like to see receive an achievement set? Let us know by sending a private message to {% rauserpic RANews %}. We encourage you to explain what makes the game so special to you, and you may be featured in a future issue of RANews!
| Game | Console | Genre |
|---|---|---|
 Doctor Who: Evacuation Earth |
Nintendo DS | Adventure, Puzzle |
- Write-up by: {% rauserpic Digifiend %}
This one has only five requests, but is rather obscure due to only being released in Europe. It's a puzzle game similar to the Professor Layton games, based on the BBC TV series Doctor Who, and has a storyline featuring the Eleventh Doctor and his companion Amy Pond, including voice acting from Matt Smith and Karen Gillan. Achievements could be tied to progressing through the story, completing specific puzzles, and for getting missables. Fans of the show should like this as it's basically a playable episode of series 5, not unlike the Adventure Games series later released on PC and this game's direct sequel for Wii, Return to Earth. Fans of Layton should like it because of the gameplay.
| Game | Console | Genre |
|---|---|---|
 Famicom Detective Club - Part II: Ushiro ni Tatsu Shoujo |
SNES/Super Famicom | Point-and-Click Adventure |
- Write-up by: {% rauserpic mywifeleftm %}
Nintendo, especially in the 80's and 90's, were the face of family friendly entertainment. It's no surprise, then, that a visual novel series that involved high school aged characters and murder mysteries that started on the NES never made it over to the West. What is surprising, though, is that this was developed in house by Nintendo themselves.
For a majority of the world, the most exposure that the Famicom Detective Club series has ever gotten was a trophy of one the game's titular characters, Ayumi Tachibana, in Super Smash Bros. Melee. She was actually considered as a playable fighter in that game, but was ultimately scrapped due to not being relevant outside of Japan. Imagine my surprise when Nintendo randomly announces that the first two games in the series were going to be receiving a full blown remaster? The series had been dormant for almost 30 years at that point.
This series definitely deserves to have a set somewhere within it, as one of the oldest and most unique visual novels out there, and I think the SNES version of this particular game would be the best one. It has a fanmade English patch already as well. Please consider this game, thank you!
| Game | Console | Genre |
|---|---|---|
 Dirty Pigskin Football |
Arcade | Sports - American Football |
- Write-up by: {% rauserpic DrJordo %}
You know what I miss? The absolutely crazy sports game genre. Today, the market is filled with semi-realistic simulators of every big sports league, but in the 1990s, some sports games went in a completely different direction. Instead of re-creating the experience of real life sports, they threw out all the rules and created leagues so wild, so dangerous, we're lucky some mad billionaire hasn't made them a reality yet. 2020 Super Baseball. Bill Laimbeer's Combat Basketball. Ninja Golf. These games and many more used existing sports as a stepping stone to attempt something greater, instead of being shackled to their rules, or even reality in general. My favorite game in this short-lived genre is one many have never even heard of: Dirty Pigskin Football, developed for the Atomiswave arcade board by Sammy and released in 2004. When I first saw this arcade machine, it demanded my attention. It's got a tiny plastic football for a joystick! And what I saw on the screen was even crazier than that.
In Dirty Pigskin Football, two 5-member teams play a three-minute game of American football. However, these aren't your average teams; sure, you could play as the regular football guys, but why pick them when instead, you could play as zombies, aliens or gasp women!? There are eight teams to choose from, and the player must guide their chosen team through a five-game season. Each possession lasts for four downs, with no resets. Running touchdowns are worth six points, and passing touchdowns are worth seven. On each play, the teams get to select from one of three plays using the three buttons. On offense, the red and blue buttons throw to the corresponding receiver, and the yellow button activates turbo power, draining your constantly filling turbo meter for a boost of speed. If the meter is full, you can press yellow plus blue or red to throw a "super pass" that is always caught by the chosen receiver. the receiver can also use this input to spin around or stiff-arm tacklers, as well as shaking the joystick to escape tackles. On defense, red executes a diving tackle, blue changes which character the player is controlling, and yellow once again uses turbo power. When near the ball carrier with a full turbo meter, yellow plus red executes a "super tackle" that stops them dead in their tracks with an extra-painful take down. Games of Dirty Pigskin Football are fast and brutal, bringing to mind Midway's NFL Blitz series. Indeed, due to the gameplay and wacky presentation, I've seen it described as "The most Midway game ever not made by Midway."
The final team you will face in the championship game depends entirely on your win-loss record. At three or four losses, it's a mirror match against your own team. At two losses, you play against “Hall of Fame”, made up of players from the playable teams, clad in gold. At one loss, your opponents are "Hardkore", a team of post-apocalyptic robots. If you manage to win all four regular season games, you get to take on the "Dark Horde", a pack of demonic monsters. This variety in championship teams gives the player incentive to improve their skills to take on even tougher opponents.
In conclusion, Dirty Pigskin Football provides a fast, fun, and unique take on the sport of American football. Even if you aren’t a sports fan, the arcade action and wild presentation might appeal to you. As I write this, the game doesn’t even have a page on RetroAchievements, let alone a set, and I hope that one day this will change.
| Game | Console | Genre |
|---|---|---|
 Rogue Trip: Vacation 2012 |
PlayStation | Vehicular Combat |
- Write-up by: {% rauserpic jamesbuc %}
When Sony wanted to set itself apart from Nintendo with its first console, the original PlayStation, the system sold itself heavily on being cool, edgy, hardcore, and willing to do things that Nintendo wouldn't. With that we got titles like Destruction Derby, Wipeout, Tekken, and, most importantly for my post, Twisted Metal, a car carnage game full of explosions, grime, and violence where various contestants competed in all or nothing battle arena combat with the winner receiving the ultimate prize, one single wish, granted to them.
The first Twisted Metal game sold incredibly well. The core gameplay of racing around battle arenas, collecting rockets, special attacks, and other weapons in order to take out every enemy in front of you... Well it rules. The sequel upped the ante with improved graphics, better controls, and a highly polished comic-book style that made everything feel like an action packed horror anthology. However, after this Twisted Metal 3 and 4, released back to back, were absolutely seen as a downgrade as the controls felt clunkier, the comic-book art was replaced by ugly CG, and a lot of the charm just seemed to vanish as soon as it had arrived.
Part of the reason for that was the exodus of the original developers, SingleTrac, with Sony choosing to instead use just 989 Studios from this point out. SingleTrac would do a few racing games, but soon would return back to the gameplay that made the studio to begin with. They came out with two games: Critical Depth, essentially Twisted Metal but in underwater submarine vessels.... And then the next year came out with 'Rogue Trip: Vacation 2012'.
At a quick glance, the game absolutely could be mistaken for Twisted Metal; most of the art style carries across with cartoonish characters in the select menu, a psychotic hot-dog vendor, a Batman parody, a stripperific nun, and then some. Most of the cars even look and feel like they have been stripped straight from the Twisted Metal franchise.
As for the gameplay? While the game uses the tried and tested formula of "race around the arena and destroy everyone in it" and it still absolutely works. The variety of levels shine, with a large chunk of them parodying traditional tacky Americana vacations. While mostly, the gameplay is virtually unchanged from the Twisted Metal series, there are some attempts to spice things up. The main gimmick of Rogue Trip comes in its attempt to tie plot and gameplay together. The main plot strings around "Big Daddy", a Kingpin-esque villain, taking advantage of the apocalypse in order to sell overpriced tacky vacations to tourists wanting to get away from the doom and gloom. The contestants? You play as a bunch of ragtag mercenaries, wanting to cash in on Big Daddy's vacations by crashing these resorts and ferrying tourists around the various locales without Big Daddy's permission.
With all this, the main gimmick comes in the form of those tourists. Each stage has one tourist and multiple photo opportunities within it. If you happen to have the tourist in your car, then you can hit up those spots for cash, and with that cash you can regain health, upgrade weapons, and collect armour from various vendors so you can make your job of wiping out the competition that much easier. If you don't have the tourist, then its a cat and mouse chase as you try and nab them from whoever has hold of the tourist at the time.
As for why I wish this game had a set of achievements to it? Well, it comes under the game's biggest flaw. Usually in Twisted Metal, there is a bit of a reason to go through the game more than once; each character has their own ending, and often its worth battling through thanks to the endings having a big streak of dark humour running through. Rogue Trip? There are no character endings at all; after beating the game with each of the characters, your only reward is the "host" of the competitions giving you a code, either a cheat code or a character unlock code. Back on the PS1 this may have been worth something, but nowadays given you can look up codes anywhere, its a bit of a weak reward.
Giving the game some achievements though? Then this action packed, darkly funny and over the top title could be given a chance to shine again and would encourage multiple plays.
| Game | Console | Genre |
|---|---|---|
 Barnyard |
PlayStation 2 | Adventure, Minigames |
- Writeup by: {% rauserpic residentevil1998 %}
Barnyard is truly a game I would consider a hidden gem. It's based on the movie of same title, though with a bit of a twist. You play as the new cow on the farm, and all the animals living there give you various tasks of the day (and sometimes night) - the more you do, the more areas you unlock! There is a surprising amount of areas in the game, more than you'd expect from a game like it. The tasks that the animals give you have quite a large variety. The game consists of lots of different mini games - gopher golf, mud jumpers, and tease the mailman to name a few. Some tasks require you to explore the world to find what you need. I've always loved the charming world of the game. There's lots of things you can interact with, things to explore, collectibles, and adorable graphics. The game feels like a child-friendly GTA.
Barnyard is available on the GameCube, Wii, PlayStation 2, and PC. If you like mini game collections and semi-open world (at least... Open world in the standards of back then), please by all means give the game a chance. If any game deserves a set of achievements, it's this one in my humble opinion. Thank you for reading.
| Game | Console | Genre |
|---|---|---|
 Mega Man Star Force DX |
Nintendo DS | Action RPG |
- Writeup by: {% rauserpic Digifiend %}
This is a hack of the first Mega Man Star Force game, and incorporates the features of the Leo, Pegasus, and Dragon versions combined. It also adds a new series of endgame bosses, stronger golden palette swaps of the ones from the base game, and removes mandatory annoying touch screen interactions by letting you do those mini-games with the buttons. Content missing from the US release was also re-added from the Japanese version, including a crossover with Lunar Knights. It also adds a bestiary, called EM Database, and new sidequests, along with the ability to collect Star Cards, replacing the functionality of the Japanese exclusive Wave Scanner peripheral. This game has 20 set requests, and is the best way to play the first Mega Man Star Force title.
| Game | Console | Genre |
|---|---|---|
 Gradius Gaiden |
PlayStation | Shoot 'em Up |
- Writeup by: {% rauserpic PenguGG %}
It is a shame that this Gradius never came out outside of Japan when it got released on the PlayStation. It eventually got released in Gradius Collection for the PSP at least, but we missed out on greatness at the time. It is a good example on how to evolve a series in a tasteful way, coming with all the great visuals and soundtrack, and even a cool CG intro that greets you on start up.
This title is still Gradius at heart and whoever plays Gradius will feel at home with this one. New mechanics and settings were introduced in this version to make it a different experience from the rest. First of all, two new fighters are introduced, the Falchion Beta and the Jade Knight, and alongside the Lord British and the Vic Viper they all have different power-ups and weapons for you to try, and also the capability of powering up those weapons to make them stronger. Other than choosing which shield type to select independently of the fighter chosen, you can also re-organize the weapons' order at your liking, even putting the shield on the first slot.
Stages here are really impressive. One is a junkyard that has old bosses from older Gradius titles that are still operational and will try to shoot at you. Another one brings back the original stage 1 of the first Gradius, but it's getting gradually disintegrated as you go. Another stage that looks like a stage that could be from Salamander is called "Organic Fortress", which you can already guess by the name how it'll look like.
There's no doubt that this game is hard, although an easier difficulty can be set if you are so inclined. Everything in this title adds up to one fine game, one deserving to be played and enjoyed by shmup fans especially. If that doesn't convince you enough, this game has Moais.
🗿
| Game | Console | Genre |
|---|---|---|
 Yakuza |
PlayStation 2 | Action-Adventure |
- Writeup by: {% rauserpic ahtea %}
I'm newish to Yakuza games, having started with Yakuza 0 a couple years after it came out. It quickly became my favorite game series of all time, and Kiryu and Majima are two of my favorite characters of all time. But while I played and got a platinum trophy on Yakuza Kiwami, I've always been curious about the original. The English translation starring Mark Hamill is incredibly intriguing, even if it's awful, and I'm real curious to see the roots of the series, and how something that was considered the Japanese answer to GTA became what it has. I've been on a mission for the last year to 100% and plat/master every Yakuza game, and while I never considered the PS2 originals, because I was not aware of this site, I'm eager to add this to the list.
| Game | Console | Genre |
|---|---|---|
 Fossil Fighters |
Nintendo DS | Role-Playing Game |
- Write-up by: {% rauserpic Dennis1543 %}
An absolute staple of my personal childhood, this RPG centers around "vivosaurs", dinosaurs that have been revived after being excavated from fossils found in the ground. Similar to Pokémon, these vivosaurs are used in combat between fighters, with different vivosaurs having elemental types that are resistant / super effective against types you'd likely expect (fire is weak to water, earth is weak to fire, etc.). What sets this apart from just being just another Pokémon game is the way in which you acquire your vivosaurs. Each vivosaur can have up to four fossil parts: the head, body, arms, and legs. You acquire these in "dig sites", where you will get an unknown fossil from the ground and will have to excavate the fossil yourself! Equipped with a hammer (for large breaks) and a tiny drill (for more precise cleaning), you must clean off the fossil in order to use it, making sure not to damage the fossil within, getting a rating from 0-100pts. Once you have the head of a vivosaur, you are allowed to use them in battle. The quality of the fossils you excavate contribute to your vivosaurs' rank, strength, and abilities.
The game also has a charming, engaging story to follow as you progress. Playtime is generally around 25-30 hours to beat the main storyline, so there's plenty of content to be had for a set. This game (and its sequel, Fossil Fighters: Champions) definitely deserve an achievement set, with about 40 hours for 100% completion of the game. Lots of vivosaur parts to collect and perfect, cleaning tests/challenges to complete, and fun to be had on Vivosaur Island!
| Game | Console | Genre |
|---|---|---|
 Pokemon Ranger: Guardian Signs |
Nintendo DS | Action RPG |
- Writeup by: {% rauserpic Digifiend %}
The first two Pokemon Ranger games already have sets, so I find it odd that the third one doesn't. Gameplay is similar to the first two, as you draw loops around Pokemon to temporarily capture them. But whereas in previous games the assists took the form of changing the properties of your loops, this time your allied Pokemon can directly attack the one you're trying to capture, making them easier to capture by requiring fewer loops. There's a new game mode not in the previous two games, where Celebi takes you to the past and you enter a temple where the rules are a little different. While intended for multiplayer, you can play those missions solo, thus they provide opportunities for unique challenges. Some things haven't changed from the previous games, though; you'll still be defeating a villain team, and progression involves stopping their plots at certain points in the story. There would also be achievements for completing the Pokedex-equivalent Browsers in both time periods. This game has 56 requests.