PlayStation 2 Achievements Incoming

PlayStation 2 games will be getting achievements over the coming months, with some of the top games already prepped for release.

Games such as Metal Gear Solid 3, The Simpsons Hit and Run and Silent Hill 3 will be ready for when achievements launch on the planned date of October 1 – and there are dozens of other sets in the works too.

This is all thanks to gaming fans over at RetroAchievements, and to the people behind the PCSX2 emulator. You’ll be able to play your favourite games with achievement support, and those who want to get more involved will even be able to create sets of their own.

This has been a long time coming. The platform was hugely popular and contains some of the most respected games of all time. Additions like the Dreamcast are muc h-loved, but people roll through the classics and support slows down. That seems unlikely to happen on the PlayStation 2.

Games to Look Forward To

Achievements are a great way to revisit favourite old games. With Retroachievements they work exactly like they do on consoles, only through emulators.

Final Fantasy XII, the Kingdom Hearts games and the Resident Evil games are all being worked on.

But it’s not just the major hitters that you can expect to revisit this October. A host of fondly remembered games like Ty the Tasmanian Tiger will have achievements of their own come launch too.

The beauty of a communal system means that ultimately many popular games will gain achievement support. No matter how rare, no matter how seemingly small its release, someone somewhere will have played it. And if that never happens, you can always do it your self.

Achievements, alongside other emulator features such as resolution boost, can really make the old games feel fresh.

PS2 Classics and Achievements

Because for the most part, the PS2 generation gave us the blueprint for the modern game. There have been quality of life improvements, of course, and graphics have improved massively. But playing the average PS2 game today doesn’t feel retro in the same way as playing an N64 game. If you up the graphics and play on a modern TV, you could easily be playing something a bit more recent.

That’s especially true with some of the real classics of the era, such as the Metal Gear Solid games. Replaying those on Xbox a few years ago shows just how incredible they were at the time, and how much they pushed gaming forward. That’s true with a lot of the PS2 games that got HD Collection treatment, and achievements of their own.

The good thing about fan-created achievement sets is that they can go a little deeper than the developers on a lot of the HD collections ever did. While the Metal Gear games were a bit of a struggle, others just had you play through the game to get your platinum. Expect the fan-made stuff to be a little bit harder.

But if that means we can take another deeper look at these classic titles, that can only be a good thing. Once again, the gaming community proves that it cares more about many of these old titles than the people who made them.