Play now at retrophies!

If there’s one thing that has become a de-facto standard in the gaming industry during the last decade this is game achievements, trophies, or whatever you may call them. Not only on console games, but Apple and Android also provide facilities to integrate this features in games published on their platforms. Many games even implement a custom achievements system specific for that game in isolation.

There seems to be an exception though. Retro games. Obviously a game from 20 years ago was not designed with achievements in mind, but even when companies re-edit old games, they seem to be happy enough charging you current day prices for what it is often an effort-less dump of the classic game, which you may even wonder if they’re running though an emulator. Do you expect the new mini-NES will be anything more than this?

At Coconauts we love classic games, as well as emulators. So we’ve wondered… how would it be if your favourite emulators had some of the functions of today’s game platforms, like achievements?

This what Retrophies is trying to achieve. And for the first proof of concept we’re bringing achievements to Super Mario Bros.

If you have played Final Fantasy X, either its original version for PS2 or its remastered version for PS4 and PSVita, you might remember Thunder Plains and its lightning dodge challenge to get the Mars sigil.

It’s quite challenging and it might take a while. I once got it (and I have a PS2 memory card to prove it), but I was not in the mood to do it again on the remastered version.

That’s why I decided to build a simple machine to do the job for me. Because constantly processing inputs to produce outputs is what machines do best.

Lightning dancing like a machine. Presenting lightning-dodge-O-matic #FFX #Lulu #Arduino pic.twitter.com/WMLX1CRwSN

— Javi Rengel (@rephus) June 12, 2016

We moved home a few months ago to a beautiful house in the country side in UK, outside the expensive area of London, but close enough to commute daily.

As soon as we moved in, we built a simple version of our home in 3D on Blender to help us decorate. And then we integrated the 3D model into Unity3D and build a game on top of it, on this case, a FPS or more like a FPW: First Person Walker, a FPS without shooting, not as fun as it sounds.

We posted an image on Twitter a few months ago about our first prototype:

I finally created a First person game of my new home with #unity3D and #blender . Looks better than real life! pic.twitter.com/JjSPPP1835

— Javi Rengel (@rephus) February 14, 2016

We recently discovered Energenie (thanks to Manoj) a nice and cheap remote controlled socket which also provides a custom shield for Raspberry Pi, you can use it to programatically control those sockets. This allows endless possibilities: from temporized sockets, to a socket that automatically turns on when detects presence using a PIR sensor, or triggered by a website or a phone app.

Do you know what day is today? It’s 3.14, and because it matches the decimals in the most beloved irrational number ever, it’s been called an official celebration of number Pi.

Actually last year it was a most special instance, as it was 3.14.15; an event that won’t occur again for another 100 years! To celebrate, and to give some use to our newly bought 3D printer, we printed some Pi-shaped cookie-cutters we found off Thingiverse, and baked some delicious Pi… cookies.

This year still feels special, as it is 3.14.16, the decimals of rounded Pi. If you wanna celebrate, and have a 3D printer yourself, have a look at this neat collection they’ve put together, and print yourself something awesome.