Welcome to RANews!
By
meleu.
Contents
What is RANews, anyway?
Intro
This is the very first issue of the RANews, your (hopefully) monthly RetroAchievements webzine.
My motivation to start this initiative came while noticing many cool things happening on our scene here and there, but scattered in discord or in forum threads that in matter of days (or even hours) were being buried. Therefore being missed by a big portion of the community. Hopefully with RANews the community can have a centralized place to check what’s going on around here.
I plan to release a new issue in the first week of each month, and the idea is to use this space to advertise what’s happening/happened in the last month. Examples of contents you’ll see here:
- New achievement sets released/revisioned.
- The most requested achievement sets.
- Game Icons and Achievement Badges that were replaced.
- Current gaming events.
- Top players stats.
- New features being available in the achievements creator’s toolkit.
- New cheevos-related features available on RetroArch.
- Anything else we think is worth sharing with the community.
Unfortunatelly, for this issue, due to time contraints, we weren’t able to publish articles for the Top Players (it’s on the forums though), creator’s toolkit nor RetroArch. But hopefully we’ll see it in the next month.
I’ve been working hard over the last month to handcraft this website from scratch… 🥵 So I really hope you enjoy!
Quick Overview
A quick overview of what should be expected in each article and what we have for the current issue.
HotCheevs Monthly
A list of achievement sets released last month. It’s like the HotCheevs Flash you are probably used to see in the frontpage of RetroAchievements.org, but a little more extensive and grouped by consoles.
Thanks to the Herculean task being done by Hotscrock (organizing which creator is working on which set), we can have such lists.
Play This Set
It’s a place where achievement creators (and sometimes their fans) can advertise their work and tell the community why they should play them.
The idea is to post 10 “mini-articles” per month. If you want to advertise your set (or a set you’re a big fan of), write a couple of paragraphs and send us a message (go to RAdmin page and then “Send Private Message”).
Currently StingX2 is collecting and curating such content.
Most Wanted Games
Some interesting stats about the achievement set requests being done on the site. Hopefully it can encourage some achievement creators to pick a game and create a set for it.
StingX2 brings such info for us and also other cool stats tidbits.
Current Events
Want to join a retrogaming tournament? Check this article! Hotscrock compiles a list of the current gaming events happening and links where you can see how you can join them.
Revisions and Rescores
A (huge) list of the sets that got revisions, also the current work in progress. There is also a list of the sets that were rescored to meet the new standards.
Really useful info collected by Searo.
Art Updates
A list of which game icons and badges sets that were changed.
Again, awesome work from Searo.
DevTip
The idea is to make this a space where achievement creators share their tricks in an article written with more freedom and a warmer personal touch, rather than a typical cold/impersonal text found in the documentation.
In this issue MagusPC shares a nice and simple technique that makes it easier to collect useful data to be used when you want to propose a Rescore and/or a Revision.
Fun
Mixing videogames with RL games (kinda). Really funny stuff being created by StingX2.
This month we have a bingo to play.
Spoiler: winners will appear in the “hall of fame” in the next RANews issues.