crrool interview by sioneus - RetroAchievements/RANews GitHub Wiki
Rack-it-up is an on-going event where participants are assigned a task related to a chosen magazine each week and are then challenged to complete it. For Week 3, I was challenged to interview a fellow member of the RetroAchievements community and had the pleasure of interviewing crrool, a well-known speedrunner and now achievement hunter, and coincidentally the one who introduced me to RetroAchievements himself.
sioneus - First of all, thank you so much for accepting to be interviewed. It is an honor to interview not only such a long-standing member of the RA community, but also someone who's been in online gaming spaces for so long. So first, could you please introduce yourself for those who might not know you?
crrool - Hello, I'm Crrool. I'm mainly a Pokémon speedrunner, but have also speedrun other games such as Final Fantasy, Lufia, Ace Attorney, I could go on. Nowadays, I also play RetroAchievements, which has been playing a lot of the games I've speedrun already, but now in RetroAchievements form, which has been fun.
sioneus - That's great to hear. Now, you've been a user of RA for over 8 years now, do you recall how you learned about RetroAchievements?
crrool - I was hoping you wouldn't ask me that question [laughs]. To be honest, I don't actually remember how I found out about RetroAchievements, but I can tell you how I got back into it, which happened earlier this year.
I started RetroAchievements back in 2015 so I don't remember how I came across it. I played it for about a year and then I pretty much quit, for like 6 years. So I haven't been around for a long time. Then the end of last year, I got a bit bored of speedrunning so I thought, "You know what, let's try to find something else to do". That's when I remembered that there was one time long ago that I'd played RetroAchievements.
So I got back on it and the website itself was pretty much the same but the way points worked, the way achievements worked and the amount of consoles had changed, for example, games were at most 400 points, regardless of the size of the game. So now games had different amount of points and they'd added DS games, which was the console of my childhood which really got me interested in giving achievement hunting a try again. Then it spiralled into me playing very actively for about a year now.
sioneus - How would you compare your experiences speedrunning with achievement hunting?
crrool - I'm very competitive, I've been very competitive for a long time, it's is why I like speedrunning so much. With achievement hunting, it's become more like how can I improve my position on the leaderboard, how can I master a lot of games, especially big titles, and just challenging myself, tackling challenge achievements. So there's some things which feel very similar to speedrunning, in making you think differently about how you play the game. In that sense, it's been very similar, even though it plays very different in practice.
sioneus - What was the most challenging set you've ever completed?
crrool - The most challenging one has probably been the ~Hack~ Pokemon Emerald Version: Party Randomizer Plus set for GBA. It's a hack where at the start of every single battle your entire party gets randomized. The set isn't that difficult itself, it's the level cap achievements that make it quite challenging, especially the Elite Four, which you have to complete back-to-back, with no saving in-between.
Another one has been the Final Fantasy [Subset - Solo Class] set for PSP. Those add some interesting challenges to the main set.
sioneus - What is one set you'd recommend everyone try?
crrool - The first one that comes to mind is Final Fantasy V: Advance (Game Boy Advance). It very recently had a complete revision and it made the achievement set very challenging at times, though always very fair challenges, for example, boss fights but you're not allowed to have a certain class, or a boss fight where you're only allowed to use the most recent class that joined your party.
sioneus - That sounds fun.
crrool - It's been a really fun one, the revision really added to the challenge while still feeling like a really fair set. That one's definitely been one I've enjoyed going through, and Final Fantasy V was not one of the games I've speedrun, but it's really added some interesting challenges to it.
If you're looking for a small, fun set that you could probably finish in an hour, I really enjoyed Legend of Spyro, The: A New Beginning (Game Boy Advance), a Game Boy Advance 2D side-scroller.
sioneus - I've been meaning to do that one actually, it's in my Want to Play list.
crrool - I went into it having not ever played a Spyro game and it was a fun set, none of the achievements are anything too special but there's a few where you have to do a minigame without getting hit or shooting a fireball. It's a really easy set and it got me into the series so I recommend it.
sioneus - What console would you like to see sets being developed for next?
crrool - The obvious answer is Gamecube. There are so many fun GameCube games so that would be hands down the one that would be great to see. I think it's the most requested console so that answer shouldn't surprise anyone.
sioneus - Out of all GameCube games, what's the one you'd like to see have a set? Excluding Pokémon games!
crrool - Super Mario Sunshine (GameCube). Love that game. Again, very obvious answer as it's one of those games that everyone would know why that could make for a really fun set.
sioneus - I don't know, some people really hate Sunshine.
crrool - That's true. But for me, that's an easy answer.
sioneus - Now, outside of GameCube games which I've just asked you about, what game would you love to see have a set? Revisions and bonus sets count.
crrool - There are two games in particular that I'm going to point out. First is Sims 2, The: Pets (Game Boy Advance); it might seem like a weird choice but it's the closest experience to actually playing The Sims. You buy your house, you have to decorate, you get a job, increase the skills. The beauty of that particular Sims game is that it has an actual built-in achievement set that would translate really well to an achievement set on RetroAchievements. In that sense, it would be a really easy game as you could just bring those achievements over to RA and there you go, you would have an achievement.
The other one I would really like is Lord of the Rings, The: Third Age, The (Game Boy Advance), again for the GBA. It's a turn-based strategy game, but at the start of the game you can choose between Good or Evil and there's different requirements for every battle for each path. So you go through the story, you have your main hero and eight other ones, and in an achievement set I imagine you'd play on Hard Mode. There's all kinds of upgrades you can collect. It's a very straightforward turn-based strategy game without too many abilities and skills, while still adding a lot of complexity that could make for a very good achievement set. For example, some fights you can win by capturing the flag but you could also win by defeating every opponent, so you could have an achievement for each of the win conditions. Things like that could make for a really fun achievement set.
sioneus - Would you ever see yourself developing a set? Because you seem to have a very good grasp of how a set could be structured.
crrool - No. With all the code notes I can kind of figure out some things about the games, beyond that I'm not well-versed in it, nor am I interested enough to try and figure out how to develop a set.
sioneus - As a speedrunner, how do you feel about speedrun achievements?
crrool - I think they can be good, if done well. I'll give you an example, there is a Speedrun subset for Pocket Monsters Ao [Subset - Speedrun] (Game Boy), the Japanese Pokémon Blue, which is exactly as it should be. It's essentially built of three different set of achievements, one of a slow run, one of a medium run and one of actually speedrunning it. But even there, all of these speedrun achievements are very lenient. So even if you get unlucky, you should still get pretty easily within a few attempts. For reference, the set has beating the Elite Four at 3h30, single session, in-game time, which is around 1h30 more than top times are. So I enjoy speedrun achievements when the times aren't very tight; challenging, but manageable.
sioneus - Is there any direction you'd like to see the website go into? Any particular new feature you'd like to see added?
crrool - Overall, the site has been moving in a very good direction. It's implemented a lot of features recently that really make it more enjoyable to do, the most recent example being games now having a "Beaten" status. That being said, the thing I miss is the option to give more user input on whether an achievement should be an achievement. An example that comes to mind for me is, in the Pokemon Crystal Version (Game Boy Color) set, there's an achievement for getting a Lucky Egg from a Chansey. It's a 1% encounter into a 2% chance of Chansey actually having the egg and if you go into the forums for the achievement, you do see a lot of people arguing that maybe that achievement shouldn't be in the main set.
Another that comes to mind is Super Mario 64 (Nintendo 64), which is really difficult unless you're a Mario 64 speedrunner. There's one, and it's a missable one too, that's collecting all the Red Coins before the submarine disappears. With a speedrunner coaching me, I tried for 2 solid hours and I still couldn't do it.
That's where having a bit more user input could be beneficial. Now, I can see the downsides of this, it's a tricky thing. But there's some sets where the intent behind the achievement is really good, and I like the idea, but in practice it doesn't quite work as well as you would hope.
sioneus - With the coming year approaching, what is your goal for 2024?
crrool - My goal at the moment is to try to get to the top 300. The goal for this year was to get my average completion rate up, which I successfully did. It went from around 30% to around 80%. So that I'd like to keep stable, and then I'd like to see how far I can take it. Top 300 is the goal, maybe for the upcoming year it'll be top 500.
Next to that, I'd like to share RetroAchievements with more people. Just having more people to compare my scores against, see what games people are picking up, see if there's any I'd be interested in. I've been doing that a lot this year, there's some people I found from my stream and others who I learned had been signed up for a long time already, and it's been great getting to compare myself to other people in that way.
Finally, and this has started already, but I'd like to participate in more events. I finished two this year, I just joined the third one, Rack-it-up, which is how this interview got to be; and this kind of ties up to it, I want to engage more with the overall RetroAchievement's community in a way I haven't really done so far.
sioneus - Thank you so much for your time! Where can people find you?
crrool - The best place to find me is on my Twitch channel where I usually stream Pokémon sets.
Rack-it-up will be on-going until December 1st, 2024. Please join the discord and the respective channel to join the event!