Wii achievements are finally available for emulators

Listen: There’s no shame in being slightly obsessed with game achievements. We all enjoy doing well in games, but you just can’t beat the concentrated dopamine rush you get when you finally clear out that last achievement that felt out of reach for so long. While achievements are largely baked right in to all modern games, that wasn’t always the case. If you find yourself playing a lot of classic titles and wishing that there were some convenient achievements to track your progress, you are definitely going to want to check out RetroAchievements. And today, RetroAchievements is getting even better.

The RetroAchievements project is all about the retro-game community coming together and creating these fun, shared targets for classic titles. While achievements weren’t built into them initially, today we can implement achievements in these games at the emulator level. Right now, support for a new platform is arriving, as RetroAchievements begins embracing the Nintendo Wii.

We first learned that this support was on the way last year when achievements came to the GameCube. It took a few months for Android-based emulators to add support, but by the fall we had Dolphin working with them. And even back then, the project was teasing Wii compatibility for sometime this March. Right on schedule, it’s now official.

We’d say this news is getting a pretty solid response from interested gamers, as the RetroAchievements web server seems to be buckling under the load of everyone interested in getting all the details.

For now, though, there’s not much you need to actually do. Dolphin already supports Wii games on Android, so right now it’s just a matter of waiting for those devs to extend this new achievement compatibility. That could still take some time — let’s not hold our breath — but if you’ve got some favorite Wii games in mind that you think you could do really well on, maybe it’s time to start making sure you have all your disk images lined up to work with Dolphin.