TrophyTroopa

trophytroopa logo

Introducing the first Mystery/Blinds community TrophyTroopa tournament!

TrophyTroopa is a mystery racing tournament in the same vein as our previous HeavyTroopa/Giantroopa tourneys, where we directly use an online videogame database as the game pool; for HeavyTroopa it was SpeedRunsLive, for Giantroopa we used the Giant Bomb wiki, and for TrophyTroopa it will be RetroAchievements.org!

RetroAchievements is a free community-run online service that implements achievements/trophies for retro games. It currently has about 8000 games with achievements listed. RetroAchievements can integrate into several emulators (BizHawk even comes with it built-in now), but for this tourney, you do not need to use that, or even need an account on their website. We are only using their game pool to randomly determine games for our tourney.

If you'd like to join the tournament, just sign up on Challonge and join our Discord! Signups are open until March 27th, and the planned start is on March 29th.

Read on for more details about the tourney.

Format

The general format is similar to Giantwoopa if you're familiar.

  • Double elimination tournament on Challonge, with deadlines for each round
  • Competitors must stream their gameplay to twitch.tv
  • For each match, the competitors first decide on how many games to play (best of 1, 3, 5, etc.)
  • Then for each game to be played, they decide how many games to pull (1 for the true random choice, 3 or 5 for more control)
  • For the set of pulled games, they can then remove ineligible games. Pull more games to replace the removed ones. Some reasons for ineligibility:
    • Being blind to the game is not required, but recommended. Competitors should agree on whether foreknowledge about a game is allowed.
    • Some games might be for difficult to use platforms, e.g. Japanese home computers. Competitors can decide to remove these.
    • RetroAchievements also lists romhacks (e.g. difficult Super Mario World hacks). Competitors can decide to remove these.
    • Pretty much any other reason: We're here to have fun, so if the competitors agree on it, they can remove any game they want.
  • When the set of games is decided, competitors take turns banning games, until only one game is left. Use the discord commands !flip or /random to decide who bans first.
  • Competitors can decide on any race goal they want, but the games generally already come with a list of achievements that can serve as good goal suggestions.
  • Using RetroAchievements in any form other than determining the game is not required. You can enable RetroAchievements while playing if you want, and it might be able to tell you when you reached your goal.

How to pull random games

Use the /trophygames command in the Discord. The command has some parameters to choose the number of games and filter out romhacks or games without achievements. If the command doesn't work, or you don't want to spam it and just look at some random games, you can also go to https://retroachievements.org/random.php.

FAQs

Emulator Packs

We have a ready-made emulator pack for the most common platforms (everything in BizHawk, also PSP, DS, Gamecube, Wii, Arcade):
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1trCf55AJawyjl3BR35FBo3LVjIjtR7fm/

Also for more obscure platforms, mainly various home computers, Kusogrande has an emulator pack that might be useful:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BLCCMfbyWxpJls50VBHOJOGBopYGWq55/

How to use RetroAchievements

If you do want to use RetroAchievements while playing, first you need to create an account on their website. Then look into how to use RetroAchievements for your game's platform or emulator (https://retroachievements.org/download.php).

BizHawk supports RetroAchievements already, just go to Tools > RetroAchievements > Start RetroAchievements. To get a visual notification when you get an achievement, turn on View > Display Messages (but note that the text is small and quickly disappears). You can also enable a sound notification under Tools > RetroAchievements > Enable Sound Effects.

You can enable a nicer RetroAchievements integration by downloading the RA-Integration DLL and copying it into your BizHawk's "dll" directory. It will have proper achievement popups, optional screenshots when you get an achievement, and other features like that. Note that these achievement popups will not be captured in OBS because they are technically a separate window, so for the purposes of streaming in this tournament, BizHawk's builtin RetroAchievements support may be better because it lets us see the achievement notifications. Get the DLL from here: https://retroachievements.org/bin/RA_Integration-x64.dll

Why do some game titles have words between tilde "~"?

That is how RetroAchievements shows tags, e.g. ~Hack~ or ~Unlicensed~.

Deadlines

If a match is not done before its deadline, we will contact the players. If both players respond and are willing/able to do their match in a reasonable timeframe, that's fine. If one player does not respond after some time, the win will go to the other player. Any other issues are decided by mods on a case-by-case basis.

Restreaming

Most matches in this tournament will not be restreamed on MysteryFunHouse, but we might restream a few here and there, especially at the beginning and end of the tournament.

Edit

Pub: 04 Mar 2024 04:20 UTC

Edit: 13 Apr 2024 03:50 UTC

Views: 721