Non ironically speaking: Playing much less.
Priorities changed, money and time is going elsewhere. Gaming used to be a huge thing for me, and its a very time consuming hobby, and now its not. And im happy about it.

I got through Doki Doki Literature Club. It was tough but I finished it.

I also managed to buy less games this year than I played through. A first since probably 2019. Finally my backlog is starting to get smaller.

finally beating Super Mario RPG on SNES. My file was deleted 2 or 3 times in the past.

Reshelling my Dreamcast. Never done that before but always wanted to. So now had a translucent blue shell. Also getting a PS5.

Becoming a triple console owner again I guess, completed the set with the Halo edition of the Series X a couple months ago.

However I'm playing less and less games nowadays. My game time used to be mostly after my kids went to bed. I'm getting older, not staying up until 3 AM anymore while my kids keep staying up later and later. My game time is pretty much gone now it's summer break.

I 100%’d the achievements for Elden Ring. Second place would probably be beating 4 different campaigns for Total War Warhammer 2’s Mortal Empires campaign

There are a few candidates, but I'd have to go with fixing my old Wii which couldn't read discs before.

Hell of a project, just getting the damn thing open took me way too long (a process spread out over weeks), despite buying a couple of screwdrivers specifically for the job (a few of the screws were in pretty rough shape and some were just plain stuck). In the end a knife and a pair of pincers were the real MVPs, the screwdrivers were just there for moral support.

Figuring out what exactly was wrong was an iterative struggle as well, trying a bunch of stuff out only to get the same error. It ended up just being a loose piece of plastic in the innermost part of the disc drive, which at least was easily fixed once I got the final panel open and it was sitting right there. Then, now that I already had the Wii open, I also spent a bunch of time attempting to make it less noisy which was, well, partially succesful in the end. Still makes a lot of noise, but if the TV is turned up it mostly drowns it out.

Of course I could saved the trouble and just bought a functioning Wii like a sane person, they're incredibly cheap second hand after all. But, well, this was more interesting if nothing else.

Eh, the only thing that I think is close to an achievement is beating the original Mario Bros. 2SA without warps/savestates/w/e. It's not super hard, but it's a reasonably challenging game, especially if you get unlucky with the extra life minigame.

Another thing is that I've gotten As so far on all the Wario Ware Wario Cups. With that it is kind of tough, cause you have to be in the top 20%. And, it's sort of a niche game, so I imagine most of the players still doing them are people who are really into the game and have played alot. So far I've been able to get top 20% on all of them, and top 10% or better on a bunch. My highest so far I think has been top 2%.

I recently beat the star road levels on Mario World (Tubular, Mondo, etc.). Which is like... kind of tough I guess.

I beat Xenoblade Chronicles 2 again... and I kind of count that as an achievement, cause that was a fucking grind.

Other than that, I haven't really been playing many challenging games. It's a bit rare for me to try and 100% something or do any particular challenge unless I really like a game.

i got red dead redemption 2 to work on my 11 year old phenomenon 2 processor. Like the op, I didn’t write the code. But I found it and placed it in the right location. It was my most anticipated game in a long while. So happy to be able to play it without paying for a new system

Well...I beat Elden Ring. That' s a damn long game. I put 120 hours into it and I still skipped several optional sections.