Ignoring the lack of updates if the game is buggy, games back then were also more focused on quality and make gamers replay the game with unlockable features based on skills, not money. I can’t count the number of times I played Metal Gear Solid games over and over to unlock new features playing the hardest difficulty and with handicap features, and also to find Easter eggs. Speaking of Easter eggs, you’d lose a number of hours exploring every nook and cranny finding them!
If memory serves, Valve got the idea for the loot boxes from Korean free to play games. As far as I know though, they did invent the battle pass with Dota 2.
I think you can probably still get them for some modern games that were crafted with passion, through special editions and box sets. I think that the standard store edition of Total War: Warhammer actually came with a manual as well as a novella, and this was coincidentally the last physical copy of a game I bought.
My neighborhood was just poor enough that basically no kid had a PS memory card. They were all jealous of my n64’s ability to save on the cartridges. When the PS2 and GameCube rolled around we just left the machines on all day again
At some point, I’d have passed on a new game and chosen to get a memory card instead, haha
Though I did get bitten with the RPG bug back then, so that probably colours my opinion. Not that I didn’t play the first half of FF7’s Midgar (aka. first act) dozens of times because I kept getting stuck.
It’s great that level select cheats were so prevalent back then!
There’s an analogy with the music industry too. Music recording before was for the “elite” who were sure that their music would hit. Nowadays, the music recording broadens to the public, ergo more less quality focused music is released.
Game updates bring bad with the good, because devs often rely on them to deliver a full, playable game.
When you bought a game back in the day, you got a full, playable game on the media. It wasn’t always bug-free, because… you know… it’s software, but they had to at least quash all the showstoppers without the benefit of a Day 1 patch.
Fair, but ET was such an awful debacle that it killed Atari as a company and paved the way for Japanese companies to take over the entire market for the next couple of decades.
They were also much simpler and smaller back then with often extremely limited specification variations. And DRM existed back then too, with some fairly egregious and infamous physical DRM checks.
This is selection bias. You remember Metal Gear Solid, but do you remember Iron & Blood: Warriors of Ravenloft? Do you remember Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero? Bubsy 3D? The million-and-one licensed games that were churned out like baseball cards back then?
and make gamers replay the game with unlockable features based on skills, not money
If we’re going to say that a full-price game today costs $70, Metal Gear Solid would have cost the equivalent of $95. Not only that, but that was very much the Blockbuster and strategy guide era. Games would often have one of their best levels up front so that you can see what makes the game good, but then level 2 or 3 would hit a huge difficulty spike…just enough to make you have to rent the game multiple times or to cave in and buy it when you couldn’t beat it in a weekend. Or you’d have something like Final Fantasy VII, which I just finished for the first time recently, and let me tell you: games that big were designed to sell strategy guides (or hint hotlines) as a revenue stream. There would be some esoteric riddle, or some obscure corner of the map that you need to happen upon in order to progress the game forward. The business model always, at every step of the medium’s history, affects the game design.
“Value” is going to be a very subjective thing, but for better or worse, the equivalent game today is far more packed full of “stuff” to do, even when you discount the ones that get there just by adding grinding. There are things I miss about the old days too, but try to keep it in perspective.
There’s just so much everything now a days. There’s tons of great new music and tons of great new games buried in all the new stuff thats being pumped out that it’s hard to find the gems. There’s lots of passionate people out there taking the time and effort to try and make the best
I forgot about hint hotlines. They’d charge per minute and did everything they could to keep you on the phone. I called a hotline once and my parents weren’t too happy about it.
“Value” is going to be a very subjective thing, but for better or worse, the equivalent game today is far more packed full of “stuff” to do, even when you discount the ones that get there just by adding grinding. There are things I miss about the old days too, but try to keep it in perspective.
Exactly this.
Games back then were pricier - once you account for inflation.
Games back then did expect you to pay extra - in fact quite a few were deliberately designed to have unsolvable moments without either having the official strategy guide or at least a friend who had it who could tell you.
Games back then were pricier - once you account for inflation.
That’s commonly said but ignores other economic factors such as income, unspent money, and cost-of-living.
Though lots of things are better now: the entire back-catalogue of games, more access to review/forums, free games (and also ability to create your own games without doing so from nothing) etc. Aside from when video store rental was applicable, early gaming was more take-what-you-can-get (niche hardware/platforms might still have that feel somewhat).
That’s commonly said but ignores other economic factors such as income, unspent money, and cost-of-living.
Inflation is derived by indexing all of those things. Some things are far more expensive or far cheaper relative to each other, but we approximate the buying power of a dollar by looking at all of it.
a few were deliberately designed to have unsolvable moments without either having the official strategy guide or at least a friend who had it who could tell you.
Do you have an example?
I knew kids that bought strategy guides, I worked at a game shop that sold strategy guides, and as far as I could tell they were for chumps. People who has more money than creativity.
Cosmetic DLC feels like it’s for chumps too, but it’s lucrative. The best example is going to be Simon’s Quest, without a doubt. The strategy guide was in an issue of Nintendo Power. I’m sure they were also happy to let social pressures on the playground either sell the strategy guides or the game just by word of mouth as kids discussed how to progress in the game. A Link to the Past is full of this stuff too. The game grinds to a halt at several points until you happen to find a macguffin that the game doesn’t even tell you that you need. Without the strategy guide, you could end up finding those things by spending tons of hours exploring every corner of the map, but by today’s standards, we’d call that padding.
I love my old school games and will never stop playing SNES, 64, PS1, and PS2, but there were plenty of crap games on those systems too. Just like how indies and Minecraft and Soulsbornes right now are dope as hell, but everyone complains about Ubisoft and EA so much you’d think that they were the only publishers in the 2020s. There’s been solid titles and shovelwware every single generation ever since the Atari 2600. Also, the games that a lot of us grew up playing that have gone down as “the best games of all time” like FF7 and Goldeneye would be considered borderline unplayable by kids today.
Most people don’t know about, or don’t remember, the old bins filled to the brim with garbageware games. Back when shit was still the wild west and people were releasing crap left and right.
Tunic is great! The dev said he wanted to replicate the experience of playing a game in a different language that you don’t quite understand at first, and he made it perfectly. English is my second language, and it reminded me of the times trying to play games before I understood it, struggling with manuals and dictionaries.
The special edition comes with a physical manual, but ironically the player shouldn’t open it until they 100% the game. It’s like a spoiler.
The level of quality and number of bugs depends a lot on the era you’re talking about, as well as the platform. As a PC gamer from the 90s, much of my technical literacy came about from trying to coax games to work. My experience with console gaming was usually much more hassle free, though I have far less experience with it and don’t have a modern point of comparison (last console I even used, not even owned, was the PS3).
My real point of “it was better in the old days”, is the industry learning to exploit addiction. It’s everywhere, and it’s not just gambling. The longer you play the more likely you are to pay so even without loot boxes and the like, games are taking as much out of casino playbooks as possible. It’s fucking revolting and should be criminal.
As someone who has had problems with addiction of various kinds in the past, it’s so blatant to me. I can feel it playing into my vulnerabilities and it makes my blood boil. I avoid most gaming these days because I know if I let it become a habit, the next time life knocks me down I’ll fall victim to this.
This is restricted to a small part of modern gaming, though. In indie games, for example, you find none of these exploitative practices (talking in general, of course) and get wonderful, masterfully crafted works of art by people who do game development out of passion (also speaking in general, of course).
As a PC gamer from the 90s, much of my technical literacy came about from trying to coax games to work.
Kids these days have no idea how easy they have it. Tracking down a driver update or patch (that you just moved to an unencrypted folder) on a dial-up connection? Re-installing your OS from a series of floppy disks because something broke, again? Limiting clock speed because so many things were tied to CPU cycles and wouldn’t function on new hardware?
PC gaming was a nightmare but you put up with it because StarCraft or Quake 3 online was dope as hell, we had Diablo and Myst and Half-Life and Doom and Putt-Putt Goes to the Goddamned Moon so it was all worth it.
It takes two is actually one step further, only one player had to own the game. It takes two had what was called a friend pass which as long as you weren’t the host of the game allowed you to play with any other player that had already purchased the game. So despite the fact that it was forced Co-op either split screen or online, only one player had to actually buy the game.
In this day and age it blew me away when I learned that because it’s just unheard of now.
My point is that they are representative of how gaming used to be. Good on Germany for treating addiction-based money-extractors as what they are though!
Exactly. If people missed playing those games so much, they’d be playing those games. NES games are trivial to emulate.
And this is the ultimate in survivorship bias. Super Mario 3 is often touted as the best game of an entire generation. There are a lot of mediocre NES games.
We didn’t need online access back then, we had LAN parties.
Most of the time you didn’t need updates, because back then they were much more diligent about making sure a game released without bugs. Yes a few existed, but much less than what you see in today’s games. A showstopper bug was death for sales, since it couldn’t be fixed inexpensively.
And those instruction books, especially if you are into the artistry that they put into them, is sorely missed, truly.
Hmmm, I don’t think that I can agree with the point about older games having fewer bugs. In my experience, 2000s 3D games are riddled with bugs to the point of becoming unplayable in many instances.
There were some pretty bad bargain bin releases, and a lot of games had glitches but I can’t remember any game from a big company that released with a critical bug. I do think today companies are much more blasé about releasing games with serious issues and patching it later.
Yeah I always get pushed back on that, but honestly, I’ll “die on that hill”. Also, speaking of games not just in the 2000s, but even earlier.
Back then corporations had to sell cartridges and ship them, and if they shipped with any bugs, that was the death of the game.
At the end of the day, usually when I’m debating this topic with someone, they can only point to a few examples of bugs in cartridge games or in PC games back then, which was a very small ratio to all the ones that shipped correctly.
My point is basically the ratio of good games to buggy games was a lot better back in the day than it is today, because developers are time-pressed and semi-lazy, and they just figured they could fix bugs in post-production.
And funny enough, the pushback I usually get seems to be from astroturfers trying to hide that fact, of not doing as much due diligence before shipping, because it could just be fixed after the fact, regardless if the customer gets a worse product at first or not (not saying that of you, just generally).
Couch multiplayer and LAN parties had a sort of friendly atmosphere that is sorely lacking from most online multiplayer today. Folks are all business, no fun. Even in casual modes people get mad if you fool around.
I miss open server browsers. I had a few servers I would frequent for UT2k4. It was nice just bouncing in for a few rounds. People were there to win, but between teams being shuffled between games and no real ranking system, no one was really a tryhard.
i remember when games were artificially hard so you had to keep renting it longer to beat it. and if you die you go all the way back to the start of the game. so much fun
I have a feeling their comment was tongue in cheek. I absolutely agree too, for while I do think there is some merit in artificial difficulty and creativity within set restrictions, I also enjoy games much more when I emulate them and have save states.
I think a great example that bridges the gap between more modern-style hardware and daily living, and old difficult repeatable gameplay is the era of the Gameboy Color. So many of the games for these style of consoles were meant to be played in bursts (arcades, anyone?) due to the on-the-go nature, and since that fit so in line with the already existing mechanisms gaming had – artificial difficulties by design – there is a very streamlined progression from 1980’s games and early 2000’s games.
So, what changed? Well let me tell you, it wasn’t the Blackberry.
Honestly, the iPhone. As mobile game consoles like the Nintendo DS got better, games got more fully fledged like the home console games were. Developers were recreating game experiences like Spyro, putting in huge games in tiny mobile consoles (Toon Link, anyone?). Yes, the Nintendo DS still had its shovelware but the iPhone was the new bridge that gapped the old arcade style pay-to-play. Games with artificial difficulty now had micro-transactions allowing you to bypass the designed limitations. As mobile consoles got better games, mobile gaming got far, far worse, leading us to “”““random””“” RNG -gacha and lootboxes and all the great gambling starters.
That’s only further developed for offshoots of software. Just look at all the junk between the: FOSS stores, Apple Store, Play Store, Samsung Store, Meta-Quest Store, going even further some devices have their own separate store entirely. And now these stores ship updates, so you don’t even have to finish your game before selling it!
Ironically, Nintendo paved the way for a really great opportunity, then capitalists saw the opportunity to exploit the free market and now there is literal garbage everywhere.
Mobile gaming truly embraced the worst side of arcades. I remember way back when there were gamers protested so that the media and governments wouldn’t lump video games with gambling, and now the studios themselves put slot machines inside them.
Of course I still have the manual of these old games. The characters were always hand drawn and properly described. For rpg they also used a nice medieval fantasy style. A lot of these descriptions were not even necessary but they were cool to have.
We don’t miss these games because they were inherently better, but because they were fun in their own way, and enhanced creativity due to their own limitations. Also these were console games, so you had a specific time and hardware to play them. It’s not like a moder multiplayer pc game, that somehow follows you beyond the gaming time, and that are played on the same machine you use to work.
Sometimes I feel like these games are exhausting when they take so much energy. Than you have updates, tierlists and a new meta every week. I used to sit down and play without thinking at anything else on old consoles. Still do. They don’t send me unwanted notifications. Than you have all the lootboxes gacha stuff.
Games were technically limited but built a simple and fun experience.
True. I feel that particularly with ranked shooters like Valorant and their competitive modes, playing becomes less enjoyable and more of a chore. In RPGs and strategy games on the other hand, I can lose myself for hours in wonder and awe at the gameplay, story, atmosphere, setting, etc. That’s why I’d much rather play something many people would consider less exciting like Crusader Kings 3 than Valorant, Overwatch, Counterstrike, League of Legends, etc.
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I remember when volvo invented lootboxes to make tf2 free to play instead of selling a $60 “AAA” title with a battlepass and lootboxes included.
If memory serves, Valve got the idea for the loot boxes from Korean free to play games. As far as I know though, they did invent the battle pass with Dota 2.
They should have made the patent free to use as long as the game was free to play, like they did with the seat belt patent
I do miss manuals though.
The appetizer before the main course.
I think you can probably still get them for some modern games that were crafted with passion, through special editions and box sets. I think that the standard store edition of Total War: Warhammer actually came with a manual as well as a novella, and this was coincidentally the last physical copy of a game I bought.
If you are talking about the late 90’s and early 2000’s there was plently of multiplayer games and saving was pretty much standard.
I honestly think the generalization of parents here are GenX where we grew up on Atari, colicovision and then the original NES.
There were still plenty of 16-bit and even some 32-bit era games that didn’t have saving…or used passwords to save.
Or if you could save, did you have space in your memory card?..
My neighborhood was just poor enough that basically no kid had a PS memory card. They were all jealous of my n64’s ability to save on the cartridges. When the PS2 and GameCube rolled around we just left the machines on all day again
At some point, I’d have passed on a new game and chosen to get a memory card instead, haha
Though I did get bitten with the RPG bug back then, so that probably colours my opinion. Not that I didn’t play the first half of FF7’s Midgar (aka. first act) dozens of times because I kept getting stuck.
It’s great that level select cheats were so prevalent back then!
deleted by creator
Some games really needed manuals to play. That’s what text files were for.
There’s an analogy with the music industry too. Music recording before was for the “elite” who were sure that their music would hit. Nowadays, the music recording broadens to the public, ergo more less quality focused music is released.
The same goes with video games
Game updates bring bad with the good, because devs often rely on them to deliver a full, playable game.
When you bought a game back in the day, you got a full, playable game on the media. It wasn’t always bug-free, because… you know… it’s software, but they had to at least quash all the showstoppers without the benefit of a Day 1 patch.
And don’t get me started about DRM…
ET would like a word…
Fair, but ET was such an awful debacle that it killed Atari as a company and paved the way for Japanese companies to take over the entire market for the next couple of decades.
Now it’s just business as usual.
They were also much simpler and smaller back then with often extremely limited specification variations. And DRM existed back then too, with some fairly egregious and infamous physical DRM checks.
This is selection bias. You remember Metal Gear Solid, but do you remember Iron & Blood: Warriors of Ravenloft? Do you remember Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero? Bubsy 3D? The million-and-one licensed games that were churned out like baseball cards back then?
If we’re going to say that a full-price game today costs $70, Metal Gear Solid would have cost the equivalent of $95. Not only that, but that was very much the Blockbuster and strategy guide era. Games would often have one of their best levels up front so that you can see what makes the game good, but then level 2 or 3 would hit a huge difficulty spike…just enough to make you have to rent the game multiple times or to cave in and buy it when you couldn’t beat it in a weekend. Or you’d have something like Final Fantasy VII, which I just finished for the first time recently, and let me tell you: games that big were designed to sell strategy guides (or hint hotlines) as a revenue stream. There would be some esoteric riddle, or some obscure corner of the map that you need to happen upon in order to progress the game forward. The business model always, at every step of the medium’s history, affects the game design.
“Value” is going to be a very subjective thing, but for better or worse, the equivalent game today is far more packed full of “stuff” to do, even when you discount the ones that get there just by adding grinding. There are things I miss about the old days too, but try to keep it in perspective.
Son, are you crying?
There’s just so much everything now a days. There’s tons of great new music and tons of great new games buried in all the new stuff thats being pumped out that it’s hard to find the gems. There’s lots of passionate people out there taking the time and effort to try and make the best
I forgot about hint hotlines. They’d charge per minute and did everything they could to keep you on the phone. I called a hotline once and my parents weren’t too happy about it.
Exactly this.
Games back then were pricier - once you account for inflation.
Games back then did expect you to pay extra - in fact quite a few were deliberately designed to have unsolvable moments without either having the official strategy guide or at least a friend who had it who could tell you.
This has always been a weird argument to me. Did wages go up to match inflation? If not, they’re not actually getting any cheaper.
The median US household income in 1998 was $38.9k, and today it’s $77.3k.
That’s commonly said but ignores other economic factors such as income, unspent money, and cost-of-living.
Though lots of things are better now: the entire back-catalogue of games, more access to review/forums, free games (and also ability to create your own games without doing so from nothing) etc. Aside from when video store rental was applicable, early gaming was more take-what-you-can-get (niche hardware/platforms might still have that feel somewhat).
Inflation is derived by indexing all of those things. Some things are far more expensive or far cheaper relative to each other, but we approximate the buying power of a dollar by looking at all of it.
Do you have an example?
I knew kids that bought strategy guides, I worked at a game shop that sold strategy guides, and as far as I could tell they were for chumps. People who has more money than creativity.
Cosmetic DLC feels like it’s for chumps too, but it’s lucrative. The best example is going to be Simon’s Quest, without a doubt. The strategy guide was in an issue of Nintendo Power. I’m sure they were also happy to let social pressures on the playground either sell the strategy guides or the game just by word of mouth as kids discussed how to progress in the game. A Link to the Past is full of this stuff too. The game grinds to a halt at several points until you happen to find a macguffin that the game doesn’t even tell you that you need. Without the strategy guide, you could end up finding those things by spending tons of hours exploring every corner of the map, but by today’s standards, we’d call that padding.
I love my old school games and will never stop playing SNES, 64, PS1, and PS2, but there were plenty of crap games on those systems too. Just like how indies and Minecraft and Soulsbornes right now are dope as hell, but everyone complains about Ubisoft and EA so much you’d think that they were the only publishers in the 2020s. There’s been solid titles and shovelwware every single generation ever since the Atari 2600. Also, the games that a lot of us grew up playing that have gone down as “the best games of all time” like FF7 and Goldeneye would be considered borderline unplayable by kids today.
BRING BACK MANUALS.
Most people don’t know about, or don’t remember, the old bins filled to the brim with garbageware games. Back when shit was still the wild west and people were releasing crap left and right.
If you want to read some manual you know where you can.
Manuals?
Don’t you like logging into the same game 6 months later and the entire game mechanic and progression system have been changed???
Give Tunic a try. The in-game manual is a central piece of its overall puzzle.
deleted by creator
Tunic is great! The dev said he wanted to replicate the experience of playing a game in a different language that you don’t quite understand at first, and he made it perfectly. English is my second language, and it reminded me of the times trying to play games before I understood it, struggling with manuals and dictionaries.
The special edition comes with a physical manual, but ironically the player shouldn’t open it until they 100% the game. It’s like a spoiler.
deleted by creator
The level of quality and number of bugs depends a lot on the era you’re talking about, as well as the platform. As a PC gamer from the 90s, much of my technical literacy came about from trying to coax games to work. My experience with console gaming was usually much more hassle free, though I have far less experience with it and don’t have a modern point of comparison (last console I even used, not even owned, was the PS3).
My real point of “it was better in the old days”, is the industry learning to exploit addiction. It’s everywhere, and it’s not just gambling. The longer you play the more likely you are to pay so even without loot boxes and the like, games are taking as much out of casino playbooks as possible. It’s fucking revolting and should be criminal.
As someone who has had problems with addiction of various kinds in the past, it’s so blatant to me. I can feel it playing into my vulnerabilities and it makes my blood boil. I avoid most gaming these days because I know if I let it become a habit, the next time life knocks me down I’ll fall victim to this.
This is restricted to a small part of modern gaming, though. In indie games, for example, you find none of these exploitative practices (talking in general, of course) and get wonderful, masterfully crafted works of art by people who do game development out of passion (also speaking in general, of course).
Yeah, no, maybe the fact that you had to immediately jump to indie games should have been a hint that it’s not a small part.
Kids these days have no idea how easy they have it. Tracking down a driver update or patch (that you just moved to an unencrypted folder) on a dial-up connection? Re-installing your OS from a series of floppy disks because something broke, again? Limiting clock speed because so many things were tied to CPU cycles and wouldn’t function on new hardware?
PC gaming was a nightmare but you put up with it because StarCraft or Quake 3 online was dope as hell, we had Diablo and Myst and Half-Life and Doom and Putt-Putt Goes to the Goddamned Moon so it was all worth it.
I remember the day I learned this lesson.
Young gamers don’t know the pain of a BSOD and the interminable wait getting back into game on an IDE hard drive. Even a CTD was a nightmare.
Maybe I am old, but having no micro-payment bullshit is what made gaming better.
there are plenty of modern games without micropayments, play smaller indie titles.
Or indeed some bigger games not from shitty publishers.
God of War, for example. A lot of Sony’s exclusives (and many are now on PC) are completely MTX-free. Even EA’s It Takes Two was free of them.
The issue is that they don’t make the return on investment that an exploitative multiplayer game does. So the big publishers prefer to make those.
It takes two is actually one step further, only one player had to own the game. It takes two had what was called a friend pass which as long as you weren’t the host of the game allowed you to play with any other player that had already purchased the game. So despite the fact that it was forced Co-op either split screen or online, only one player had to actually buy the game.
In this day and age it blew me away when I learned that because it’s just unheard of now.
Never been to an arcade, eh?
Not really a microtransaction as much as a leasing payment
I’d say they’re both microtransactions, just one is full-on pay-to-play
You could buy most of those games for console though…
Not before consoles existed you couldn’t!
The cheap downgraded version, yes
Yeah, but Arcades are Arcades. They were also not really a thing in Germany (because they are 18+ in Germany). I only ever used them on vacations.
My point is that they are representative of how gaming used to be. Good on Germany for treating addiction-based money-extractors as what they are though!
You don’t miss those games, you miss being a kid playing those games.
I still go back and play some old stuff from my childhood. Super Mario 3 is still a really good 2D platformer.
Exactly. If people missed playing those games so much, they’d be playing those games. NES games are trivial to emulate.
And this is the ultimate in survivorship bias. Super Mario 3 is often touted as the best game of an entire generation. There are a lot of mediocre NES games.
They had soul
A couple of points.
We didn’t need online access back then, we had LAN parties.
Most of the time you didn’t need updates, because back then they were much more diligent about making sure a game released without bugs. Yes a few existed, but much less than what you see in today’s games. A showstopper bug was death for sales, since it couldn’t be fixed inexpensively.
And those instruction books, especially if you are into the artistry that they put into them, is sorely missed, truly.
Hmmm, I don’t think that I can agree with the point about older games having fewer bugs. In my experience, 2000s 3D games are riddled with bugs to the point of becoming unplayable in many instances.
And you had to scour forums with dubious links to find official or unofficial patches.
There were some pretty bad bargain bin releases, and a lot of games had glitches but I can’t remember any game from a big company that released with a critical bug. I do think today companies are much more blasé about releasing games with serious issues and patching it later.
Yeah I always get pushed back on that, but honestly, I’ll “die on that hill”. Also, speaking of games not just in the 2000s, but even earlier.
Back then corporations had to sell cartridges and ship them, and if they shipped with any bugs, that was the death of the game.
At the end of the day, usually when I’m debating this topic with someone, they can only point to a few examples of bugs in cartridge games or in PC games back then, which was a very small ratio to all the ones that shipped correctly.
My point is basically the ratio of good games to buggy games was a lot better back in the day than it is today, because developers are time-pressed and semi-lazy, and they just figured they could fix bugs in post-production.
And funny enough, the pushback I usually get seems to be from astroturfers trying to hide that fact, of not doing as much due diligence before shipping, because it could just be fixed after the fact, regardless if the customer gets a worse product at first or not (not saying that of you, just generally).
Couch multiplayer and LAN parties had a sort of friendly atmosphere that is sorely lacking from most online multiplayer today. Folks are all business, no fun. Even in casual modes people get mad if you fool around.
I miss open server browsers. I had a few servers I would frequent for UT2k4. It was nice just bouncing in for a few rounds. People were there to win, but between teams being shuffled between games and no real ranking system, no one was really a tryhard.
i remember when games were artificially hard so you had to keep renting it longer to beat it. and if you die you go all the way back to the start of the game. so much fun
I’m an oldschool gamer but unlike many of those of today, I don’t miss that part one bit. Infinite lives? Checkpoints? Autosaves? Yes please.
I have a feeling their comment was tongue in cheek. I absolutely agree too, for while I do think there is some merit in artificial difficulty and creativity within set restrictions, I also enjoy games much more when I emulate them and have save states.
I think a great example that bridges the gap between more modern-style hardware and daily living, and old difficult repeatable gameplay is the era of the Gameboy Color. So many of the games for these style of consoles were meant to be played in bursts (arcades, anyone?) due to the on-the-go nature, and since that fit so in line with the already existing mechanisms gaming had – artificial difficulties by design – there is a very streamlined progression from 1980’s games and early 2000’s games.
So, what changed? Well let me tell you, it wasn’t the Blackberry.
Honestly, the iPhone. As mobile game consoles like the Nintendo DS got better, games got more fully fledged like the home console games were. Developers were recreating game experiences like Spyro, putting in huge games in tiny mobile consoles (Toon Link, anyone?). Yes, the Nintendo DS still had its shovelware but the iPhone was the new bridge that gapped the old arcade style pay-to-play. Games with artificial difficulty now had micro-transactions allowing you to bypass the designed limitations. As mobile consoles got better games, mobile gaming got far, far worse, leading us to “”““random””“” RNG -gacha and lootboxes and all the great gambling starters.
That’s only further developed for offshoots of software. Just look at all the junk between the: FOSS stores, Apple Store, Play Store, Samsung Store, Meta-Quest Store, going even further some devices have their own separate store entirely. And now these stores ship updates, so you don’t even have to finish your game before selling it!
Ironically, Nintendo paved the way for a really great opportunity, then capitalists saw the opportunity to exploit the free market and now there is literal garbage everywhere.
Mobile gaming truly embraced the worst side of arcades. I remember way back when there were gamers protested so that the media and governments wouldn’t lump video games with gambling, and now the studios themselves put slot machines inside them.
Fucking Lion King game
Of course I still have the manual of these old games. The characters were always hand drawn and properly described. For rpg they also used a nice medieval fantasy style. A lot of these descriptions were not even necessary but they were cool to have.
We don’t miss these games because they were inherently better, but because they were fun in their own way, and enhanced creativity due to their own limitations. Also these were console games, so you had a specific time and hardware to play them. It’s not like a moder multiplayer pc game, that somehow follows you beyond the gaming time, and that are played on the same machine you use to work.
Sometimes I feel like these games are exhausting when they take so much energy. Than you have updates, tierlists and a new meta every week. I used to sit down and play without thinking at anything else on old consoles. Still do. They don’t send me unwanted notifications. Than you have all the lootboxes gacha stuff.
Games were technically limited but built a simple and fun experience.
True. I feel that particularly with ranked shooters like Valorant and their competitive modes, playing becomes less enjoyable and more of a chore. In RPGs and strategy games on the other hand, I can lose myself for hours in wonder and awe at the gameplay, story, atmosphere, setting, etc. That’s why I’d much rather play something many people would consider less exciting like Crusader Kings 3 than Valorant, Overwatch, Counterstrike, League of Legends, etc.