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!



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The game was about the game. Get off my lawn.
Yeah. I mean there was shitty stuff back then, of course.
Arcade games, games designed to not be beatable without their guides (it’s why moon logic is a concept in the first place), that kind of stuff. But it’s a whole different level nowadays.
They had soul
oh fuck, those beautiful manuals just came rushing back into the surface from the depths they were buried under.
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.
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.
Son, are you crying?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Yes, there was no online play or updates, so they couldn’t steal back the game you paid for because they decided to stop supporting it one day.
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.
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.
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.
I remember the day I learned this lesson.
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.
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.
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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.
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You could buy most of those games for console though…
The cheap downgraded version, yes
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Not really a microtransaction as much as a leasing payment
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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
Fucking Lion King game
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.
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.
Taking my kid home with a new (used via GameStop) Nintendo game sucks. I excitedly hand him the case and theres like nothing for him to read.
I loved reading through the manual for Morrowind with the copy we got on the original XBox. I read all the class descriptions, details about the schools of magic, and had a whole character planned out before starting the game. I didn’t get into tabletop gaming until much later, but looking back, that manual really captured the same feeling of reading through the D&D players handbook and picking out a race, class, background, etc.
I think that feeling is why it’s still my favorite PC game.
This was my exact experience. I read the book and looked through the map it came with. Morrowind was the game that caused me to change from FPS and Sports games to RPGs.
Ahh, the maps were so good. I remember using the extremely detailed hand drawn map to help me locate the Cavern of the Incarnate, and other cool locations. I am sad that I didn’t keep them.
Could do without online play.
I do go without. The only time I ever play online is playing PvE games with my good IRL friends that live in different countries and states now, and that’s maybe twice a month.
No randoms, no tantrums when we make noob mistakes, no toxicity. When my friends aren’t around, I play single player games or play with bots instead of people. I highly recommend it.
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Some games really needed manuals to play. That’s what text files were for.