cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/13809164
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!
I noticed 20+ guys reminiscing on games they played as kids. Nostalgia starts soon nowadays.
Older games were a lot simpler too. No loot boxes, multiple forms of currency - some of which could only be bought with real money, invasive DRM, season passes, content pulled back by selling it to you as DLC, extremely long game times artificially extended by things like mapping gimmicks, giant and almost barren worlds, unoptomized graphics requiring top of the line graphics cards that would still turn your room to a furnace, and massive amounts of bugs and glitches that may or may not be patched out at a later time.
whoopse I tripped and dropped my https://finji.itch.io/tunic link
the same developers as A Night in the Woods you say?
No bullshit. You gamed, you died, you tried again.
Dark Souls baby
Look, I have been replaying Prince of Persia Sands of Time these last few days and it’s just fucking incredible how streamlined it is.
the pause menu is just resume/options/quit? no inventory management, skill tree, quest tracker, or other bullshit? Remember this is the IP that spawned Assassin’s Creed
also… it still looks great, with relatively detailed interiors and architecture, great animations and soundtrack, characters quipping about and it all manages to run on 256Mb of ram??
32MB of RAM.
That shit was on the PS2.
I just reported the number on the cd cover, I guess they optimized even further on consoles, absolutely incredible… nowadays android apps will recommend 4gb ram for smooth performance jfc
Sands of Time is straight-up one of the best games of all time, and that’s even including the not-great combat which makes up a lot of it, and a few puzzles which just grind the whole thing to a complete stop. Its quality is not completely representative of its era.
What is representative of its era, is that it’s a complete bastard to run nowadays. Requires a GPU with hardware transform and lighting, but also a single-core CPU, which means you need a very specific age of computer to run it. Even patched up, there’s some things that just don’t look right - I’ve never managed to get it running with the portals to secret areas looking the way they should.
I am quite envious of you being able to replay it, tho. Think I gave up the last time I tried.
maybe Bottles on Linux is doing some magic behind the scenes, but I didn’t have trouble running it on a intel N100 mini pc
I haven’t done a ton of research, but it seems like it runs fine?
Freelancer was a space shooter that ran on a pentium 3 laptop with an ATI RAGE 8MB video card.
It was dope.
Never forget what they took from us.
Sensible soccer is better than any modern football game. Fight me!
Gog tries to give you as much of this as possible
Including as close as you can get to TRUE OWNERSHIP.
Once it’s in your hard drive, and you’ve backed it up, it will NEVER brick itself on purpose. It never phones home. It never revokes your “license”. You can install it on any computer at anytime anywhere, even MULTIPLE computers, and it doesn’t ask you shit.
I miss that games were completely finished and polished, put on a disk, and never touched again.
I miss that you used to truly own them. They really were entirely yours.
That took me right back to picking up an A5 box of Goblins 2 at a radio rally and reading the booklet all the way home.
Vivid af
Developers didn’t really know what would work and what wouldn’t, so they fucked around until they found something. No endless clones of the same idea. Extremely weird gameplay, often utter bullshit, sometimes a gem. It was great.
No endless clones of the same idea.
:-/
In the 70s and 80s, video games were so simple and straightforward, usually due to limited computing power, that it was trivial to create clones of games for other systems. Many of the most popular games of the early years of gaming such as Pong, Frogger, Arkanoid, Centepede, etc. were cloned heavily or were clones themselves.
Case in point, six different Tetris knock offs released between 1989 and 1997.
Another notorious instance was The Simpsons: Road Rage, which was a simple reskin of the then-popular Crazy Taxi.
I’ll admit to having done a simple reskin myself, for a high school English project, that involved swapping out PacMan for a boat and the ghosts for angry natives. I christened it “Heart of Darkness: The Video Game” and got an easy A for my trouble.
easy A, huh
I really miss the old days — now we even need to pay to progress in games. Mobile game devs are just craving money
I have been gaming for decades, I haven’t paid to progress since Street Fighter II in arcade! what the fuck are you playing?
There is no such things as a mobile game. Only addictions apps
There are still decent pay-upfront mobile games. Unfortunately, they are drowned out by F2P slop with colossal marketing budgets.
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Except there was no online play
That was a feature, not a limitation.
Updates, too. Games had to actually be in their final state before they could be sold.
Not that they were a lot of the times…
Yea, people wanna act like games of the past didn’t have game breaking glitches and, since no updates, were stuck with working around them.
Missing No. anyone? PS2 Soul Calibur 3 glitch that wiped your entire Chronicles campaign (and sometimes even the ENTIRE PLAYER FILE) because of how the memory card wrote the data?
There are pros and cons, obviously. Getting a game that was extremely well tested and nearly bug free on day 1 was great. But, not all games were that well tested, and many had gameplay-breaking bugs that you just had to live with because there was no way to update them.
Nah, then you just plugged them into the “exploit the bugs hacking device” i.e the game genie, and enjoyed making things even more fucked up.
There was no Game Genie for the Atari.
This is the biggest lie g*mers tell themselves. Unpatched bugs and exploits were more common and were just called DLC expansion packs.
DLC expansion packs
You might not believe this, but there was a time before DLC expansion packs. Super Mario World, I love you.
Remind me what that one DLC for Lemmings was called?
Depends on whether standalone expansions are considered DLC. “Oh No, More Lemmings!”, and “Holiday Lemmings”. The Holiday packs are 91’, 92’, 93’, and 94’. I think a strategy guide had extra levels too. Also, the assorted ports of Lemmings sometimes had unique levels.
If you love Lemmings, I recommend the fan remake, NeoLemmix. It combines all the levels from every platform into a single game, plus with QOL improvements like rewinding by a step. There are also no duplicate levels for difficulty, so every level is unique. Some of the levels have bonus objectives you can go for, if achievements are your thing.
I always thought Lemmings would have been cool if they had released a good level editor and let people design their own. Might have turned into something like crossword puzzles where it just became a continuing thing with endless variety.
Alas, the IP is owned by a AAA company. Doomed to languish in the footnotes of history, all because it can’t make all the money. Given TLC, I think Lemmings could have been similar to Worms in longevity.
Lemmings is barely a $1.99 mobile game by today’s standards. It sold at release for 29.99 USD, which is 72 USD in today’s dollars.
Maybe pick one that makes a decent case for you.
Games were far better when they didnt update every fucking day. I hate it so much.
Oh, and I actually OWNED the disc or cart I bought (before online activation shit)
Thats why i play a lot more ps2 Dreamcast and Xbox now. Fuck (most) modern games.
Eh, it really depends on the game. Obviously no game should be dependent on the internet to be playayble, but I do actually like playing against (or with) other people. Mario Kart with NPCs gets boring after a while, and unfortunately bringing friends over to my house to play games wasn’t really an option, so online it was. Splatoon is another one that has always been a delight, and while I love story mode obviously the AI can’t fight like a human.
I don’t really play shooters and stuff though.
Also consoles had modem peripherals since at least the Famicom days, some of which did allow multiplayer. Namely, there was the Family Computer Network System, however apparently it was an information service with some downloadable content, rather than a multiplayer service.
Wikipedia says that both Satellaview for SNES and 64DD for N64 had online gaming, but idk how exactly it worked.
Except there WAS online play. Since like the 90s. RTS games especially had online tournaments. Also, LAN parties used to be epic.
Games DID receive updates when needed. Internet speeds were slow, so it was expected that when you bought a game you got the game after installation, and not a day one patch that barely fixes anything.
As for the other kinds of updates; games got expansion packs. As the name would suggest, they expanded the game. Sometimes quite drastically.
Saves still corrupt to this day in brand new AAA releases.
I mean, the kids playing a switch. Consoles didn’t really get updates until the 360/ps3 era and even then it wasn’t a guarantee a game would get updates.
That’s why there is such a big deal about release versions from back then. If a game was big enough it could get a updated physical release with some slight tweaks.
I guess if I were to specifically keep it consoles, sure. But PC gaming had Internet and games with patches. But usually games just needed… Like… One patch to balance something or fix a problem.
The N64 was pretty experimental with some limited online features. And some time later, if I remember correctly, the PS2 had an ethernet socket.
The Dreamcast was probably the biggest exploration into the internet before modern consoles. Heck even the megadrive had a gamepass like service (Sega Channel) that would have a rotating line up of games, some even being exclusive to the service
Ahead of their time.
You’re thinking of a different time.
I don’t think so. The kid is playing a Nintendo Switch and called the other guy “dad”.
So “dad” must be around my age. So he was a kid during the 90s, and so would stand to reason he’d game on N64, PSX, Windows 98, and onward.
My kid plays switch and I grew up in the 80s. I think he’s talking more dos/windows 3.1 times, Super Nintendo, maybe Sega genesis/mega drive times, where many games did not have saves. I remember playing sonic and when you ran out of lives, that was that. When I bought X-Wing, it came with a massive manual.
But whatever, it’s a comic about nostalgia. People will always be nostalgic about their own childhood.
I dunno, man. That kid is looking pretty tiny. I don’t know about you, but most people get a kid before they turn 50.
Also, the dad in the comic is clearly holding a PSX controller.
Yes, you’re right on the internet, of course. The artist has no idea what they’re talking about, should delete their comic and hang their head in shame. Good job. You win 1 internet point.
PSX games had saves on memory cards, the generation of consoles before that often didn’t.
I have a bunch of consoles around from that era. My oldest systems are 8bit Master System. If saving was an option, it was you writing down a code in between levels.
Pretty sure the SNES/Super Famicom had a bunch of games come out with saving onto the cartridge, which predates the N64 and PSX.
Yeah, so, not sure how accurate this list is, but it looks like all the big named RPGs had saves, and all the first party Nintendo titles also had saves.
I said often, not always.
Eh. As someone who plays MANY games, I can’t say that I agree with the notion of old games being inherently better. The interface, bugginess, or lack of QOL often hamstrings the experience.
IMO, it would be best if old games are remade. Arcanum is a pain in the rear, because the text and images can be small on my monitor, plus crashing if I click too quickly. Technical issues are my #1 killer of games, because it takes the wind out of my sails if I try to get into something.
