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!
Everything that is now a DLC or microtransaction was instead some cool secret you could find or unlock, the games were smaller but that discovery meant they FELT so much bigger.
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.
The books were often filled with cool art not found in the game, sometimes there were hints hidden in the margins, or some had a mini-walkthru of the first level or something in the back, along with lore, they added a lot to the game imo. It felt like a well put together package, not unlike album artwork, liner notes and whole albums which people are also now (re)discovering are pretty cool.
God on the PC end of things youd get like a literal book with some games. Keyboard overlays for controls, posters, all sorts of fun shit.
Some reissue of ‘Gran Turismo’ 1 or 2 for the PS1 had a hundred-page manual detailing how to drive a proper race line and how to set up the car for different behaviors.
Love the maps, I have an old photo of myself playing on the family 386sx with a Might and Magic Clouds of Xeen map in the background. I remember the Ultima games always came with a bunch of cool stuff too.
I loved the maps.
I’ve grown up in the land of pirate cartridges with no booklets, so never knew any lore about Mario games besides “the princess got kidnapped”. Didn’t discover that the enemies had names until I was an adult.
Oh boy, you didn’t even get the bad b&w photocopy manual? Those came with rentals a lot of times. There was a lot of pointless info too though, like grand descriptions of the starting equipment you ditch after the first half hour lol.
We had nothing outside the games back then, and no boxes for the carts either. But OTOH the pirate cartridges often had multiple games on them — up to like a dozen decent ones on a NES cart, or straight up a hundred variations of the same few base games, particularly old and smaller ones from the early 80s. I think the variations were made by modifying some variables before launching the base game: changing the speed, starting level or whatever.
I was occasionally reading magazines about games, and encountering names of enemy characters from a platformer that I’ve played a hundred times would make me go “what the hell are they talking about”. Apparently rich kids in the big city could afford genuine games with the manuals.
There’s no doubt that most new games are much better than most old games.
I and everyone else has the possibility to play the old games whenever they want. Most run on your phone.
Why don’t we do it? Marketing of course, but also, has anyone ever actually tried one of the old games that they haven’t played before? For example, I tried to play Ocarina of Time, and the controls as well as the graphics are terrible. So much shit is just plain annoying and clunky. Everyone decries it as “one of the best games”, but I can’t see how it is better than almost any modern action RPG.
The main reason why everyone likes it and other old games is nostalgia, almost nothing else.
Want full games without online play that are hard, you die, you try again? Play something like hollow knight/silksong. There’s so many easter eggs in so many games. You got more diversity in style of games now than ever.
No doubt there are also much more shitty games now. If you have a problem with games today, you’re just bad at picking the right one for you.
These older games also pioneered a lot of things that are taken for granted in modern games. People decide to try these games and since a lot of mechanics and types of storytelling are the norm know, they don’t get the appeal.
Exactly. For their time, all these games were incredible, just not always compared to today.
OoT hasn’t aged the best, but it’s still a solid experience for a game that pioneered mainstream 3D graphics. The Ps1/N64 generation was all about innovation and experimentation, so it’s a bit unfair to judge those games so harshly. Now the Ps2/Gamecube gen was when things became refined. In the same franchise, Wind Waker is a retro game and still one of the absolute best in the series.
It’s a case by case basis. I’ve heard the Dynasty Warriors Origins is really good but I can’t speak for that since I haven’t played it. Other than that, compare the Ps2 musuo games to more modern ones like DW8/9, or the Pirate Warriors series. The classics are way more fun and engaging.
Or just look at Square Enix. Some of what they do now days is good, but most of their stuff is gacha-laden garbage now. Even their Pixel Remaster collection traded in a legacy of their own source code for a toy built in Unity, for a pseudo-classic experience that doesn’t even have the additional content of previous remasters.
Or, in the fps genre, I dare you to find a modern fps that’s as packed full of amazing content and features as Time Splitters 3: Future Perfect.
That depends on the definition of “better.” Don’t mistake me, I LOVE modern games but there was something magical about needing months to beat one game. And while old games didn’t have online components they were definitely a community effort. Siblings, neighbors, friends from school, all coming over and collaborated with to beat each game. Together we discovered every secret place and learned every trick. If someone figured something out it became local game lore and everyone would try to replicate it. We used to all pile in a room to play Mario bros and work together to knock out every level in an afternoon (if you you know), then run it again with the worp whistle trick because we could. There were games we never beat. Simon’s Quest haunted us (I looked it up as an adult and beat it on nesticle - screw you garlic merchant). But that was part of it too, we didn’t have the safety net of a search engine to bail us out when we got stuck. Frustrating? Yes. But it forced us to slow down and think about the challenges in front of us. It wasn’t better or worse, just different then now. (Also please try to keep in mind part of the reason your controls might feel clunky is the game was designed for a different controller then you are using).
That being said I will never miss that hinky as fuck Nintendo cartridge nonsense that required a ritual involving alcohol, prayer, and the breath of life to get it read a game cartridge. Fuck the NES - again if you know, you know.
You’re kinda talking about gaming culture though, not the games themselves. There are plenty of hard games that need months to beat (depending on time investment).
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??
Freelancer was a space shooter that ran on a pentium 3 laptop with an ATI RAGE 8MB video card.
It was dope.
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.
I haven’t done a ton of research, but it seems like it runs fine?
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 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.
“Completely finished and polished”, except in the cases they weren’t, like the mountains of shovelware in every gen 🙃
Never touched again was only true up to PS2 era and only for consoles, PC had update patches since the 90s
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
Many years ago, you read an instruction book without knowing it was going to be your last.
Treasure every moment.
Why make people sad when you could just not?
It’s interesting how games from the 80s and 90s, in general, required less time to complete than the crop that came with the PS2 era. DVDs allowed for much, much longer games, sometimes to a fault, other times the extra time to complete was in the form of challenges or unlockable characters.
Let’s not forget that half of the replayability of NES/SNES/PSX era titles came from “my entire collection is 25 games”
When I was little I had my parents read to me from the Mario 3 instruction manual before going to bed.
Manuals were necessary because the games back then couldn’t fit a tutorial and, especially in the Atari days, the art didn’t always get across what was going on.
I too had my nose in the manual on the ride home. My parents had a rule that we couldn’t bring portable game systems (Game Gear in my case) on “short” car rides, so I’d sometimes bring a manual to look at.
I recommend Tunic if you’re nostalgic for game manuals
Regarding the text of the OP, that sense of discovery is gone now. The internet has ruined it. All the secrets get posted online within the first week, and there’s a wiki up in short order spoiling it for future players.
Regarding the last paragraph, developers have adapted, and now include more complex/obscure secrets meant to be shared by people and solved together. Though of course if players just look things up before even trying then you can’t stop them, but that’s their own fault.
The modern scourge are dataminers, who will immediately jump to digging through game files and spoil puzzles in the communities trying to solve them. Not all of them will do that, but it only takes one to ruin the fun.
Also Tunic is an absolute banger of a game, would recommend, just don’t spoil yourself!
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.
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.
Oh man, @Beep@lemmus.org is gonna be so pissed you kept Field Explores’ name in the comic.
I’m pretty sure this guys kink is being hated by everyone, don’t summon the troll, they’re jerking it to your hate.
They’re fun to mock, so that means everyone is happy!
I have zero issue if anyone wants to jerk off to me ;)
Damn advertisements!
Who summoned me—Beep, the undeclared king of the webcomics world?
I require context.
Beep thinks that comic’s author’s name is an ad, and is against it, so they are in a crusade against crediting the author and always crops that part.
Christ, what an asshole.
deleted by creator
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.
whoopse I tripped and dropped my https://finji.itch.io/tunic link
the same developers as A Night in the Woods you say?
