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!
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?
You could buy most of those games for console though…
The cheap downgraded version, yes
Not before consoles existed you couldn’t!
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
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!
oh fuck, those beautiful manuals just came rushing back into the surface from the depths they were buried under.
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…
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.
When you bought a game back in the day, you got a full, playable game on the media
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.
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.
Into my heart an air that kills From yon far country blows; What are those blue remembered hills, What spires, what farms are those? That is the land of lost content, I see it shining plain, The happy highways where I went And cannot come again.My games never came with a manual. Maybe because we swapped them in school shamelessly. Not needing to be online was a great bone because it made copying so much easier.
Some games really needed manuals to play. That’s what text files were for.
They had soul
The good thing was that games were complete and they didn‘t try to suck ever last penny out of you post-launch. Also, no updates meant they actually couldn‘t just ship them broken and fix later…
Tekken used to have more than half of the characters HIDDEN. Now they just sell them one by one.
Well the new Tekken games launch with more and more characters, besides 7 which did launch with less than 6, and if you consider that the price of games has gotten cheaper due to inflation since the first Tekken it starts to make sense that they’re trying to make more money off them. Games have been costing more to make while costing less to buy for decades now and the industry is reaching a point where that’s become unsustainable but people just won’t accept a larger sticker price and longer development cycles so studios are finding new ways to make money. Personally I think selling characters as they come out for a few bucks is actually not a bad thing in fighting games, it keeps the games alive and interesting for much longer so long as it’s done well.
But it did mean they would ship them broken with no chance of fixing them, tbf.
That happened like, 6 times.
I can literally only think of a handful of games that had serious bugs.
There was that ninja turtles game for nes with the impossible jump, there was enter the matrix for PS2/xbox that was completely not done. There were a few games that were poorly conceived in the first place like ET for Atari…
But yeah, what else had serious bugs?
WrestleMania 2000 on N64 had a bug that would randomly delete all saved data.
There isn’t a single game without bugs
There was plenty of terrible, buggy games you just didn’t see because stores would drop them. PC had it far worse than console did back in the day. I think it’s also that games are just way fucking cheaper now, adjusted for inflation a SNES game was around 120 bucks and a PS2 game was around 75 bucks.
Still happens, used to be rare
That only happened extremely rarely. Nowadays it seems to be almost mandatory, precisely because the mindset is that they can just fix it later
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.
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.
Limiting clock speed because so many things were tied to CPU cycles and wouldn’t function on new hardware?
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).
This is restricted to a small part of modern gaming, though. In indie games-
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.
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.
Give Tunic a try. The in-game manual is a central piece of its overall puzzle.
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.
This is me in Italian. I don’t know why it never occurred to me that anyone would experience the same with English, but knowing about it makes me feel so much better.
The amount of depth in that game is mind blowing. It’s funny reading reviews/comments of people complaining about the rewards for the secrets that make it obvious they got the solutions online. Figuring out the secrets IS part of the reward!
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.
Manuals?
Don’t you like logging into the same game 6 months later and the entire game mechanic and progression system have been changed???
If you want to read some manual you know where you can.
Well yea:
- No online play meant game had to be played with people sitting next to you. You had to socialize;
- No updates meant games had to be finished when sold, none of the early access or battle pass bullshit;
- Games were made hard to artificially give longer play time but this resulted in sense of achievement when you beat the game;
- Booklets were actually awesome because you had lore in your hands which was written in a way not to spoil the game but hyped you to play further so you could get to that content.
Sure for the most part it’s nostalgia, but technology brought as many, if not more, bad things as it did with good things. We’ve seen games get much better than old games and we’ve seen them much worse.
just buy indie games lol
Those have manuals you can read on the ride home?
Actually there is a company called limited run games I think that goes all out and prints physical copies of some indie games with instructions and bonus stuff. It’s pretty awesome but takes a while to get it.
Ok that is pretty awesome
These days I’m driving on the way home.
I think there is something to respect about both types of games these days.
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.
