Which was sometimes frustrating, but when they are funny and good bugs it’s amazing.
There’s a reason that so many speedruns on older consoles use the Japanese cartridges, because those versions came out first and have exploitable glitches the western release later fixed.
Bugs at that time were almost never totally game-breaking either, since that would have been a nightmare recall for the publisher, and so the final builds were tested a lot more intensively than games now.
dan@upvote.au 3 months ago
There were fewer game breaking bugs though, since the developers knew they couldn’t be patched after release.
PunnyName@lemmy.world 3 months ago
The game itself was smaller in virtually every way. Even if it took you 80 hours to beat, the data was nothing in comparison to modern games.
dan@upvote.au 3 months ago
Sure, but what I meant is that good developers took a lot of care in ensuring the game was ready for release, and companies like Nintendo and Sega did a lot of checks to ensure there were no major issues (for example, they’d keep it running for a long time while monitoring memory usage to ensure there were no memory leaks)
echo64@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Some games back in the day needed a patch the first week of release and never got one. Famously, the Japanese version of Kirby super star had to be recalled because it was so buggy. Half the intended mechanics in ff6 either don’t work properly or just flat out do nothing.
I really like old games, I have a bunch of old consoles that I play all the time, but this rose tinted view on things has got to go. Old games were buggy, too, they just did less and so had less to fail on.
And up until the ps2/3 era, qa was just the developers testing it themselves.
krashmo@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Do you recall a game released in the last 5-ish years that didn’t have a patch in the first week of release? I obviously haven’t played every game released in that time frame but it seems like many are still fixing day one bugs months after release.
Kushan@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Games have got a lot more expensive to make these days. It’s never laziness, it’s money. Everything is money. And it costs money to hold up a game release, but you had to back in the day because you had no choice. Now you do have a choice, because you can keep working on a game long after you send it for mastering and certification.
Sure, you can argue that publishers should spend more money on testing and stop being “lazy” but that extra cost is getting passed on to you. It’s already obscene how expensive some games are to produce.
KISSmyOS@feddit.de 3 months ago
For PC atleast, you could buy a magazine that came with a floppy disk containing patches.
dan@upvote.au 3 months ago
Wow I completely forgot about this. Later on it was CDs with both patches and demos.
setsneedtofeed@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Also later printings of the games themselves could be patched out of the box. Somebody buying day one versus a year later could get a slightly different version of the game.
mellowheat@suppo.fi 3 months ago
There were some infamous cases though, even in games that ended up being fucking brilliant. Like Master of Magic.