Rose tinted glasses. Games were buggy as hell. Many times unbeatable in certain conditions.
What a feeling that was
Submitted 1 year ago by The_Picard_Maneuver@lemmy.world to memes@sopuli.xyz
https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/726cb798-bb7b-4459-8ffd-58a2878f1b32.jpeg
Comments
IsThisAnAI@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Sylvartas@lemmy.world 1 year ago
They were way less complex though. Which does help with QA coverage and generally gives less chances for things to break. But yeah, I still agree, rose tinted glasses and all that
Instigate@aussie.zone 1 year ago
What percentage of all games released before download updating became the norm had game-breaking bugs? I really don’t remember that many, certainly not so many that it was considered to be a widespread issue.
Yeah, unpatchable games tended to be buggier in general, but there’s also a sense of charm and intrigue that comes with discovering a bug or exploit and utilising it to your advantage. I still remember playing the fuck out of Morrowind and discovering that you could exploit the Corprus disease to get essentially infinite Strength and Endurance which was awesome.
I think stating that “many” games were unbeatable is hyperbolic, but I guess that depends on your definition of “many”. If you define it as being more than five, then sure. If you define it as being a statistically significant percentage? Maybe not.
ICastFist@programming.dev 1 year ago
I think the main problem is that people think about the “good old games” and forget the sheer amount of shovelware and shit games that existed.
It can also be hard sometimes to know whether something was shoddy code or just bad design.
chiliedogg@lemmy.world 1 year ago
The DOS version of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was missing a platform in the third zone, and literally couldn’t be beaten.
Sometimes the ability to patch is good.
Shyfer@ttrpg.network 1 year ago
Ya but there’s too much. Now we have games getting out half-finished because they know they can patch it later after the public pays full price too beta test it.
chiliedogg@lemmy.world 1 year ago
It’s almost like there’s good and bad parts.
But beforehand a bad game was bad forever. Now it can be fixed.
Cyberpunk was a buggy mess at launch, but they did eventually fix it and make a solid game.
rickyrigatoni@lemm.ee 1 year ago
And once it’s sufficiently patched being angry about spending three years with an unfinished game is considered toxic entitled gamer behavior and you’re supposed to pretend like it didn’t happen.
ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
Remember having to stop mid install to put the next disc in?
mods_are_assholes@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Windows 95 had a version that came on 30 floppy disks.
NOT fun.
XTornado@lemmy.ml 1 year ago
Shit I installed Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 with 10 DVDs and let me tell you… that’s something I don’t want back.
Like give me a small USB drive or a Blu-ray but that one I know it’s not common outside consoles and movies.
And you needed a Microsoft Account and activate the CD Key anyway…which actually didn’t allow to install the game downloading it which the DVDs was for offline install, ok… But don’t force.me to use them if I have access to online… Who came up with this man??? Plus you need the first disk inserted like the old times… I swear… It was like travelling back in time but with extra hassles of today world on top.
thatKamGuy@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
5 (6?) 3.5in floppies to get Dune 2 loaded on my Amiga 2000; at least I could take the time between disks to go to the bathroom, grab a snack, read a book etc. 😅
mods_are_assholes@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Still the only RTS I ever actually liked. Man that menu was mind blowing at the time.
mellowheat@suppo.fi 1 year ago
Remember having to stop mid game and put the next disc in?
Splatterphace@lemm.ee 1 year ago
I prefer waking my console and pressing a button to play, no disc fumbling
simple@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Turn on PS2
Disc starts spinning
Red screen of death shows up telling me the disc is invalid
Take out disk and wipe it thoroughly
Pray
Repeat 1-5 times until it works
Yeah, good times…
dan@upvote.au 1 year ago
Never had this issue with a Nintendo 64 :P
I don’t think I ever had issues with the cartridges.
ICastFist@programming.dev 1 year ago
Red screen of death shows up telling me the disc is invalid
laughs in unlocked PS2 with HDD
Rai@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 year ago
RRoD was 360. PS2 was one of the most durable consoles ever.
I think the 2600 and SNES take the prize for durability. 64 was durable, unless you have the DK64 nightmare game console and played in the sun.
henfredemars@infosec.pub 1 year ago
For real. I remember that despite our best efforts discs would get scratched occasionally, and try keeping those disks pristine with kids. That mechanical drive was also a common and expensive point of failure that’s guaranteed to wear out eventually because of those moving parts.
It’s not all sunshine and rainbows, but I think there’s a tendency to glorify the past and hyperfocus on the disadvantages. We forget that there were parts of the past that really sucked.
Steve@startrek.website 1 year ago
Cartridge blow jobs
bananabenana@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Me, an intellectual, modding a game for the next 36 hours straight…then quitting after 2 days
ICastFist@programming.dev 1 year ago
The likelihood of the game simply not working with that much modding done to it is very high, even with load order amenities
bananabenana@lemmy.world 1 year ago
You’re not wrong, but I can’t help myself. Just one more mod…
TankovayaDiviziya@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Pros of disc games: ready to play and you own the game.
Cons: game breaking bugs exist and asking devs to send you game patches is awkward af.
Rentlar@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
Gamers in Japan were the real early access testers of yesteryear. Major bugs or glitches that were there were hopefully fixed by the time the game hit international release.
Theharpyeagle@lemmy.world 1 year ago
It’s honestly weird to remember that international releases were delayed months or years just a couple decades ago. Could you imagine if it took a year for BotW to release in the West?
doublenom@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
You only own the game as long as the support holds. Scratch the disk, empty the card ram battery, etc. You’re done.
dmention7@lemm.ee 1 year ago
So, the same as any other physical object you might purchase?
answersplease77@lemmy.world 1 year ago
You also just have to cope with whatever broken glitches there are in the game and find a way around them because aint no patch no hotfix no nothing is coming to save you
setsneedtofeed@lemmy.world 1 year ago
It actually wasn’t uncommon for post-launch patches to be applied to later printings of games. A lot of start screens will have the version number of the game on them somewhere, so that you can tell. This is something we forget about since digital copies of older games tend to default to being the latest printed version.
Misconduct@startrek.website 1 year ago
We forget about it because it wasn’t remotely helpful at the time if you got a bored version
samus12345@lemmy.world 1 year ago
And as a result, the vast majority of games didn’t have game-breaking bugs at launch, unlike today.
setsneedtofeed@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I think this view has heavy survivorship bias. There were many broken or heavily bugged games shipped.
FMT99@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Games were also limited to “See if you can jump over this wall! Now see if you can do it again in a different color!”
deathbird@mander.xyz 1 year ago
Actually true. The number of (S)NES games with game-breaking bugs was near-zero. Probably because they couldn’t just patch them later.
TheKingBee@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Tell me you never bought ultima 3 without telling me you bought ultima 3…
MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz 1 year ago
In the early days, cartridges were kinda like swapping out the RAM/SSD each time, pre-loaded with a game. Wasteful and expensive, even back then, but it was the best way to do it for the time.
There was a short while there where DVDs and and CDs had a perfect balance between storage and read speed, where you could keep the game files on optical media while still accessing it fast enough to have reasonable load times. BluRay and hdDVD increased the capacity, but not the read speed enough to match.
We could go back to games coming on flash media, which switch does still do, but switch games don’t have 3d models and textures at the fidelity levels of other modern platforms.
With current technology, delivering digital media on a storage medium that has the performance to actually play from it, is kinda like gift cards. Like yeah, it’d be nice, but I’d rather just have the NVME storage drive/money so I can use it for whatever I want.
Maybe there will be another ultra cheap read-only storage medium one day, but right now, it’s not a thing.
dan@upvote.au 1 year ago
Interestingly, the performance aspect is one of the reasons some phone manufactures quote for removing the SD card slot. The gap between the performance of onboard storage and SD cards keeps growing, so people that add an SD card to their Android phone and store all their apps on it have a bad experience because the software isn’t really designed with such slow storage in mind any more.
Maybe SD Express will help? There’s still some issues with it and it’s still expensive, but in theory it should be able to support 800+ MB/s read speeds. Not as fast as an NVMe drive of course, but faster than a SATA SSD.
Maybe the little storage cards from the Xbox Series X need to become a thing that’s more widely used. I’d guess they’re just M.2 2230 NVMe drives inside. Would be an interesting distribution mechanism for games (like a modern cartridge format) but they’re just too expensive for that at the moment.
MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz 1 year ago
Like, sure, if I could buy a storage drive that just comes with a console game I want already on it, that could be cool.
But really, I’d rather have a plain drive than a drive that can only store that one game.
lunarul@lemmy.world 1 year ago
there where DVDs and and CDs had a perfect balance between storage and read speed
90% of the games didn’t need that much storage. As someone growing up in a country with no copyright laws at the time, I was used to 100-200 games on a single CD. Then my dad got an official copy of MK Trilogy and I remember thinking how wasteful it was to use an entire CD for one game (you could physically see on the surface of the CD how much data was recorded on it, and it was mostly unused space).
Then there was the rare game that used not only the entire storage, but needed multiple CDs for the whole thing (e.g. Phantasmagoria).
We could go back to games coming on flash media, which switch does still do
Switch games get online updates too though. They’re not much different from other platform games in that regard.
The overall issue being discussed is not physical media vs downloading games. It’s the fact that the games you get are not a final playable version, but still need additional downloads to make them playable (zero-day patches are a norm these days).
randomaside@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 year ago
I want this so much. I dream about making cartridges that are glorified PCIE NVME caddys and the slot on your console being essentially a PCIEx4 slot.
Maybe we could port some games and wrap them up as flatkpaks.
I’m just spit balling but it could work.
MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz 1 year ago
Why would you want that? Do you like getting gift cards instead of the money?
There’s a reason storage media gets cheaper per byte as you go up in capacity, because 30 small drives with their own PCBs and controllers and ram-caches, isn’t better.
At most, I could get behind taking your memory card with you to a games store, and have them copy game files onto it from a local archive drive.
But who TF looks at all the BlyRay boxes in the games section and thinks "these should all have a entire SSD in them. At least optical media only distributes the actual storage component, all read/write components are in the drive.
Jolteon@lemmy.zip 1 year ago
Yeah, but when we did things like that we actually had to finish games before we sold them.
Klear@lemmy.world 1 year ago
As long as there wasn’t a gamebreaking bug with no way of fixing it.
PlantDadManGuy@lemmy.world 1 year ago
How do I sell my Steam library? 🥲
mods_are_assholes@lemmy.world 1 year ago
There are websites where you can, but you get a terrible return.
I don’t really want to support them but google will point you in the right direction if you are in need.
Huschke@lemmy.world 1 year ago
All I remember is having to go to the store, walk a around the store and hope they still have it, go to the counter and pay for it and then having to go all the way back home to play it.
Now you click a button, make yourself a sandwich and the game is ready to go.
mods_are_assholes@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I have to admit, half the reason I stopped pirating was that Steam made it so easy to just click and play.
mr_pip@discuss.tchncs.de 1 year ago
But you get obese if you make yourself a sandwich every time the game crashes, because only buggy messes get released nowadays…
Huschke@lemmy.world 1 year ago
That’s why you wait half a year and get the game for half the price without major bugs.
summerof69@lemm.ee 1 year ago
If you care about your health, don’t buy overpriced bugged crap!
samus12345@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Yet I still go out of my way to get physical (especially for new games) because I want that trade-in credit when I’m done with it.
Jakeroxs@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
I sure loved having games release in several separate version with different bugs depending on which lot of discs/cartridge you got.
captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
People paid money for the North American release of Lufia 2.
merthyr1831@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I mean you DID get updates, just hidden in different print runs/regional releases of games.
Its why speedrunners prefer a lot of japanese releases of earlier titles; Because back when Japan was the center of videogame culture, they’d get the first release of most games which often meant the buggiest version.
gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
Bro do you remember what load times were like back then?
The_Picard_Maneuver@lemmy.world 1 year ago
My mind personally goes back to cartridges here. But yeah, load times on early disc games were atrocious.
grue@lemmy.world 1 year ago
LOL, what load times? On old consoles, you hit the power switch and you’re instantly at the title screen.
Captain_Baka@feddit.de 1 year ago
Well yes, of course Pepperridge Farm remembers this.
LemmyKnowsBest@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Chocolate cookies & goldfish crackers & breads & rolls & pastries. Pepperidge Farm.
normalexit@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I miss being able to play a game without paging through 50 pages of legalese and having to accept their agreements.
Anticorp@lemmy.world 1 year ago
For the purposes of this contract “you” means you. “Purchase” means rent. “Buy” means we take your money without guarantees of any sort. “Own” means we own you.
someguy7734206@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
You kind of always had to. At least on PC.
normalexit@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I’m from the before times of DOS and early windows gaming. There was a little legal disclaimer sometimes, but you usually just got dumped into the game.
Psychodelic@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I love games that get updated and change as the years go by! I think it’s one of the most incredible things I’ve seen in gaming
ICastFist@programming.dev 1 year ago
Except when the game sucked, then it was a waste of time
thanks_shakey_snake@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
Switch games still use physical cartriges (…SD cards) and it’s pretty rad tbh.
bappity@lemmy.world 1 year ago
games in the future are just gonna be zettabyte zip bombs
AceFuzzLord@lemm.ee 1 year ago
For consoles, yeah that was great. The problem was when you had to download a game on PC either from disc or maybe you used a service like shockwave to get your games. Then the installation felt like it took forever as a kid.
swayevenly@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Try using GOG on PC.
dutchkimble@lemy.lol 1 year ago
Updates, yes but almost every game did need to be installed though
Resonosity@lemmy.world 1 year ago
The only games I tend to play these days are the ones that I don’t have to update before playing. Such a nuisance to be always online.
loudWaterEnjoyer@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 year ago
Yes I loved not being able to save my progress
Risk@feddit.uk 1 year ago
How were the graphics back then?
xor@infosec.pub 1 year ago
remember when someone patented the concept of having mini-games while it’s loading so almost no games have it?
also awesome…ipkpjersi@lemmy.ml 1 year ago
I remember when games didn’t need updates, they just worked, or the bugs they had were cool. Though I guess it makes sense that since games are more complex and larger now, they end up having more bugs and need more updates.
Pantherina@feddit.de 1 year ago
Uhm let me just to an rpm-ostree update first
Noodle07@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Anyone played the game “loki” straight from the box? Unplayable lmao
Zip2@feddit.uk 1 year ago
Ah yes, I remember bugs with no way of getting them fixed.
dan@upvote.au 1 year ago
There were fewer game breaking bugs though, since the developers knew they couldn’t be patched after release.
PunnyName@lemmy.world 1 year 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.
KISSmyOS@feddit.de 1 year ago
For PC atleast, you could buy a magazine that came with a floppy disk containing patches.
mellowheat@suppo.fi 1 year ago
There were some infamous cases though, even in games that ended up being fucking brilliant. Like Master of Magic.
tiramichu@lemm.ee 1 year ago
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.
PunnyName@lemmy.world 1 year ago
QA teams then were probably paid better than they are now.
samus12345@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Nowadays you can finally play the old games with the bugs fixed, if they were popular enough.