Remember having to stop mid install to put the next disc in?
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. 😅
Still the only RTS I ever actually liked. Man that menu was mind blowing at the time.
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Shit I installed Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 with 10 DVDs and let me tell you… that’s something I don’t want back.
Like if you want to provide a physical offline version 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. Like ok I get it the DVDs was for people to be able to do an offline install, ok… But don’t force me to use them if I have access to internet… Which actually you needed to setup the account and activate the CD key online anyway, the DVD only helped reduce your bandwidth usage.
Who came up with this man??? Plus you need the first disk inserted to play like the old times… you have the damn CD key and Microsoft account to validate wtf… I swear… It was like travelling back in time but with extra hassles of today world on top.
Windows 95 had a version that came on 30 floppy disks.
NOT fun.
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
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.
We forget about it because it wasn’t remotely helpful at the time if you got a borked version
And as a result, the vast majority of games didn’t have game-breaking bugs at launch, unlike today.
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!”
I think this view has heavy survivorship bias. There were many broken or heavily bugged games shipped.
Survivorship bias doesn’t make sense in this context, because I actually lived then and played hundreds of games. Plenty were buggy as hell (notice I said game-breaking bugs specifically), but none were unplayable (well, not because of bugs anyway). I hear Battletoads on NES was uncompleteable 2 player, but my brother and I never made it to level 11 together to find out.
Actually true. The number of (S)NES games with game-breaking bugs was near-zero. Probably because they couldn’t just patch them later.
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Anyone played the game “loki” straight from the box? Unplayable lmao
How were the graphics back then?
They needed to be tightened up on level 3.
Cutting edge
People still enjoyed the graphics because they were better than previous generations.
Some Nintendo 64 games towards the end of its life had some really nice lighting effects that people didn’t even think were possible.
Of course. :) I was meme’ing too.
Textures and audio were always the largest part of a game. And the installation process of a game was mostly decompressing those. What changed in recent years is not as much an increase of the overall size of these assets, but less incentive to compress them in the first place. Most buyers have enough bandwidth to be able to download uncompressed assets and start playing right away instead of having to wait for a long installation step after the download is finished.
I know :) was just poking fun back.
Graphics? That would have been a luxury.
Some devs did amazing with what they had to work with
Crash and Spyro on the PSX hold up extremely well, since they go all out on cartoony looks. Crash 3’s death animations are still very entertaining
Bro do you remember what load times were like back then?
My mind personally goes back to cartridges here. But yeah, load times on early disc games were atrocious.
Ah yes
I don’t know what this gif is about; blowing in cartridges was an NES thing, not an SNES thing.
Edit: you can downvote me, but I’ve owned a SNES since 1991 and have literally never felt the need to blow in a cartridge.
Edit 2: By the way, blowing into the cartridge never actually worked to begin with, even on the NES. It only seemed like a thing because of the North American NES’s shitty push-in-then-down cartridge loading mechanism. Not only did top-loading consoles like the SNES and Sega Genesis not have the cartridge connection problems that led people to think they needed to blow on it, the top-loading revised NES didn’t either!
Blowing on a cartridge was a cartridge thing. The idea being to blow dust off the connector pins, the console itself is irrelevant.
Of all the consoles I ever owned or played at other people’s houses, the NES was the only one anybody ever blew on.
My lived experience trumps anything you can try to claim. You lose; good day sir!
in all your 12 years
I never owned a NES, but had a SNES and my brother also borrowed his friend’s Mega Drive (Genesis for those of you in the US) from time-to-time. All of us would blow the connectors on the cartridges, regardless of console. If anything went wrong with a game, the first step to troubleshoot was to take the cartridge out and give it a good blow.
It was never about how the console actually worked, a five year-old isn’t going to logically think about that. It was all about a perceived performance increase by doing it.
I’m with you - I never had problems with my SNES games starting, whereas having to re-insert NES games was common. If other people had problems with SNES games, I never heard about it.
It was shocking when I learned many years later that blowing on the cartridge did nothing.
LOL, what load times? On old consoles, you hit the power switch and you’re instantly at the title screen.
Well yes, of course Pepperridge Farm remembers this.
Chocolate cookies & goldfish crackers & breads & rolls & pastries. Pepperidge Farm.
Switch games still use physical cartriges (…SD cards) and it’s pretty rad tbh.
SD Express should help with this once it’s more production-ready, as in theory it supports read speeds of 800MB/s. The highest-end ‘regular’ SD cards are around 230MB/s.
For systems that need faster speeds, I wonder if we’ll ever see cartridges with an M.2 2230 NVMe drive in them, I guess kinda similar to the storage cards for the Xbox Series. Maybe when the price comes down.
I mean… On PC you could grab a bunch of blue rays, burn game files onto them, and then mount them as storage drives whenever you wanted to run a particular game.
But why would you do that? Why would you prefer your game library be stored that way?
Even with my PS Vita, the second that hacked firmware enabled using an SD card adaptor and dumping all my games, and just having them all installed all the time, that’s what I did.
I was livid that the cost of digital copies and the memory cards was artificially blown up so badly, that the most “economical” way to bring a bunch of games with me was 30 storage cards instead of one big one.
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There a dozens of us!
Really want Gravity Rush on PC. More people need to know about that fantastic game.
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I remember when games didn’t need updates, they just worked, or the bugs they had were cool (or annoying and required workarounds). 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 these days.
I prefer waking my console and pressing a button to play, no disc fumbling
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…
Red screen of death shows up telling me the disc is invalid
laughs in unlocked PS2 with HDD
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.
They mean a red screen of death you’d get when the CD was invalid, not a RRoD.
Never had this issue with a Nintendo 64 :P
I don’t think I ever had issues with the cartridges.
My copy of Beetle Adventure Racing on N64 went through the washing machine after it got picked up with my bedsheets. Left it in the sun for an hour afterwards and popped it back into the console and it kept working perfectly. I don’t know why any console devs ever decided that discs were better than cartridges; it’s just objectively untrue.
The issue was that you can hold far more data on a CD - 650MB on a CD vs 64MB on the largest N64 cartridges. The N64’s 3D hardware was far superior to the Playstation, so sometimes I wonder if having a larger storage medium could have resulted in even better games.
Take a look at what Kaze Emanuar is doing with SM64 if you’re curious what the N64 can do with modern software practices ;D
Yeah I’ve seen his videos - very impressive. He’s spent years working on it though (way more than most N64 devs that built commercially released games), and compiler optimizations that exist today didn’t exist back then.
I don’t think compiler optimizations matter much - supposedly the final build was compiled without optimizations, presumably by mistake, and the N64 has very specific hardware which compilers don’t know how to optimize for.
What we certainly do have are much more powerful machines and software in general, letting you test, analyze and profile code much more easily, as well as vast amounts of freely available information online - I can’t really imagine how they did it back then.
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.
Cartridge blow jobs
I sure loved having games release in several separate version with different bugs depending on which lot of discs/cartridge you got.
People paid money for the North American release of Lufia 2.
Except when the game sucked, then it was a waste of time
Uhm let me just to an rpm-ostree update first, see you in an hour
Yeah, but when we did things like that we actually had to finish games before we sold them.
How do I sell my Steam library? 🥲
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.
I had to sell my vinyl collection, full of limited editions, tons of colored vinyl extras, old rarities …
Since i had to sell them or starve, the shop that bought them off, really fucked me completely over.
I try not to think too much about it.
2 things i learned from this:
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To not collect stuff the way i did before anymore.
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There’s no higher crime, than making a mistake on your tax declaration, at least in Germany.
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As long as there wasn’t a gamebreaking bug with no way of fixing it.
Ah yes, I remember bugs with no way of getting them fixed.
Which was sometimes frustrating, but when they are funny and good bugs it’s amazing they can’t be patched out.
There’s a reason so many speedruns on older consoles use the Japanese cartridges, because those versions came out first and have exploitable glitches which the western release later fixed.
Bugs at that time were almost never totally game-breaking either, fortunately. That could be a nightmare recall for the publisher, and so the final builds were tested more intensively than games now.
QA teams then were probably paid better than they are now.
They were probably paid about the same, maybe less, just money went further back then.
There were fewer game breaking bugs though, since the developers knew they couldn’t be patched after release.
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For PC atleast, you could buy a magazine that came with a floppy disk containing patches.
Wow I completely forgot about this. Later on it was CDs with both patches and demos.
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.
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.
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).
These days, some games need a patch within the first week of release. Manufacturers have gotten lazier in terms of ensuring the game works properly, since they can just patch issues after release.
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.
I’m with you. I love old games. Here’s some (non-exhaustive) information on the NES version that I still play from time to time.
The first Final Fantasy had a bunch of bugs. Red mages were just as powerful as black and white because of an INT bug. You could walk through walls in certain places. The peninsula of power wasn’t supposed to happen. Spells that were supposed to help physical attributes in battle just didn’t. At least one spell meant to decrease enemy evasion increased it instead. Houses saved before giving you back spell slots. There was an invisible woman in the first castle. Running was supposed to be based on luck and level but was based on luck and the level of whoever was two slots below you. Status effects weren’t properly protected against by a bunch of items.
A lot of this was fixed in re-releases.
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.
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.
Nowadays you can finally play the old games with the bugs fixed, if they were popular enough.
Updates, yes but almost every game did need to be installed though
Yeah, installed by sticking it into the console and then starting it…unless you’re talking about PC games.
I was, but perhaps this was a console discussion judging by the downvotes
Clarifying that might’ve saved you.
Then again, it’s the internet, no one does nuance on the internet.
Indeed, but then these points are like the points of Whose Line Is It Anyway
