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.
I noticed 20+ guys reminiscing on games they played as kids. Nostalgia starts soon nowadays.
Sensible soccer is better than any modern football game. Fight me!
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??
That took me right back to picking up an A5 box of Goblins 2 at a radio rally and reading the booklet all the way home.
Vivid af
I really miss the old days — now we even need to pay to progress in games. Mobile game devs are just craving money
I have been gaming for decades, I haven’t paid to progress since Street Fighter II in arcade! what the fuck are you playing?
Staring at my phone, wishing I had something to read on the ride home
If you really like the nostalgia of old instruction booklets, or buying a game outside your spoken language, try Tunic. Fantastic game
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
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.
Ahhhh the little sleeves in the crystal cases that you would read excitedly on the way home.
An indie dev could make a ton releasing a game with a guidebook if a retro gaming YouTuber caught wind of it.
I’m surprised nobody has mentioned one of the most amazing things of pre-internet games: No wikis or video tutorials.
Sure there were some magazines if you were lucky and they might offer some hints or maps that could help but that’s nothing compared to the full playthroughs you can find hours after a new game releases today. You might think that made the games harder and more frustrating and you’ld be right. You could struggle for weeks to get past a single level.
But that also meant that every victory you had was your own. That was a feeling that is very hard to obtain today without a lot of self discipline.
Game design is better today than it’s ever been. For most of us I think it’s just nostalgia for our childhoods and for living in simpler times that makes us think otherwise.
I mean have you ever gone back and played a classic game that you didn’t grow up with? It’s rough. I’ve plumbed the depths of the NES virtual console and found that all the best games just happen to be the ones I’ve already played. That’s probably not a coincidence.
Even when the game is genuinely great, there’s still a mountain of bullshit and bad game design to get through, which is just unnecessary today.
With that said, everyone in this comment section needs to check out UFO 50. It’s a collection of 50 “retro” games by a group of indie games designers, and it’s absolutely brilliant.
It’s a loving recreation of playing games how they used to be played, except it’s cleverly laced with subtle, modern design features that make the retro goodness so much better. It’s like combing through old ROMs trying to find a diamond in the rough, except there’s more diamond than rough.
Speaking of Easter eggs, UFO 50 also has a hidden meta-narrative buried deep in the collection, detailing the dark history of the fictional company that made them.
Graphics are better than ever, but design itself has been moving at a glacial pace for decades.
Yeah I don’t have any idea what you’re referring to. There are still a huge amount of new and innovative games every year. It’s possible you’re just not playing them.
I’ve actually begun a quest to go back and finish all the games I didn’t play / didn’t finish from the past. NES, SNES, N64, and PSX. To my surprise, I’m actually enjoying some of these games much more than I did as a kid.
The gameplay is quite simple but it’s really well executed. There are a lot of games that just try to do one or two interesting things and then explore how far they can go with that. Nowadays, games seem to take more of a “kitchen sink” approach which tends toward some features being much better developed than others, and first-order-optimal strategies abound.
Sure, there are also plenty of retro-inspired games (like UFO 50), but I view those as a return to the design principles of old, rather than a refutation of them.
That’s fair. There were good things about being able to design games at that scale. One of the reasons UFO 50 works so well is because the number of games means that each game could be its own discrete thing. They could include small, arcade-style games like Ninpek and Magic Garden, that focus on a core concept instead of trying to add value.
But I also think the refutation in UFO 50 is more like a silent correction.
Barbuta starts with an immediate moment of unfairness as a joke, and then it provides a game that’s much more fair than the games it’s inspired by. It simulates the jank but doesn’t expect you to put up with it for the whole game.
Ninpek is another example. Can you imagine getting through that game with just three lives? That’s how it would have been designed in the 1980s, and that’s the game they present to you at first. But as you get better at playing the game, it reveals that you’re actually going to get a lot more lives than that. In a brilliant bit of sleight of hand, those two things happen at the same time, making it feel like you’re just mastering a difficult game.
Porgy is the same way, but more directly. It kicks you ass in the first thirty seconds, then immediately backs off the difficulty. That first impression makes it feel like it’s more punishing than it actually is.
Most of the collection is like this to some extent, and I think that’s for the best.
There definitely are seriously janky and just plain bad games for all systems in the past. The difference is that there is a much higher proportion of good games from that era due to the smaller number of games overall.
There were 675 games released for the NES in North America during its lifespan. If you take the top 100 games you’d find that most are good games worth revisiting and many are great games considered widely to be classics.
On the other hand, well over 10,000 games are released on Steam every year since 2021. How many of those have you even heard of, let alone could you say are worth playing?
Sure, it’s not fair at all to blame the developers of great games coming out today for all of the slop and endless clones they have nothing to do with. But discovery is a huge problem now and it’s only getting worse!
For context, the NES library was actively curated by Nintendo, that’s what their “seal of quality” was about. There were a few bootlegs, but unless you had a niche for that bootleg (see that Bible game) I suspect the complexity and cost of developing for the NES heavily discouraged bootlegs.
I think we gain more than we lose by the lower barrier to game development and publishing, quality indie games can get much more traction (unfortunately many do get buried in the slop) and games with niche marginalized audiences are more able to exist and find that audience now. YouTubers have been a big source of finding indie games for me, and sometimes recommendations from people on social media. I guess I have the opposite problem - I’ve got so much stuff on my wishlist and owned game backlog that I want to play that I’d probably have to spend the next decade of my life just playing games to get through them all.
None of what I’m saying should be taken as an argument that game developers should give up or something like that. The situation is much better now than it was. Heck, a lot of NES game developers had to design their sprites on graph paper and input them into the game’s ROM file by hand, by typing in the raw numbers in hexadecimal! Clearly we now have a lot better ways of doing graphics than that!
I just want to push back against the general notion that “old games are outdated/obsolete/etc” or that new games are always better than old games by virtue of having more features, flashier graphics, better sound etc. There’s tradeoffs with everything and I think the kitchen sink approach to game design isn’t obviously correct.
We went through the same historical trends with painting, music, and movies. Now if you look at more recent trends in classical music, there’s a lot of focus on minimalism, compared to the opulence of the baroque and classical periods.
The bad games aren’t pushing out the good games. More games means more good games.
Even if we’re judging proportionally, you can’t count games that no one is playing. If I give my toddler a harmonica, does that make music worse? Only if I force you to listen to it.
That top 100 list kind of proves my point, because a lot of those games are excruciating to play nowadays. I loved Final Fantasy 1 when that was the only RPG I owned, but it would be unplayable by today’s standards. Because today’s standards are much, much higher.
In terms of games that are worth revisiting because of their historical or artistic significance? There are plenty in that list. But in terms of games that would be good by today’s standards? I don’t think 1/3 of it makes the cut.
I disagree. I’d much rather play FF1 than play the latest FF game. Modern Final Fantasy games are way too easy for my taste. They’re more like movies with a load of very soft mechanics, with all the sharp edges sanded off.
That’s really common across the board. I know a lot of people love modern Soulslike games but I much prefer the fast, crunchy combat of a game like Zelda II over the smooth, floaty, anticipation-based controls of Dark Souls.
There’s a lot of other comparisons like this. The original Metroid is very rough, lonely, and lacks an automap which makes it easy to get lost. Later games in the series surround you with helpers that eliminate all sense of isolation and bombard you with hints and automaps that make it impossible to lose your way.
Lots of modern players would call these systems “objectively better” and I won’t contradict their preference, I only deny the objectivity of it. As I see it, many of these improvements are actually tradeoffs. Many modern players, for example, hate getting lost. Well I like getting lost and a lot of modern games simply won’t let me! I like getting stuck in games and having to do serious problem solving to figure it out. Many modern gamers get impatient and give up on games like that. They might even call it excruciating, as you do.
Anyway, none of this is intended to convince you to be a retro gamer like me. You love what you love and hate what you hate. I just hope it’s a little bit clearer why folks like me have all this nostalgia, as depicted in the comic.
I agree with your critiques of modern games, especially the part about floaty anticipation-based gameplay.
But I gotta disagree about Final Fantasy 1 being harder. It’s not hard; it’s just tedious. There’s no beating it without grinding, and the grind is the same thing, over and over, with no variance. If tedium is your thing, great, but the biggest barrier to beating Final Fantasy 1 is boredom, and I don’t think that’s good game design in any decade.
So just to be clear, I’m not talking about difficulty in a fair game. Bubble Bobble is possibly my favorite NES game of all time, because even though it’s stupid hard, the controls are so tight that every death is your own fault.
I also have nostalgia for these old games. I’d just never try to argue that they were better from a design standpoint. The industry has come a long way. Standards are higher, and the artform has grown.
Believe it or not, some people like grinding! There’s an element to grinding-based RPGs that you don’t really see anywhere else: the ability to tune the game’s difficulty level on the fly, through your own gameplay. If you’re stuck on a section of the game, you can decide to grind a lot until it’s trivially easy to pass, or you can grind less and try to push your luck.
FF1 is really nice for this because you can’t just save your game anywhere, you need to stay at an Inn in town or spend a tent/cabin/house to save on the world map. You can’t save your game in dungeons at all. This means your expedition into a dungeon must be completed in one go.
Since grinding is the way you make your party stronger (and hence the dungeon easier), you can decide how much grinding you want to do before taking a shot at the dungeon. If you mess up and the party gets wiped, well that’s too bad! This really does give the game a push your luck mechanic and allows you to try to conquer the dungeon with a minimal amount of grinding.
Later games in general tend to go out of their way to avoid this at all costs, with the exception of Soulslike games that I mentioned earlier (as well as Roguelikes, which I happen to be a huge fan of), because game developers are often quite afraid of players losing progress (and players have become accustomed to this).
Metroid is also like this. You can spend a lot of time grinding your energy back to full or you can push your luck and try to explore without getting hit. It’s a challenge that later games in the series heavily mitigated by providing abundant recharging stations.
Definitely. Like I think a lot of people forget that the older generation of games, like the 8bit era especially, were arcade ports that were designed to eat quarters and not really modified much when moved to console. That was the main reason it was like, “here’s your three lives to get through the next 15 levels and when you’re out go fuck yourself start over loool”.
I was an 80s kid and have tons of nostalgia for the time and the games even but to put it simply, there were not many games back then that you were getting more than a couple hours out of unless you were getting your shit pushed in constantly due to the artificial difficulty designed to suck up those quarters at the arcade. Even games like the original Legend of Zelda, if you know what to do ahead of time youre only talking a few hours of actual content. For platformers it was far less…Ninja Gaiden, a brutally difficult game…turn on invincibility and you can speed run that shit in like what, 20 minutes?
And not to toot my own horn but there would be games I paid $50 for that Id have done in an afternoon and then what? Nothing, play again I guess. Which sometimes was worthwhile, other times not so much.
Even later the ethos was still there, just instead of the quarter stealing mechanic, it was the “dont let them finish it in a rental period” mechanic…they wanted people to buy, not rent.
But, I do definitely miss the simplicity. No fuckin achievement chasing bullshit, no fucking unlocks, no dlc…they couldnt as easily release 40% of a game and lock the remaining 60% behind season passes and shit.
And of course having the whole game be dependent on multi-player and an active community for it to worth a shit beyond the first 60 daya. How many full price AAA games out there that lasted a few mere months befoee the server was a ghost town and nothing to do in the single player game.
Cest la vie lol
No updates, that’s actually a plus in my mind these days, considering how many games they’ve taken down. You can’t take a disk from someone’s game collection, but you can certainly remove it when it’s been purchased digitally.
No updates or mtx is a big upside tbh
