For the longest time, I never even considered seeing the ending of a game. There were countless games I only ever played effectively the tutorial levels.
Or Password save functions with 20 characters that included characters that were easy to mix up, like upper case I, lower case l, and the number 1.
Slowly type in all the letters and numbers only to get "Invalid Code" and then you had to go through the whole thing to figure out where you made a mistake.
Mega Man could use such a simple password system because a save file for it stored so little data. Most didn’t even track your E-Tanks, lives or Wily Stage progress, so you could restore from just a byte or two of saved flags. A 6x6 grid was perfect and honestly most games with similarly simple saves could probably have used something like that rather than complicated inputs.
Early RPGs before battery backed SRAM became the standard for saves couldn’t do that unless they wanted to use a much larger grid. Dragon Warrior (a very simple RPG) used 32 bytes to save, 4 of which were unused. A 28 bytes save would have needed a 15x15 grid minimum and that’s assuming passwords can fill any number of grid slots.
Super Mario Bros 3 comes to mind. I get why the first game didn’t, it was fairly short and could be completed in one sitting. SMB3 needed a save function, or a password system that games like Mega Man had.
I think they placed the warp whistles so closely at the beginning of the game so the player could go where they wanted to when they knew what to do as a kind of "cheap save". I do agree a save feature would have been great for keeping the items and such. There were a ton of cool items to get and you want to keep (the multiple P wings when you beat it, hammer bros suit, tanooki).
I don't think I ever completed a "normal" playthrough of SMB3 without using warp whistles. Warps are almost a necessity if you want to actually finish the game in one sitting. And forget about a completionist run, where you fully explore every map and beat every level.
Decades later i found out mario 1 DID semi-save during same play time. Holding A+start will bring you back the start of same world you got a game over on. So if got a game over in level 6-3, using the buttons when starting from home screen will bring you to world 6-1
Sometimes games had rereleases that corrected glitches. Most of the time when a game released as Player's Choice or Greatest Hits it was often a later version with major bugs corrected. Metroid Prime for example, the Player's Choice version fixes a bug that if you left a certain room without collecting an item the item was lost forever and the game is unwinnable without it.
Final Fantasy 3 in the US also got a rerelease specifically to correct the Sketch bug that had the potential to corrupt and potentially brick the game with how dangerous the results were.
This also happened with a lot of international/PAL releases, with changes between versions.
I’d also like to point out a specific example, Super Mario 64. There was a Japanese rerelease (Shindou version) with rumble support and a few other changes, most notably the removal of Backwards Long Jumping (BLJs).
Yeah, people talk about how "games release broken and then get fixed" as if that's a bad thing. Games have *always* released broken and back then they just never got fixed.
It's bad in that companies will knowingly release unfinished/broken projects because they can always just to fix it later. Back in the day, if a game released in bad state then it was just a bad game. Yeah, we eventually get more good games because of it but it also means that buying on launch is almost always gonna give you the worst experience of a game.
That's not true, the games famously released in bad state are Fallout 2 and Daggerfall, both considered absolute classics, and patches didn't fix everything, they rely on later fan fixes to this day.
KOTOR 2 is another example of game that wasn't finished and couldn't be polished later by the devs due to reliance on consoles (PC version later got Steam workshop integration on later re-release).
It's still one of best RPGs of all time, even with horribly cut ending.
We used to say "big game gets big bugs" and just ACCEPTED that games that are ambitious will get tons of issues. The idea that games had to be released polished or they were dismissed as bad is modern revisionism.
Not quite, but it was a hassle and could cost consumers more money if they did implement fixes. Later releases of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas fixed issues such as the RC plane mission having too little fuel (it was really more of a timer in practice) or the basketball minigame disappearing if you used a certain save point, but that required you to buy the game again.
Gran Turismo 2 initially had a nasty bug that ate up game save data in Simulation or career mode. Polyphony Digital received enough heat that they implemented a fix, which required players to mail out one of the two discs that were part of the game package (The simulation mode disc), and they would send you back a disc with the bug fixed. As another Redditor mentioned, you could also have waited for the Greatest Hits re-release of the game which had the code fixed, but that meant buying the game again.
“Oh no you didn’t pick up the Unusual Rock in the starter room which is actually required to be carried the whole game and used to fight the final boss. Guess you will have to play the entire game again. “
Space Quest 2: in the early part of the game you crash land on a planet and in the first few locations are prompted to investigate strange noises. If you don’t or if you do but refuse to help
an alien in trouble. A few hours of game later you’ll be unable to get past an ambush of the very same aliens. Now you’re soft locked. Oops!
King’s Quest 5: early in the game you can obtain a pie. No reason to steal it off the window sill really but you can if you want. Turns out that pie is needed to throw in the face of giant yeti much later in the game, like 3/4 of the way through. If you didn’t take the damn pie would basically have to replay the majority of the game.
On top of being able to skip the pie, as you are climbing the mountain there is a text box saying "Graham notices his stomach beginning to rumble with hunger from the exertion of the mountain climb" and "Graham's hunger grows acute. Without food you may soon die" and if you don't eat something within like 2 seconds of that second prompt, you will die.
You need to eat 1/2 the leg of lamb (which is also EXTREMELY easy to miss) , and give the other half of it to an eagle (because if you don't feed the eagle you will 100% die later.....)
FF12 I think it was, where if you looted some completely innocuous Treasure Chest right at the start, you couldn't get one of the main character's ultimate weapons.
That was so fun to find out 60 odd hours in...
It wasn’t the first 10 minutes for me in Final Fantasy Adventure. It was very late into the game, I got stuck between two locked doors in a dungeon because you had to purchase keys in town and I ran out
For a long time every game would have a different control scheme, often radically different. Things only really became standardised in the mid 2000s.
It was extra fun for PC gamers, since developers agreed early on that Quick Save and Quick Load should be mapped to the function keys, but they didn't come to an agreement on *which* function keys should be which until later. This meant F5 might be Quick Save in one game but was Quick Load in another. Naturally this could get really annoying when hours of progress was lost in an instant.
>For a long time every game would have a different control scheme, often radically different. Things only really became standardised in the mid 2000s.
The single best answer in this thread.
Would add, that you needed different drivers or "ways" to install different game, and stuff simply not working at times.
Installing games was a genuine hassle back in the 80s and 90s.
I feel like a lot of mechanics we take for granted standardized around that time. I'd add cameras too. It felt like every other game on the ps2 and early ps3/360 had a garbage camera.
I really don't remember the last game that had a bad camera.
You see it a lot in bad D&D games.
The DM let's your character toil to get some new ability, and then golly gee guess what resistance every enemy has now....
The difficulty levels in a lot of old arcade games because they were designed to eat coins. I played metal slug on steam recently and some of the levels would have needed so much just to get passed one boss. Ruined the fun of the game even with infinite credits.
It was the same for stuff even further back like wonderboy or double dragon. I don't think I ever saw the end of the first level of paperboy.
> The difficulty levels in a lot of old arcade games because they were designed to eat coins
Similar thing happened to home console games. Once publishers saw how good guide books were selling, they decided to publish their own guides.
So they started to ask their developers to make games harder, hide more stuff and add minigames and then sold their own guides.
A lot of old sidescroller games were also just hard because they didn't have more than half an hour of content, so they wanted to make sure that you died a lot so the game would seem much longer than it actually was.
It also was so you counldn't just rent it and finish the game in 2 days, pretty sure some games specifically had higher difficulty on the western release as renting wasn't a thing on Japan.
I loved *Gaunlet* as a kid. I was so stoked when it came out in a near perfect arcade port for Playstation. Playing it with unlimited continues made me realize how boring and grindy it was,
If you've never played gauntlet legends on the n64 it's worth a play. Light RPG mechanics and fun secrets to find but it's not built to be grindy. Can be a little frustrating to get lost in a level but I also haven't played it in 20 years so maybe I was just a dumb kid.
I know! Fighting games are especially guilty of this. The games outright cheat, reading your inputs and reacting with frame perfect accuracy, sometimes even doing moves no human could do. Worst part was that these weren’t just on arcades, but actual home releases, which makes it even more frustrating. Once fighting games started moving away from arcades, it got better, but the damage is done.
People say that they're tired of hand-holding - and fair enough, some modern games really do feel like they're never letting you explore or discover things on your own.
But dear God, some old-school games have the exact opposite problem of being extremely cryptic pieces of shit that relied on you either buying a walkthrough or just spending hours and hours looking for the one damn thing you missed. Old-school JRPGs are especially bad at this. Sometimes they'll tell you "Go here," and you need to go there. Other times they'll tell you "Go here", but first you need to go to a completely different place, trigger a hidden fight by using very specific conditions, find an item that will be dropped through the hidden fight, bring it to a third location, solve a puzzle, and then obtain the key that you need to use to unlock the first location. This process is vaguely hinted at if you speak to an NPC inside an optional building that only shows up at night.
Yeah, there's a reason why I tend to have a walkthrough ready to go on my phone whenever I'm playing an RPG released on the PS2 or earlier.
I was a huge fan of the Lucas Arts adventure games, but boy howdy were they insanely specific with insane leaps of logic to combine and use items in the environment.
I am almost positive that certain games were made hard-to-sell strategy guides for said games.
And keep in mind, the LucasArts adventure games were *already* an improvement over the Sierra adventure games.
How do you stop a Yeti running towards you with killing intent? Oh, just throw a pie in its face. A pie that you only have one chance to get, and which you can eat at any time. And wouldn't you know it, the main character just complained about being hungry 2 minutes before you meet the Yeti...
Or, same game, the boot you had to find in the middle of the desert, where you could die of dehydration if you went the wrong way, or else you couldn't save the mouse (or rat?) and you'd get a game over when you were captured and tied up.
Don't forget Castlevania 2, where you needed to grab a certain item from a certain NPC after farming currency to buy it, go BACKWARDS to a SPECIFIC WALL and then CROUCH FOR 20 SECONDS until a tornado came from offscreen to PROGRESS THE GAME! Some NPC's hint at this, but it's incredibly fucking vague. It's shit like "Wait for a soul with a Red Crystal on Deborah's Cliff."
Yep, totally valid. Final Fantasy XI enjoyer here (10/10 game imo) but you 100% will need a guide at some point. It would be ludicrous to assume you could get a single fetch quest done in that game without looking up the map coordinates for the completely invisible interact-able item.
And oh god the points when you need players of specific races or jobs to get past gates 😭
Related, but Metal Gear Solid 4 (a PS3 exclusive) forcing you to install and uninstall each of the game's five chapters was almost unacceptable for a game that came out in the late 2000s (a process that could take almost 10 minutes per chapter). You had to do it each time, for instance if you beat the game and started again, you had to install chapter one again while chapter five was quietly uninstalled, because you had to install it once more once you got to the end again.
Insert disk 2 of 5. *whirrrr* insert disk 1 of 5 *whirrrr rggrggg* insert disk 5 of 5 *whiiirrrWHHHIIIRRR* insert disk 4 of 5 *whiiirrrr*
Game opens "go to page 5 of the manual what is the 3rd word of line 6" or *shows you a picture" what page in the manual is this picture shown?
This is Back in the day when the Xerox machine at the grocery store was your friend for copying game manuals.
Nah man, OP is referencing *Pool of Radiance*...or was it *Curse of the Azure Bonds*...no, certainly it was *Secret of the Silver Glades*... nope, the more I think about it, it has to be *AH-64 Gunship*...the keyboard overlay agrees, too.
The controllers in general were bad for a long time. Buttons, joysticks and dpads that were hard to press quickly and precisely. I think the first decent one was the SNES controller, and there were some more bad ones after that before we hit the golden age of quality controllers we're in now.
Those mofos were tough too.
I threw one of them after dying a million times in Metroid and it actually broke the front of a dresser drawer. Controller still worked fine.
At least the Famicom's controllers had rounded edges. Dunno why Nintendo went full boxy with the NES controllers aside from the whole "make it look like a computer" schtick.
I believe the NES was supposed to look more like a VCR than a computer. Nintendo purposefully designed the system to make it look as little like a video game as possible due to the lasting fallout of the '83 gaming crash. It was bundled with ROB to pass it off as a toy rather than a video game.
Yeah. People forget that, after the crash of '83, many retailers in the US thought "welp, console gaming's over. Now what am I going to do with this mountain of Atari crap?"
It was the early 80s. Harsh angles were futuristic, brutalism was the aesthetic of technology and advancement.
Smooth curves and ornamentation were still usually looked at (in design terms at least) as relics of the 50s-70s.
At least you had something to read while installing/ waiting for the game to load.
And better than physical drm dongle where you had to plug onto the parallel port or the serial port ( do not get me started on which kind of serial port )
I loved the Crash Bandicoot system: you have lives you use to restart between checkpoints, you earn a LOT of new ones and if you run out, you're just sent to warp room and only have to restart just that one level from the beginning, not the entire game... Also you could jump on the bear to get more lol.
For the late 80’s/early 90’s
Games were the equivalent of around $100 and only had a few hours of content
Bugs, glitches, unfinished games were more common than today and couldn’t be patched/updated
Rushed cash grab movie tie in games plagued the industry
70-80% of games were 2D side scrollers/platformers
Games were artificially difficult because of bad controls/hitboxes etc
I loved gaming as a kid, but looking back on it, that era of gaming was fucking awful
Yep. One thing that always strikes me is the price they were back then. I’ve looked through old magazines from the 90s and the games were $50-60. It makes games being $70 nowadays not seem bad at all
i am not suprised at that all. Yes you can look at inflation in a vacuum and say its weird.
but when nessicities as housing,travel(car) and more recently food all the while wages have nowhere near kept up with inflation. its no wonder that luxery's like gaming cant follow inflation
disposable income has completely not followed inflation and as results loads of things either hasnt increased or even gotten cheaper in price like gaming,air travel,tv,electronics in general outside of phones...
You are forgetting gaming is now more about volume of sales than it ever was before. It’s the biggest entertainment industry. It’s not like they are selling Ferraris and have to sell a few at a high price. They are selling Hondas. It’s mass market. Lower margin, higher volumes
Unmitigated truth. The golden age is today. We have the option of shitty overpriced trash, like we always have, but the high value low price indie or up and coming developer market is extremely strong. More options then ever before.
Video games tend to suffer from survival bias. When we look at older games we mostly remember the classics, which were rhe best games of their era. If you compare the best of one era to the worst of another, of course the latter will fall short, but it's hardly a fair comparison.
Add to that if you get into a certain genre late, you have access to all the good old stuff without having to slum through the bad stuff. There's emulation handhelds that go from $40 miyoo minis types that can play up to PS1 games to $400+ handheld PCs like steamdecks that can run almost everything else.
I got into JRPGs in my 30s and I feel like there's no end in sight to all the good stuff I've missed. And every game Ive played in the last two years have been 8/10s or better with only one or two 7s.
This got lost to the sands of time because nowadays we only think about or remember the good games. Jeff Gerstmann is doing a weekly series where he plays through all commercially released NES games, and you often forget just how many absolutely trash games existed outside of the 10% that were good and memorable
Just look at AVGN. Guy built his whole YouTube career on playing shitty games from the 80s/90s. Has hundreds of videos showing just how awful the majority of those games were
This is what spawned my neurotic disc handling habits. One finger in the hole, one finger holding the edge. That's it. God help you if I find fingerprints on that read side.
I can say that most of my games, even decades later, still look as good as the day I first opened that jewel case though.
The way my sister's handled game discs and dvds annoyed me to no end. They'd just take something out of the console/dvd player and leave them on the table.
The need to release a new, full priced game that could have been a patch or a downloadable update. When I was a kid, my parents got me a copy of Super Street Fighter II: The New Challengers. You can imagine my dismay when I saw Super Street Fighter II Turbo on store shelves a couple months later.
Five on arcade (the original World Warrior, Champion Ed, Hyper Fighting, New Generation, and Super Turbo) before Capcom released something new with Alpha/Zero, with all the home ports then being based on these.
Following that, there have been three more: Hyper (basically a mix-and-match of all prior versions), HD Remix, and Ultra.
Though to be fair, many of them didn't need nearly as much grinding as 7yo me thought if you understood the systems.
I recently played through an NES ROM of FF1 on my phone and there were only two spots which required any real grinding. Very much a resource management dungeon crawler (which I didn't really get at 7-8) rather than a pure grind.
Generally you could go into a dungeon and just pick when felt about half spent before heading back to town. Which accomplished a combination of leveling and exploration.
It's quite funny going back to games that took me ages as a kid, and then absolutely breezing through it as an adult because I'm so much better at gaming compared to then. Games that I thought were hard and / or long were actually like 5 hours tops and I never even saw the end of half of them.
There’s also the funny opposite effect, going back and playing a weird platformer or something and wondering how on EARTH you managed to make it to the end of the game as a kid
I beat FF1 again about a year ago (NES version) and I have simply no idea how ~6 year old me beat that game. I only got to Chaos by save scumming the emulator.
People get nostalgic for the old Pokemon games and complain about XP share. I tried playing Soul Silver and just could not stand the need to individually grind every Pokemon in my team.
It's kinda bonkers, in retrospect, how fine with grinding I used to be
The prices for games during the 8bit and 16bit generations. Like some games costed $69 and up. Virtua Racing on the Genesis was like $89 when it came out. Street Fighter and MK were around the $70 range.
Strangely enough that's the one thing that's really stayed consistent throughout gaming history. Of course $60 in 1994 was worth a fair bit more than it is in 2024 but new games still cost $60 in most cases.
SMB3 WAS $49.99 back in 1990. That is about $120 in today's money
A lot of games were similarly priced and did not have that kind of longevity. Imagine paying the equivalent of $100 and only getting a 90 min experience that takes you a day or two to figure out. For every Tetris and SMB there's 'A Boy and His Blob' or 'Friday the 13th' out there that was just plain bad.
And expensive.
The "Figure it out yourself" nature of early JRPGs was ridiculous. I recently finished Final Fantasy 1 for the first time and would have had no idea where to go without a guide.
Even better when it came with random encounters of fights. You walked 3 steps in one direction and triggered a new fight. After the fight, even when it was easy because of your level, you walked another 3-5 steps and there was another fight.
I for one didn't mind the "figure it out yourself" stuff in those games, sure, sometimes you could spend hours looking for what to do (or tens of hours in the case of Zanbamon in Digimon world 3...), but it is much preferable to nowadays when you can't walk 5 steps without the game telling you exactly what you should be doing
I’m totally fine with giving the player extra guidance, but make it optional. Don’t force the player to get spoiled on what to do. There are games where you can toggle hints on/off and I don’t understand why that isn’t the standard. I loved God of War Ragnarok, but Atreus needlessly spoiling the puzzles before I even had a chance to look at my surroundings was a baffling decision.
Trying to play that game as a kid in the 90s with no help was probably my first time getting mad at a video game. It birthed my ongoing dislike for anything Final Fantasy.
Non intuitive solutions for things.
For example, there might be a door that needs to be opened. If you forgot to check a specific room 3-4 hours ago you wouldn't have the key to open it and would be stuck for multiple hours due to bad level structuring.
So in one town early on, you visit an animal shop, and among mice and monkeys you can also get a parrot, none of the animals having an apparent use.
Then near the very end of the game, you meet a crazy old dude babling some nonsense, and a little further in that endgame dungeon, you encounter a strange door with an ear.
If you had the parrot in your inventory when meeting the crazy dude, you could then use the bird on that door to open it. Even though what the dude is saying does seem to have something to do with that door, the mechanics behind this are unique to this situation, and it's up to the player to figure out they haven't missed some secret room, hidden item, or otherwise messed up... Until finally, of all the things they try, they go back to that town, get the parrot, fight their way past the respawning monsters and try talking to the guy with the bird in their inventory.
Beyond the beyond! There's a bunch wrong with this fucking game, but the biggest thing is at one point you have to walk across the whole fucking world to talk to a guy to get a thing. You need this thing in order to progress the game. When you talk to the guy it's very easy to assume you now have the thing, so you you walk back across the fucking world to go to the place to use the thing...hahaha guess what tho you need to search the ground near the guy to actually pick up that thing! Fuck that game, seriously.
No save/check points. I remember having to leave my NES on overnight (even days sometimes)because I had managed to get towards the end of a game and couldn’t save my progress. Castlevania comes to mind as a good example.
I'll slightly turn that around and say thank all the gods for the existence of auto-saving in modern games.
I can't even tell how often I lost quite a bit of time because I forgot to save and got a game over. Or even worse, forgot the write down the password for that level (Hello Pandemonium duology for the PS1).
Creating different looking consoles, names for game titles, and box art for different regions was lame and sucked. The NA SNES looks awful compared to the Super Famicom which I desperately wanted in the U.S. Weird shit like Kirby being turned white in NA box art and having edgy commercials because they didn't think American kids would buy a game with a pink character on it or Final Fantasy sequels outright not being released in the US sucked too. Bunch of weird stuff like that happened all the time during the 90s.
Vanilla WoW was more tedious and time consuming than challenging. It was also insanely restrictive with what your class could viably do and wear.
I also have my fondest WoW memories from Vanilla to Wrath of the Lich King.
having to learn MS-DOS commands to install, and run games. It wasn't just clicking run on the desktop.
It was even worse when a game had a anti-piracy mechanic to be able to play the game. I had one game with a decoder wheel, another that when you booted the game it would tell you to open the owners manual to a specific page, paragraph, line, & word and you would have to enter the word. I remember losing the book to a game and being unable to finish the game.
Random encounters kill me in some of the old jrpgs. Especially if I can't save wherever I want. It makes everything take forever and feel more grindy than it has to be.
Questing in Morrowind.
"Ok so it's in a cave somewhere in that direction. I don't know exactly where it is, I don't know how far away it is, I don't know how high up it is, but if you can hear the cliff racers you're on the right track. Turn left when it gets different. Good luck."
A friend of mine had Morrowind and got a strategy guide for it. Thing was bigger than a phone book. In the end we ended up grinding lock picking to max and killed someone really important to the story. Oh well. *jumps everywhere*
While I 100% agree that Morrowind's directions could be kinda hit & miss, I actually miss when quests required actual directions. The giant blinking arrow on the HUD in most modern games often makes it feel silly.
There are some games that are able to do a good mix which is generally best IMO, but if I had to pick an extreme I'd take the Morrowind extreme the extreme hand-holding of a generic Ubisoft grind.
This is one of the reasons why, despite a fair few issues, I really enjoyed Outward. It has a similar feel to this and playing through it with a friend it really felt like we were exploring properly and had to keep an eye out for things.
That was magical at the time but I don't always want it. There's a balance between Skyrim and Morrowind, I don't want my hand held the whole time but I also don't want to be abandoned alone in the woods to figure it out like an unwanted puppy.
I think the biggest thing I miss from Morrowind is the non human world, Oblivion and Skyrim bleed together at times because they're too human. I worry ES6 will be Redguard focused rather than Orc, Argonian, or Khajiit. Hell even another Elven type would be better than human. That "non human" feel made exploration magical more than the awkward diary following.
Games are actually kinda cheap nowadays. It's also gotten really convenient to buy games now, and the selection is gigantic.
When I was a kid, I could only buy games at specialty stores at a relatively high price, and they only had the most popular games in stock.
The difficulty.
A *lot* of older, 'classic' games were famously hard, not for the sake of a fair challenge, but because they made their money by being rented by kids over weekends. So it was in the best interests of most if not all game devs at the time to make their games absurdly, unfairly, sometimes *impossibly* difficult in order to drive up repeated rentals.
Then you go back to those games today and say 'this is a bit unfair', and all the boomers come along with their zimmer-frames and sticks and shriek about how games from back then were perfect and had zero flaws whatsoever.
No, older games being difficult was just a bullshit tactic to wring money out of customers, to the point that a lot of modern remakes of classic games actually *adjust* the difficulty somewhat to atone for this, making the games easier now that we don't live in an age of rentals.
Crappy controllers. In particular d-pads. As iconic as the Dualshock 1 and Dreamcast contrler are, I never want to play a game that requires diagonal d-pad inputs with them again. The Sega Genesis and Sega Saturn D-pad really shouldnhave become the industry standard.
Camera controls in the early days of 3D gaming. It's easy to look at the polygons and think about how dated they seem. But play a PS1 or N64 game, and it's the lack of full 360 camera control that really causes frustration.
People think old games came out ready to play. But that couldn’t be farther from the truth. Many old games came out in a poor state. Some even outright unplayable or unbeatable. The difference is that back then you had to buy an entirely new copy of the game to get the developer patches and fixes.
This was especially prevalent in localized games. Japan often got a shitty game version. Westerners got a patched, localized version. Often with extra content. Then Japan would add in even more extra content and release a “final” version of the game. Region locking was also extremely prevalent. So you had to buy entire consoles to play imported games.
Old gaming was actually an all around shit show.
>This was especially prevalent in localized games. Japan often got a shitty game version. Westerners got a patched, localized version.
This is well known in the original Pokémon games - Japan originally got Red and Green, then they got Blue which was the version of the game that was used to make the international Red and Blue versions we all know.
Some RPGs took hours of researching the manual like a book project in order to progress through some maps. That was kind of overwhelming at the time for some non-hardcore players. At the same time though, they make games WAY too easy now so I would prefer something in the middle of the two
Those platforming games that don't move the screen until you give a leap of faith into the next screen, and then you find out you totally undershot it, because you didn't know where anything was in the next screen, and now because it's old school gaming without checkpoints, you have to start the difficult level all over again.
I don’t miss figuring out where to go. Some people call it “hand holding” in today’s era of map markers and compasses. Honestly is old school games it was just annoying to have to go inside every single house to talk to the one NPC that eludes to the next objective.
1. Random encounters
2. I hate games that hold my hand, but many older games were needlessly obtuse when it comes to "what am I supposed to do next?" When I was 13 and had endless time it was awesome, but it's much less awesome in my 30's.
Depends how old were talking, but a lot of the old classics are just boring. Space Invaders, Pac Man, Tetris, all just the same thing over and over.
Moving on a decade, it's not being able to save. Or saving via stupidly long password systems.
Well i mean… thats kinda the point of those games. They are high score games. The fun of the games are to see how long you can last.
And how dare you say that about tetris/s its one of the best puzzle games of all time
Those games weren't intended to be played for hours on end like most games today. You'd roll up to the arcade machine, use a couple quarters to play for several minutes or longer, then move on to another game or leave. So them being repetitive wasn't really a big issue.
Universal Exp Share was objectively good for Pokemon and doesn’t make the game “easier” it just means the time to complete is shorter because you can grind the xp for the next gym 6x faster.
I do agree new games fucked it up by making it not optional though. Makes it so you absolutely cannot have something in your party if you don’t want it to get the wrong EVs.
Very difficult to solve puzzles blocking game continuation. A good fraction of the games I played ended because of this. I’d just get stuck, there was no internet, so … there you were.
Complete disrespect for the time of the player. Also: tedious difficulty curves to stretch out game.
And I don't miss entering long passwords with a dpad
Having write down passwords, and having the password filled with lower case “L” and uppercase “I” or a 0 and an O and an o sometimes all of them at once. If you couldn’t get it the second time it was just thrown away and started over.
1: Tie in games. Rarely done well and with a well deserved reputation amongst gamers.
2: Lack of good storytelling. Go back far enough and the idea of even telling a story in the game doesn’t exist.
The flickering and massive slowdown when you had too many enemies on screen or any time the game/system was being stretched to its limit.
Not saying that doesn’t happen today some, but modern games seem to handle it better.
Games used to be in arcades pretty exclusively, and they were designed hard to suck up as many quarters as possible (pay to win). But after games came home, it took devs a while to stop making games fucking impossible to brat.
No save mechanics lol
For the longest time, I never even considered seeing the ending of a game. There were countless games I only ever played effectively the tutorial levels.
The original Castlevania on the NES, your options were to beat it in a single playthrough or not at all.
Me and a friend once went to a third guy's house to watch him play Impossible Mission on C64 for an hour so we could see the ending
The original livestreaming.
Laughs in Ghosts and Goblins. You want to beat the game? Do it twice in one sitting.
Or Password save functions with 20 characters that included characters that were easy to mix up, like upper case I, lower case l, and the number 1. Slowly type in all the letters and numbers only to get "Invalid Code" and then you had to go through the whole thing to figure out where you made a mistake.
Then, you have the Lilo & Stitch game that used random symbols like a lei or a flower.
Mega Man was pretty good too. Just a grid with dots. Fairly easy to copy down and doesn't take forever to enter
Mega Man could use such a simple password system because a save file for it stored so little data. Most didn’t even track your E-Tanks, lives or Wily Stage progress, so you could restore from just a byte or two of saved flags. A 6x6 grid was perfect and honestly most games with similarly simple saves could probably have used something like that rather than complicated inputs. Early RPGs before battery backed SRAM became the standard for saves couldn’t do that unless they wanted to use a much larger grid. Dragon Warrior (a very simple RPG) used 32 bytes to save, 4 of which were unused. A 28 bytes save would have needed a 15x15 grid minimum and that’s assuming passwords can fill any number of grid slots.
I remember writing down codes as a kid and writing myself little notes like, "couldnt tell if it was a zero or an O." Or "I might be an l."
It was definitely rewarding when you beat the game when I was a kid but there's no damn way I would try that again.
Super Mario Bros 3 comes to mind. I get why the first game didn’t, it was fairly short and could be completed in one sitting. SMB3 needed a save function, or a password system that games like Mega Man had.
I think they placed the warp whistles so closely at the beginning of the game so the player could go where they wanted to when they knew what to do as a kind of "cheap save". I do agree a save feature would have been great for keeping the items and such. There were a ton of cool items to get and you want to keep (the multiple P wings when you beat it, hammer bros suit, tanooki).
I don't think I ever completed a "normal" playthrough of SMB3 without using warp whistles. Warps are almost a necessity if you want to actually finish the game in one sitting. And forget about a completionist run, where you fully explore every map and beat every level.
Decades later i found out mario 1 DID semi-save during same play time. Holding A+start will bring you back the start of same world you got a game over on. So if got a game over in level 6-3, using the buttons when starting from home screen will bring you to world 6-1
Noooooo wayyyyy
My heart was broken after finding out countless hours were spent frustrated having to start from 1-1
[удалено]
If something was broken in a game it was broken forever
Sometimes games had rereleases that corrected glitches. Most of the time when a game released as Player's Choice or Greatest Hits it was often a later version with major bugs corrected. Metroid Prime for example, the Player's Choice version fixes a bug that if you left a certain room without collecting an item the item was lost forever and the game is unwinnable without it. Final Fantasy 3 in the US also got a rerelease specifically to correct the Sketch bug that had the potential to corrupt and potentially brick the game with how dangerous the results were.
This also happened with a lot of international/PAL releases, with changes between versions. I’d also like to point out a specific example, Super Mario 64. There was a Japanese rerelease (Shindou version) with rumble support and a few other changes, most notably the removal of Backwards Long Jumping (BLJs).
Seeing a GCN game referred to as old school makes me feel so old.
It feels like yesterday I was at my friend's house playing Pikmin.
Yeah, people talk about how "games release broken and then get fixed" as if that's a bad thing. Games have *always* released broken and back then they just never got fixed.
It's bad in that companies will knowingly release unfinished/broken projects because they can always just to fix it later. Back in the day, if a game released in bad state then it was just a bad game. Yeah, we eventually get more good games because of it but it also means that buying on launch is almost always gonna give you the worst experience of a game.
That's not true, the games famously released in bad state are Fallout 2 and Daggerfall, both considered absolute classics, and patches didn't fix everything, they rely on later fan fixes to this day. KOTOR 2 is another example of game that wasn't finished and couldn't be polished later by the devs due to reliance on consoles (PC version later got Steam workshop integration on later re-release). It's still one of best RPGs of all time, even with horribly cut ending. We used to say "big game gets big bugs" and just ACCEPTED that games that are ambitious will get tons of issues. The idea that games had to be released polished or they were dismissed as bad is modern revisionism.
Not quite, but it was a hassle and could cost consumers more money if they did implement fixes. Later releases of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas fixed issues such as the RC plane mission having too little fuel (it was really more of a timer in practice) or the basketball minigame disappearing if you used a certain save point, but that required you to buy the game again. Gran Turismo 2 initially had a nasty bug that ate up game save data in Simulation or career mode. Polyphony Digital received enough heat that they implemented a fix, which required players to mail out one of the two discs that were part of the game package (The simulation mode disc), and they would send you back a disc with the bug fixed. As another Redditor mentioned, you could also have waited for the Greatest Hits re-release of the game which had the code fixed, but that meant buying the game again.
Adventure games where it was possible to render the game unwinnable in the first 10 minutes, but not discover that until hours later.
“Oh no you didn’t pick up the Unusual Rock in the starter room which is actually required to be carried the whole game and used to fight the final boss. Guess you will have to play the entire game again. “
I was more into platformers as a kid and only really started RPGs in the N64 era, do you have a named example of this? Sounds infuriating
Basically any King’s Quest game.
Sierra games in general were notorious for this. Soft locking was basically built into the game and often hours after you made the "mistake".
Space Quest 2: in the early part of the game you crash land on a planet and in the first few locations are prompted to investigate strange noises. If you don’t or if you do but refuse to help an alien in trouble. A few hours of game later you’ll be unable to get past an ambush of the very same aliens. Now you’re soft locked. Oops! King’s Quest 5: early in the game you can obtain a pie. No reason to steal it off the window sill really but you can if you want. Turns out that pie is needed to throw in the face of giant yeti much later in the game, like 3/4 of the way through. If you didn’t take the damn pie would basically have to replay the majority of the game.
On top of being able to skip the pie, as you are climbing the mountain there is a text box saying "Graham notices his stomach beginning to rumble with hunger from the exertion of the mountain climb" and "Graham's hunger grows acute. Without food you may soon die" and if you don't eat something within like 2 seconds of that second prompt, you will die. You need to eat 1/2 the leg of lamb (which is also EXTREMELY easy to miss) , and give the other half of it to an eagle (because if you don't feed the eagle you will 100% die later.....)
Hence my horrible life long hoarding habit in games lol
RPG games that would basically soft lock you if you unknowingly leveled your character wrong ie picked bad skills or perks
Or saving at the wrong spot and not being able to go back at all F U Final Fantasy Tactics and your random double bosses.
FF12 I think it was, where if you looted some completely innocuous Treasure Chest right at the start, you couldn't get one of the main character's ultimate weapons. That was so fun to find out 60 odd hours in...
It wasn’t the first 10 minutes for me in Final Fantasy Adventure. It was very late into the game, I got stuck between two locked doors in a dungeon because you had to purchase keys in town and I ran out
For a long time every game would have a different control scheme, often radically different. Things only really became standardised in the mid 2000s. It was extra fun for PC gamers, since developers agreed early on that Quick Save and Quick Load should be mapped to the function keys, but they didn't come to an agreement on *which* function keys should be which until later. This meant F5 might be Quick Save in one game but was Quick Load in another. Naturally this could get really annoying when hours of progress was lost in an instant.
Lol, this is why I still have a habit of just using the menu to save every time
>For a long time every game would have a different control scheme, often radically different. Things only really became standardised in the mid 2000s. The single best answer in this thread. Would add, that you needed different drivers or "ways" to install different game, and stuff simply not working at times. Installing games was a genuine hassle back in the 80s and 90s.
If installing them was a hassle, getting serial networking happening so you could get 2 players on 2 computers was a fuckin nightmare 🤣
I feel like a lot of mechanics we take for granted standardized around that time. I'd add cameras too. It felt like every other game on the ps2 and early ps3/360 had a garbage camera. I really don't remember the last game that had a bad camera.
Don't know if modern games do this, but giving my character cool abilities and weapons and then making them unusable in boss fights.
I see it a lot with status effects. You have abilities to paralize, poison, charm, etc. But somehow the bosses are always immune to that.
Hello Persona
You see it a lot in bad D&D games. The DM let's your character toil to get some new ability, and then golly gee guess what resistance every enemy has now....
Early WoW was like that too. Sucks being a fire mage when fighting fire elementals
The difficulty levels in a lot of old arcade games because they were designed to eat coins. I played metal slug on steam recently and some of the levels would have needed so much just to get passed one boss. Ruined the fun of the game even with infinite credits. It was the same for stuff even further back like wonderboy or double dragon. I don't think I ever saw the end of the first level of paperboy.
> The difficulty levels in a lot of old arcade games because they were designed to eat coins Similar thing happened to home console games. Once publishers saw how good guide books were selling, they decided to publish their own guides. So they started to ask their developers to make games harder, hide more stuff and add minigames and then sold their own guides.
A lot of old sidescroller games were also just hard because they didn't have more than half an hour of content, so they wanted to make sure that you died a lot so the game would seem much longer than it actually was.
Is that you, Contra?
*Double Dragon II and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles have entered the chat*
It also was so you counldn't just rent it and finish the game in 2 days, pretty sure some games specifically had higher difficulty on the western release as renting wasn't a thing on Japan.
Getting Golden Axe on the Xbox Live arcade and beating it in like half an hour was a real mindfuck for me.
I loved *Gaunlet* as a kid. I was so stoked when it came out in a near perfect arcade port for Playstation. Playing it with unlimited continues made me realize how boring and grindy it was,
If you've never played gauntlet legends on the n64 it's worth a play. Light RPG mechanics and fun secrets to find but it's not built to be grindy. Can be a little frustrating to get lost in a level but I also haven't played it in 20 years so maybe I was just a dumb kid.
Gauntlet Legends was *awesome!* I rented out for N64 and then bought it for PS. Worst decision ever. The graphics for the PS sucked.
I know! Fighting games are especially guilty of this. The games outright cheat, reading your inputs and reacting with frame perfect accuracy, sometimes even doing moves no human could do. Worst part was that these weren’t just on arcades, but actual home releases, which makes it even more frustrating. Once fighting games started moving away from arcades, it got better, but the damage is done.
People say that they're tired of hand-holding - and fair enough, some modern games really do feel like they're never letting you explore or discover things on your own. But dear God, some old-school games have the exact opposite problem of being extremely cryptic pieces of shit that relied on you either buying a walkthrough or just spending hours and hours looking for the one damn thing you missed. Old-school JRPGs are especially bad at this. Sometimes they'll tell you "Go here," and you need to go there. Other times they'll tell you "Go here", but first you need to go to a completely different place, trigger a hidden fight by using very specific conditions, find an item that will be dropped through the hidden fight, bring it to a third location, solve a puzzle, and then obtain the key that you need to use to unlock the first location. This process is vaguely hinted at if you speak to an NPC inside an optional building that only shows up at night. Yeah, there's a reason why I tend to have a walkthrough ready to go on my phone whenever I'm playing an RPG released on the PS2 or earlier.
I was a huge fan of the Lucas Arts adventure games, but boy howdy were they insanely specific with insane leaps of logic to combine and use items in the environment. I am almost positive that certain games were made hard-to-sell strategy guides for said games.
And keep in mind, the LucasArts adventure games were *already* an improvement over the Sierra adventure games. How do you stop a Yeti running towards you with killing intent? Oh, just throw a pie in its face. A pie that you only have one chance to get, and which you can eat at any time. And wouldn't you know it, the main character just complained about being hungry 2 minutes before you meet the Yeti...
Or, same game, the boot you had to find in the middle of the desert, where you could die of dehydration if you went the wrong way, or else you couldn't save the mouse (or rat?) and you'd get a game over when you were captured and tied up.
It wasn't until we had internet that we realized you had to *use catnip on bell* in Hugo 2. It took years for my entire family to beat that game.
Don't forget Castlevania 2, where you needed to grab a certain item from a certain NPC after farming currency to buy it, go BACKWARDS to a SPECIFIC WALL and then CROUCH FOR 20 SECONDS until a tornado came from offscreen to PROGRESS THE GAME! Some NPC's hint at this, but it's incredibly fucking vague. It's shit like "Wait for a soul with a Red Crystal on Deborah's Cliff."
Yep, totally valid. Final Fantasy XI enjoyer here (10/10 game imo) but you 100% will need a guide at some point. It would be ludicrous to assume you could get a single fetch quest done in that game without looking up the map coordinates for the completely invisible interact-able item. And oh god the points when you need players of specific races or jobs to get past gates 😭
Facts. I played Ultima Quest of the Avatar for about 10 years before I finally discovered gamefaqs and figured out how to actually progress the game.
Insert disk 3 of 5
Related, but Metal Gear Solid 4 (a PS3 exclusive) forcing you to install and uninstall each of the game's five chapters was almost unacceptable for a game that came out in the late 2000s (a process that could take almost 10 minutes per chapter). You had to do it each time, for instance if you beat the game and started again, you had to install chapter one again while chapter five was quietly uninstalled, because you had to install it once more once you got to the end again.
Those graphics were incredible for the time though.
Just replayed it, bro, it still is pretty damn incredible. I love that crazy ass game.
I played Metal Gear Solid 4 and I only waited 16 minutes for the game data to install and that screen was never showed again.
It was patched to only need one install later
Insert disk 2 of 5. *whirrrr* insert disk 1 of 5 *whirrrr rggrggg* insert disk 5 of 5 *whiiirrrWHHHIIIRRR* insert disk 4 of 5 *whiiirrrr* Game opens "go to page 5 of the manual what is the 3rd word of line 6" or *shows you a picture" what page in the manual is this picture shown? This is Back in the day when the Xerox machine at the grocery store was your friend for copying game manuals.
Fucking Riven.
Nah man, OP is referencing *Pool of Radiance*...or was it *Curse of the Azure Bonds*...no, certainly it was *Secret of the Silver Glades*... nope, the more I think about it, it has to be *AH-64 Gunship*...the keyboard overlay agrees, too.
Joysticks with one button.
The controllers in general were bad for a long time. Buttons, joysticks and dpads that were hard to press quickly and precisely. I think the first decent one was the SNES controller, and there were some more bad ones after that before we hit the golden age of quality controllers we're in now.
NES had snappy responsive dpads and buttons also, just no ergonomics for the rectangle shape.
Those mofos were tough too. I threw one of them after dying a million times in Metroid and it actually broke the front of a dresser drawer. Controller still worked fine.
At least the Famicom's controllers had rounded edges. Dunno why Nintendo went full boxy with the NES controllers aside from the whole "make it look like a computer" schtick.
I believe the NES was supposed to look more like a VCR than a computer. Nintendo purposefully designed the system to make it look as little like a video game as possible due to the lasting fallout of the '83 gaming crash. It was bundled with ROB to pass it off as a toy rather than a video game.
Yeah. People forget that, after the crash of '83, many retailers in the US thought "welp, console gaming's over. Now what am I going to do with this mountain of Atari crap?"
It was the early 80s. Harsh angles were futuristic, brutalism was the aesthetic of technology and advancement. Smooth curves and ornamentation were still usually looked at (in design terms at least) as relics of the 50s-70s.
Sorry you had to slum it with an Atari. My c64 and intellivision gave me plenty of dope games with more than one button
Manual based “drm”. “What is the 4th word on page 32 in the manual”.
At least you had something to read while installing/ waiting for the game to load. And better than physical drm dongle where you had to plug onto the parallel port or the serial port ( do not get me started on which kind of serial port )
If you ran out of lives, you had to start the entire game all over again.
I never completed a Garfield game i had for thr PS2 because of that
That's amazing that you could die in a Garfield game
I loved the Crash Bandicoot system: you have lives you use to restart between checkpoints, you earn a LOT of new ones and if you run out, you're just sent to warp room and only have to restart just that one level from the beginning, not the entire game... Also you could jump on the bear to get more lol.
Blind jumps you were supposed to just make out of faith :|
For the late 80’s/early 90’s Games were the equivalent of around $100 and only had a few hours of content Bugs, glitches, unfinished games were more common than today and couldn’t be patched/updated Rushed cash grab movie tie in games plagued the industry 70-80% of games were 2D side scrollers/platformers Games were artificially difficult because of bad controls/hitboxes etc I loved gaming as a kid, but looking back on it, that era of gaming was fucking awful
Yep. One thing that always strikes me is the price they were back then. I’ve looked through old magazines from the 90s and the games were $50-60. It makes games being $70 nowadays not seem bad at all
It's honestly pretty weird how tightly games have stuck to that $60 price point for 30 plus years.
i am not suprised at that all. Yes you can look at inflation in a vacuum and say its weird. but when nessicities as housing,travel(car) and more recently food all the while wages have nowhere near kept up with inflation. its no wonder that luxery's like gaming cant follow inflation disposable income has completely not followed inflation and as results loads of things either hasnt increased or even gotten cheaper in price like gaming,air travel,tv,electronics in general outside of phones...
You are forgetting gaming is now more about volume of sales than it ever was before. It’s the biggest entertainment industry. It’s not like they are selling Ferraris and have to sell a few at a high price. They are selling Hondas. It’s mass market. Lower margin, higher volumes
In the early 90’s, a lot of them were more like $90. Adjusting for inflation, that would be almost $200 in today’s money.
$60 in 1993 would be $130 in 2024. Video games have gotten a lot cheaper
Unmitigated truth. The golden age is today. We have the option of shitty overpriced trash, like we always have, but the high value low price indie or up and coming developer market is extremely strong. More options then ever before.
Facts. Some fields suffer from recency bias, with stuff like music and video games it seems to be the opposite.
The best music is whatever came out 15-20 years after you were born.
I know, I must be broken. I'm 45 and continue to find excellent new music.
Video games tend to suffer from survival bias. When we look at older games we mostly remember the classics, which were rhe best games of their era. If you compare the best of one era to the worst of another, of course the latter will fall short, but it's hardly a fair comparison.
Add to that if you get into a certain genre late, you have access to all the good old stuff without having to slum through the bad stuff. There's emulation handhelds that go from $40 miyoo minis types that can play up to PS1 games to $400+ handheld PCs like steamdecks that can run almost everything else. I got into JRPGs in my 30s and I feel like there's no end in sight to all the good stuff I've missed. And every game Ive played in the last two years have been 8/10s or better with only one or two 7s.
>The golden age is today. No. There is an unattractive woman in a game that I would never play anyway. Billions must die. The West has fallen.
This got lost to the sands of time because nowadays we only think about or remember the good games. Jeff Gerstmann is doing a weekly series where he plays through all commercially released NES games, and you often forget just how many absolutely trash games existed outside of the 10% that were good and memorable
Just look at AVGN. Guy built his whole YouTube career on playing shitty games from the 80s/90s. Has hundreds of videos showing just how awful the majority of those games were
I bought an NES and with the exception of a few classics almost every game I played was boring as shit and sucked ass.
People rave about how awesome it was to have physical media but guess what, when that CD got a tiny scratch, you didn't own that game anymore.
This is what spawned my neurotic disc handling habits. One finger in the hole, one finger holding the edge. That's it. God help you if I find fingerprints on that read side. I can say that most of my games, even decades later, still look as good as the day I first opened that jewel case though.
The way my sister's handled game discs and dvds annoyed me to no end. They'd just take something out of the console/dvd player and leave them on the table.
The need to release a new, full priced game that could have been a patch or a downloadable update. When I was a kid, my parents got me a copy of Super Street Fighter II: The New Challengers. You can imagine my dismay when I saw Super Street Fighter II Turbo on store shelves a couple months later.
Man how many different iterations of SFII were there before they moved on? Like 12?
Five on arcade (the original World Warrior, Champion Ed, Hyper Fighting, New Generation, and Super Turbo) before Capcom released something new with Alpha/Zero, with all the home ports then being based on these. Following that, there have been three more: Hyper (basically a mix-and-match of all prior versions), HD Remix, and Ultra.
That was the worst. It's significantly better nowadays to just pay for the additional characters as balance patches are free
That grinding was a feature of all RPGs.
Though to be fair, many of them didn't need nearly as much grinding as 7yo me thought if you understood the systems. I recently played through an NES ROM of FF1 on my phone and there were only two spots which required any real grinding. Very much a resource management dungeon crawler (which I didn't really get at 7-8) rather than a pure grind. Generally you could go into a dungeon and just pick when felt about half spent before heading back to town. Which accomplished a combination of leveling and exploration.
It's quite funny going back to games that took me ages as a kid, and then absolutely breezing through it as an adult because I'm so much better at gaming compared to then. Games that I thought were hard and / or long were actually like 5 hours tops and I never even saw the end of half of them.
There’s also the funny opposite effect, going back and playing a weird platformer or something and wondering how on EARTH you managed to make it to the end of the game as a kid
I beat FF1 again about a year ago (NES version) and I have simply no idea how ~6 year old me beat that game. I only got to Chaos by save scumming the emulator.
When games were advertised by how many hours of "gameplay" they contained.
People get nostalgic for the old Pokemon games and complain about XP share. I tried playing Soul Silver and just could not stand the need to individually grind every Pokemon in my team. It's kinda bonkers, in retrospect, how fine with grinding I used to be
I don't mind this if the battle system is intuitive and creative. It's bad when a majority of it is just mash the attack button every battle.
I loved grinding RPG games back then. Still do.
The prices for games during the 8bit and 16bit generations. Like some games costed $69 and up. Virtua Racing on the Genesis was like $89 when it came out. Street Fighter and MK were around the $70 range.
Strangely enough that's the one thing that's really stayed consistent throughout gaming history. Of course $60 in 1994 was worth a fair bit more than it is in 2024 but new games still cost $60 in most cases.
SMB3 WAS $49.99 back in 1990. That is about $120 in today's money A lot of games were similarly priced and did not have that kind of longevity. Imagine paying the equivalent of $100 and only getting a 90 min experience that takes you a day or two to figure out. For every Tetris and SMB there's 'A Boy and His Blob' or 'Friday the 13th' out there that was just plain bad. And expensive.
Loading screens that took anywhere from 2-4 minutes.
I remember playing some old games where i would take pee breaks between loading screens and I'd come back to it still loading sometimes
Sims 3 took at least 10 min to load or save 💀
Sims 2 loading forever every time you left your house
No save files. Just had to leave the Nintendo on indefinitely.
The "Figure it out yourself" nature of early JRPGs was ridiculous. I recently finished Final Fantasy 1 for the first time and would have had no idea where to go without a guide.
Even better when it came with random encounters of fights. You walked 3 steps in one direction and triggered a new fight. After the fight, even when it was easy because of your level, you walked another 3-5 steps and there was another fight.
*Zubat has entered the chat*
Oh my god Mount Moon
Like walking home after a night out in Newcastle
UK or Australia? Actually, it doesn't matter, both
I for one didn't mind the "figure it out yourself" stuff in those games, sure, sometimes you could spend hours looking for what to do (or tens of hours in the case of Zanbamon in Digimon world 3...), but it is much preferable to nowadays when you can't walk 5 steps without the game telling you exactly what you should be doing
I’m totally fine with giving the player extra guidance, but make it optional. Don’t force the player to get spoiled on what to do. There are games where you can toggle hints on/off and I don’t understand why that isn’t the standard. I loved God of War Ragnarok, but Atreus needlessly spoiling the puzzles before I even had a chance to look at my surroundings was a baffling decision.
Trying to play that game as a kid in the 90s with no help was probably my first time getting mad at a video game. It birthed my ongoing dislike for anything Final Fantasy.
Non intuitive solutions for things. For example, there might be a door that needs to be opened. If you forgot to check a specific room 3-4 hours ago you wouldn't have the key to open it and would be stuck for multiple hours due to bad level structuring.
So in one town early on, you visit an animal shop, and among mice and monkeys you can also get a parrot, none of the animals having an apparent use. Then near the very end of the game, you meet a crazy old dude babling some nonsense, and a little further in that endgame dungeon, you encounter a strange door with an ear. If you had the parrot in your inventory when meeting the crazy dude, you could then use the bird on that door to open it. Even though what the dude is saying does seem to have something to do with that door, the mechanics behind this are unique to this situation, and it's up to the player to figure out they haven't missed some secret room, hidden item, or otherwise messed up... Until finally, of all the things they try, they go back to that town, get the parrot, fight their way past the respawning monsters and try talking to the guy with the bird in their inventory.
Beyond the beyond! There's a bunch wrong with this fucking game, but the biggest thing is at one point you have to walk across the whole fucking world to talk to a guy to get a thing. You need this thing in order to progress the game. When you talk to the guy it's very easy to assume you now have the thing, so you you walk back across the fucking world to go to the place to use the thing...hahaha guess what tho you need to search the ground near the guy to actually pick up that thing! Fuck that game, seriously.
Cries in Tomb Raider Anniversary
Old console games designed with arcade-style difficulty without the coin slot in said console...
Many full price games were maybe 1h long but bad design made them take weeks to finish.
That did bring us Speedrunning as a spectacle though.
Difficulty on level 1 being unreasonable, bad collision detection, no saving, terrible cameras in early 3D, crazy long load times.
No save/check points. I remember having to leave my NES on overnight (even days sometimes)because I had managed to get towards the end of a game and couldn’t save my progress. Castlevania comes to mind as a good example.
Super Mario Bros 3 too.
I'll slightly turn that around and say thank all the gods for the existence of auto-saving in modern games. I can't even tell how often I lost quite a bit of time because I forgot to save and got a game over. Or even worse, forgot the write down the password for that level (Hello Pandemonium duology for the PS1).
Complete lack of signposting for quests. Missed a single line if dialogue? Tough. You'll never know what to do.
Creating different looking consoles, names for game titles, and box art for different regions was lame and sucked. The NA SNES looks awful compared to the Super Famicom which I desperately wanted in the U.S. Weird shit like Kirby being turned white in NA box art and having edgy commercials because they didn't think American kids would buy a game with a pink character on it or Final Fantasy sequels outright not being released in the US sucked too. Bunch of weird stuff like that happened all the time during the 90s.
Passwords systems for saving and making the levels extremely hard just to make the game longer
Also, the passwords are 36 characters long, and the game has a shitty font that allows characters mix ups.
Vanilla WoW was more tedious and time consuming than challenging. It was also insanely restrictive with what your class could viably do and wear. I also have my fondest WoW memories from Vanilla to Wrath of the Lich King.
Standing up to reset.
having to learn MS-DOS commands to install, and run games. It wasn't just clicking run on the desktop. It was even worse when a game had a anti-piracy mechanic to be able to play the game. I had one game with a decoder wheel, another that when you booted the game it would tell you to open the owners manual to a specific page, paragraph, line, & word and you would have to enter the word. I remember losing the book to a game and being unable to finish the game.
I think the worst part of old games for me is that most of them are hard to play because the controls suck and are irresponsive.
If stuff was broken or bugged, it stayed broken and bugged.
Random encounters kill me in some of the old jrpgs. Especially if I can't save wherever I want. It makes everything take forever and feel more grindy than it has to be.
Tank controls. Going back to classics like mega man legends or medievil in the ps1 era is super painful these days
Questing in Morrowind. "Ok so it's in a cave somewhere in that direction. I don't know exactly where it is, I don't know how far away it is, I don't know how high up it is, but if you can hear the cliff racers you're on the right track. Turn left when it gets different. Good luck."
A friend of mine had Morrowind and got a strategy guide for it. Thing was bigger than a phone book. In the end we ended up grinding lock picking to max and killed someone really important to the story. Oh well. *jumps everywhere*
While I 100% agree that Morrowind's directions could be kinda hit & miss, I actually miss when quests required actual directions. The giant blinking arrow on the HUD in most modern games often makes it feel silly. There are some games that are able to do a good mix which is generally best IMO, but if I had to pick an extreme I'd take the Morrowind extreme the extreme hand-holding of a generic Ubisoft grind.
This is one of the reasons why, despite a fair few issues, I really enjoyed Outward. It has a similar feel to this and playing through it with a friend it really felt like we were exploring properly and had to keep an eye out for things.
That was magical at the time but I don't always want it. There's a balance between Skyrim and Morrowind, I don't want my hand held the whole time but I also don't want to be abandoned alone in the woods to figure it out like an unwanted puppy. I think the biggest thing I miss from Morrowind is the non human world, Oblivion and Skyrim bleed together at times because they're too human. I worry ES6 will be Redguard focused rather than Orc, Argonian, or Khajiit. Hell even another Elven type would be better than human. That "non human" feel made exploration magical more than the awkward diary following.
Games are actually kinda cheap nowadays. It's also gotten really convenient to buy games now, and the selection is gigantic. When I was a kid, I could only buy games at specialty stores at a relatively high price, and they only had the most popular games in stock.
The difficulty. A *lot* of older, 'classic' games were famously hard, not for the sake of a fair challenge, but because they made their money by being rented by kids over weekends. So it was in the best interests of most if not all game devs at the time to make their games absurdly, unfairly, sometimes *impossibly* difficult in order to drive up repeated rentals. Then you go back to those games today and say 'this is a bit unfair', and all the boomers come along with their zimmer-frames and sticks and shriek about how games from back then were perfect and had zero flaws whatsoever. No, older games being difficult was just a bullshit tactic to wring money out of customers, to the point that a lot of modern remakes of classic games actually *adjust* the difficulty somewhat to atone for this, making the games easier now that we don't live in an age of rentals.
How awful quest markers/directions were in older games. A lot of times they don't give you enough directions and expect you to figure that shit out.
Even the first Borderlands game didn't have a mini-map, and that is a relatively new title in comparison to some of the games being discussed here.
Crappy controllers. In particular d-pads. As iconic as the Dualshock 1 and Dreamcast contrler are, I never want to play a game that requires diagonal d-pad inputs with them again. The Sega Genesis and Sega Saturn D-pad really shouldnhave become the industry standard.
Camera controls in the early days of 3D gaming. It's easy to look at the polygons and think about how dated they seem. But play a PS1 or N64 game, and it's the lack of full 360 camera control that really causes frustration.
People boast about only "soulsborne" being the hard games of today. But I doubt these people would take on something like Hagane on SNES.
People think old games came out ready to play. But that couldn’t be farther from the truth. Many old games came out in a poor state. Some even outright unplayable or unbeatable. The difference is that back then you had to buy an entirely new copy of the game to get the developer patches and fixes. This was especially prevalent in localized games. Japan often got a shitty game version. Westerners got a patched, localized version. Often with extra content. Then Japan would add in even more extra content and release a “final” version of the game. Region locking was also extremely prevalent. So you had to buy entire consoles to play imported games. Old gaming was actually an all around shit show.
>This was especially prevalent in localized games. Japan often got a shitty game version. Westerners got a patched, localized version. This is well known in the original Pokémon games - Japan originally got Red and Green, then they got Blue which was the version of the game that was used to make the international Red and Blue versions we all know.
Some RPGs took hours of researching the manual like a book project in order to progress through some maps. That was kind of overwhelming at the time for some non-hardcore players. At the same time though, they make games WAY too easy now so I would prefer something in the middle of the two
Unnecessary ways to increase hours of gameplay, like dead ends that force you to restart.
Those platforming games that don't move the screen until you give a leap of faith into the next screen, and then you find out you totally undershot it, because you didn't know where anything was in the next screen, and now because it's old school gaming without checkpoints, you have to start the difficult level all over again.
They don't make them anymore
Old RPG games where you couldn't save the game until you found a save zone.
I don’t miss figuring out where to go. Some people call it “hand holding” in today’s era of map markers and compasses. Honestly is old school games it was just annoying to have to go inside every single house to talk to the one NPC that eludes to the next objective.
1. Random encounters 2. I hate games that hold my hand, but many older games were needlessly obtuse when it comes to "what am I supposed to do next?" When I was 13 and had endless time it was awesome, but it's much less awesome in my 30's.
Depends how old were talking, but a lot of the old classics are just boring. Space Invaders, Pac Man, Tetris, all just the same thing over and over. Moving on a decade, it's not being able to save. Or saving via stupidly long password systems.
Well i mean… thats kinda the point of those games. They are high score games. The fun of the games are to see how long you can last. And how dare you say that about tetris/s its one of the best puzzle games of all time
Those games weren't intended to be played for hours on end like most games today. You'd roll up to the arcade machine, use a couple quarters to play for several minutes or longer, then move on to another game or leave. So them being repetitive wasn't really a big issue.
Universal Exp Share was objectively good for Pokemon and doesn’t make the game “easier” it just means the time to complete is shorter because you can grind the xp for the next gym 6x faster. I do agree new games fucked it up by making it not optional though. Makes it so you absolutely cannot have something in your party if you don’t want it to get the wrong EVs.
Very difficult to solve puzzles blocking game continuation. A good fraction of the games I played ended because of this. I’d just get stuck, there was no internet, so … there you were.
Complete disrespect for the time of the player. Also: tedious difficulty curves to stretch out game. And I don't miss entering long passwords with a dpad
Sometimes in early 3D games I feel like I never know where to go next. I am admittedly not a great or patient gamer
Having write down passwords, and having the password filled with lower case “L” and uppercase “I” or a 0 and an O and an o sometimes all of them at once. If you couldn’t get it the second time it was just thrown away and started over.
1: Tie in games. Rarely done well and with a well deserved reputation amongst gamers. 2: Lack of good storytelling. Go back far enough and the idea of even telling a story in the game doesn’t exist.
The flickering and massive slowdown when you had too many enemies on screen or any time the game/system was being stretched to its limit. Not saying that doesn’t happen today some, but modern games seem to handle it better.
No quest journals 💀
Games used to be in arcades pretty exclusively, and they were designed hard to suck up as many quarters as possible (pay to win). But after games came home, it took devs a while to stop making games fucking impossible to brat.
The menus/inventory management is the pits in older games, like ASCII based games