Updates, too. Games had to actually be in their final state before they could be sold.

Games were far better when they didnt update every fucking day. I hate it so much.

Oh, and I actually OWNED the disc or cart I bought (before online activation shit)

Thats why i play a lot more ps2 Dreamcast and Xbox now. Fuck (most) modern games.

Eh, it really depends on the game. Obviously no game should be dependent on the internet to be playayble, but I do actually like playing against (or with) other people. Mario Kart with NPCs gets boring after a while, and unfortunately bringing friends over to my house to play games wasn't really an option, so online it was. Splatoon is another one that has always been a delight, and while I love story mode obviously the AI can't fight like a human.

I don't really play shooters and stuff though.

Also consoles had modem peripherals since at least the Famicom days, some of which did allow multiplayer. Namely, there was the Family Computer Network System, however apparently it was an information service with some downloadable content, rather than a multiplayer service.

Wikipedia says that both Satellaview for SNES and 64DD for N64 had online gaming, but idk how exactly it worked.

It doesn't have to be your last.

Why make people sad when you could just not?

I think for me the last was Oblivion 🥲

I miss that you used to truly own them. They really were entirely yours.

"Completely finished and polished", except in the cases they weren't, like the mountains of shovelware in every gen 🙃

Never touched again was only true up to PS2 era and only for consoles, PC had update patches since the 90s

Same as they don't often do today.

Most games are in early access in the state you mention. But that's the thing, it's most often clearly labeled and you are free to wait until actual release.

That's just plain better imo.

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.

Graphics are better than ever, but design itself has been moving at a glacial pace for decades.

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

The biggest pain point of the oldest games is that they came out of the arcade era, so they were specifically designed to lack save features, and be so punishing that you would spend more of your quarters playing them.

I did a playthrough of both Castlevania 1 and Megaman 1. After a while I gave in and started using savestates, and suddenly both games became amazing. Jumping over Dracula's fireballs is a lot more dramatic when you have to do it with pixel precision.

Overall it was better, but you also had more macrotransactions.

Wanted to play as Vega in Street Fighter 2? Buy the whole game again.

What's that - another character pack? Buy it a third time.

Freelancer was a space shooter that ran on a pentium 3 laptop with an ATI RAGE 8MB video card.

It was dope.

32MB of RAM.

That shit was on the PS2.

Sands of Time is straight-up one of the best games of all time, and that's even including the not-great combat which makes up a lot of it, and a few puzzles which just grind the whole thing to a complete stop. Its quality is not completely representative of its era.

What is representative of its era, is that it's a complete bastard to run nowadays. Requires a GPU with hardware transform and lighting, but also a single-core CPU, which means you need a very specific age of computer to run it. Even patched up, there's some things that just don't look right - I've never managed to get it running with the portals to secret areas looking the way they should.

I am quite envious of you being able to replay it, tho. Think I gave up the last time I tried.

No endless clones of the same idea.

:-/

In the 70s and 80s, video games were so simple and straightforward, usually due to limited computing power, that it was trivial to create clones of games for other systems. Many of the most popular games of the early years of gaming such as Pong, Frogger, Arkanoid, Centepede, etc. were cloned heavily or were clones themselves.

Case in point, six different Tetris knock offs released between 1989 and 1997.

Another notorious instance was The Simpsons: Road Rage, which was a simple reskin of the then-popular Crazy Taxi.

I'll admit to having done a simple reskin myself, for a high school English project, that involved swapping out PacMan for a boat and the ghosts for angry natives. I christened it "Heart of Darkness: The Video Game" and got an easy A for my trouble.

There is no such things as a mobile game. Only addictions apps

I have been gaming for decades, I haven't paid to progress since Street Fighter II in arcade! what the fuck are you playing?

Including as close as you can get to TRUE OWNERSHIP.

Once it's in your hard drive, and you've backed it up, it will NEVER brick itself on purpose. It never phones home. It never revokes your "license". You can install it on any computer at anytime anywhere, even MULTIPLE computers, and it doesn't ask you shit.

Reminds of asking for Final Fantasy Tactics for Christmas. I didn't realize the game was almost impossible to find until the Greatest Hits reprint.

My parents misunderstood and got me the strategy guide for Final Fantasy VIII. I think I was disappointed at the time, but I still got their money's worth out of that book.

Or the "DRM" of the time, copy protection where the game would either stop and ask you for the Xth word of the Yth paragraph on page Z of the manual. Or the code wheels.

JUSTIN BAILEY ------ ------