I sure loved having games release in several separate version with different bugs depending on which lot of discs/cartridge you got.
People paid money for the North American release of Lufia 2.
Ah yes, I remember bugs with no way of getting them fixed.
There were fewer game breaking bugs though, since the developers knew they couldn’t be patched after release.
The game itself was smaller in virtually every way. Even if it took you 80 hours to beat, the data was nothing in comparison to modern games.
Sure, but what I meant is that good developers took a lot of care in ensuring the game was ready for release, and companies like Nintendo and Sega did a lot of checks to ensure there were no major issues (for example, they’d keep it running for a long time while monitoring memory usage to ensure there were no memory leaks).
These days, some games need a patch within the first week of release. Manufacturers have gotten lazier in terms of ensuring the game works properly, since they can just patch issues after release.
For PC atleast, you could buy a magazine that came with a floppy disk containing patches.
Wow I completely forgot about this. Later on it was CDs with both patches and demos.
You also just have to cope with whatever broken glitches there are in the game and find a way around them because aint no patch no hotfix no nothing is coming to save you
It actually wasn’t uncommon for post-launch patches to be applied to later printings of games. A lot of start screens will have the version number of the game on them somewhere, so that you can tell. This is something we forget about since digital copies of older games tend to default to being the latest printed version.
We forget about it because it wasn’t remotely helpful at the time if you got a borked version
And as a result, the vast majority of games didn’t have game-breaking bugs at launch, unlike today.
I think this view has heavy survivorship bias. There were many broken or heavily bugged games shipped.
Survivorship bias doesn’t make sense in this context, because I actually lived then and played hundreds of games. Plenty were buggy as hell (notice I said game-breaking bugs specifically), but none were unplayable (well, not because of bugs anyway). I hear Battletoads on NES was uncompleteable 2 player, but my brother and I never made it to level 11 together to find out.
Actually true. The number of (S)NES games with game-breaking bugs was near-zero. Probably because they couldn’t just patch them later.
Games were also limited to “See if you can jump over this wall! Now see if you can do it again in a different color!”
I love games that get updated and change as the years go by! I think it’s one of the most incredible things I’ve seen in gaming
Yeah but aren’t you annoyed by spending 5 minutes updating a game? I’d much rather a game that never adds new features or fixes that gamebreaking bug.
That’s a totally valid point. I absolutely hate updates in general. It’s one of those double edged swords. I’ve been trying to get used to the idea, as to not lose my mind in the modern world. Not easy
That said, I like the idea of (sort of) the way some software companies offer standalone versions alongside their subscription plans. If you don’t want updates just buy the full software (or pirate it of course).
And I have to say, I’m an absolute fan of free to play games - even if I don’t necessarily play many. I just think we need to teach people, parents specifically, about how microtransactions work and can add up.
Pros of disc games: ready to play and you own the game.
Cons: game breaking bugs exist and asking devs to send you game patches is awkward af.
You only own the game as long as the support holds. Scratch the disk, empty the card ram battery, etc. You’re done.
Gamers in Japan were the real early access testers of yesteryear. Major bugs or glitches that were there were hopefully fixed by the time the game hit international release.
It’s honestly weird to remember that international releases were delayed months or years just a couple decades ago. Could you imagine if it took a year for BotW to release in the West?
Modern companies still get stupid about it by forgetting time zones exist. Australian journalists have caught hell for “breaking embargo dates” or “somehow playing the game early.” Nah. You said such-and-such date, not some specific time in Greenwich. It’s already tomorrow there.
remember when someone patented the concept of having mini-games while it’s loading so almost no games have it?
also awesome…Rose tinted glasses. Games were buggy as hell. Many times unbeatable in certain conditions.
They were way less complex though. Which does help with QA coverage and generally gives less chances for things to break. But yeah, I still agree, rose tinted glasses and all that
What percentage of all games released before download updating became the norm had game-breaking bugs? I really don’t remember that many, certainly not so many that it was considered to be a widespread issue.
Yeah, unpatchable games tended to be buggier in general, but there’s also a sense of charm and intrigue that comes with discovering a bug or exploit and utilising it to your advantage. I still remember playing the fuck out of Morrowind and discovering that you could exploit the Corprus disease to get essentially infinite Strength and Endurance which was awesome.
I think stating that “many” games were unbeatable is hyperbolic, but I guess that depends on your definition of “many”. If you define it as being more than five, then sure. If you define it as being a statistically significant percentage? Maybe not.
I think the main problem is that people think about the “good old games” and forget the sheer amount of shovelware and shit games that existed.
It can also be hard sometimes to know whether something was shoddy code or just bad design.
Remember having to stop mid install to put the next disc in?
Shit I installed Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 with 10 DVDs and let me tell you… that’s something I don’t want back.
Like if you want to provide a physical offline version give me a small USB drive or a Blu-ray but that one I know it’s not common outside consoles and movies.
And you needed a Microsoft Account and activate the CD Key anyway…which actually didn’t allow to install the game downloading it. Like ok I get it the DVDs was for people to be able to do an offline install, ok… But don’t force me to use them if I have access to internet… Which actually you needed to setup the account and activate the CD key online anyway, the DVD only helped reduce your bandwidth usage.
Who came up with this man??? Plus you need the first disk inserted to play like the old times… you have the damn CD key and Microsoft account to validate wtf… I swear… It was like travelling back in time but with extra hassles of today world on top.
Updates, yes but almost every game did need to be installed though
Yeah, installed by sticking it into the console and then starting it…unless you’re talking about PC games.
I was, but perhaps this was a console discussion judging by the downvotes
Clarifying that might’ve saved you.
Then again, it’s the internet, no one does nuance on the internet.
Indeed, but then these points are like the points of Whose Line Is It Anyway
Bro do you remember what load times were like back then?
My mind personally goes back to cartridges here. But yeah, load times on early disc games were atrocious.
Ah yes
I don’t know what this gif is about; blowing in cartridges was an NES thing, not an SNES thing.
Edit: you can downvote me, but I’ve owned a SNES since 1991 and have literally never felt the need to blow in a cartridge.
Edit 2: By the way, blowing into the cartridge never actually worked to begin with, even on the NES. It only seemed like a thing because of the North American NES’s shitty push-in-then-down cartridge loading mechanism. Not only did top-loading consoles like the SNES and Sega Genesis not have the cartridge connection problems that led people to think they needed to blow on it, the top-loading revised NES didn’t either!
Blowing on a cartridge was a cartridge thing. The idea being to blow dust off the connector pins, the console itself is irrelevant.
Of all the consoles I ever owned or played at other people’s houses, the NES was the only one anybody ever blew on.
My lived experience trumps anything you can try to claim. You lose; good day sir!
in all your 12 years
The DOS version of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was missing a platform in the third zone, and literally couldn’t be beaten.
Sometimes the ability to patch is good.
Ya but there’s too much. Now we have games getting out half-finished because they know they can patch it later after the public pays full price too beta test it.
How were the graphics back then?
Textures and audio were always the largest part of a game. And the installation process of a game was mostly decompressing those. What changed in recent years is not as much an increase of the overall size of these assets, but less incentive to compress them in the first place. Most buyers have enough bandwidth to be able to download uncompressed assets and start playing right away instead of having to wait for a long installation step after the download is finished.
I know :) was just poking fun back.
Some devs did amazing with what they had to work with
Crash and Spyro on the PSX hold up extremely well, since they go all out on cartoony looks. Crash 3’s death animations are still very entertaining
People still enjoyed the graphics because they were better than previous generations.
Some Nintendo 64 games towards the end of its life had some really nice lighting effects that people didn’t even think were possible.
Of course. :) I was meme’ing too.
They needed to be tightened up on level 3.
Graphics? That would have been a luxury.
Yeah, but when we did things like that we actually had to finish games before we sold them.
As long as there wasn’t a gamebreaking bug with no way of fixing it.
I prefer waking my console and pressing a button to play, no disc fumbling
Turn on PS2
Disc starts spinning
Red screen of death shows up telling me the disc is invalid
Take out disk and wipe it thoroughly
Pray
Repeat 1-5 times until it works
Yeah, good times…
Never had this issue with a Nintendo 64 :P
I don’t think I ever had issues with the cartridges.
My copy of Beetle Adventure Racing on N64 went through the washing machine after it got picked up with my bedsheets. Left it in the sun for an hour afterwards and popped it back into the console and it kept working perfectly. I don’t know why any console devs ever decided that discs were better than cartridges; it’s just objectively untrue.
The issue was that you can hold far more data on a CD - 650MB on a CD vs 64MB on the largest N64 cartridges. The N64’s 3D hardware was far superior to the Playstation, so sometimes I wonder if having a larger storage medium could have resulted in even better games.
Take a look at what Kaze Emanuar is doing with SM64 if you’re curious what the N64 can do with modern software practices ;D
Yeah I’ve seen his videos - very impressive. He’s spent years working on it though (way more than most N64 devs that built commercially released games), and compiler optimizations that exist today didn’t exist back then.
I don’t think compiler optimizations matter much - supposedly the final build was compiled without optimizations, presumably by mistake, and the N64 has very specific hardware which compilers don’t know how to optimize for.
What we certainly do have are much more powerful machines and software in general, letting you test, analyze and profile code much more easily, as well as vast amounts of freely available information online - I can’t really imagine how they did it back then.
I’m glad others have pointed out this is pretty bullshit. If it’s a great game then it’s good. If the game was buggy you’re shit out of luck, stuck with a broken mess with no hope of it being fixed.
