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.
Some games back in the day needed a patch the first week of release and never got one. Famously, the Japanese version of Kirby super star had to be recalled because it was so buggy. Half the intended mechanics in ff6 either don’t work properly or just flat out do nothing.
I really like old games, I have a bunch of old consoles that I play all the time, but this rose tinted view on things has got to go. Old games were buggy, too, they just did less and so had less to fail on.
And up until the ps2/3 era, qa was just the developers testing it themselves.
I’m with you. I love old games. Here’s some (non-exhaustive) information on the NES version that I still play from time to time.
The first Final Fantasy had a bunch of bugs. Red mages were just as powerful as black and white because of an INT bug. You could walk through walls in certain places. The peninsula of power wasn’t supposed to happen. Spells that were supposed to help physical attributes in battle just didn’t. At least one spell meant to decrease enemy evasion increased it instead. Houses saved before giving you back spell slots. There was an invisible woman in the first castle. Running was supposed to be based on luck and level but was based on luck and the level of whoever was two slots below you. Status effects weren’t properly protected against by a bunch of items.
A lot of this was fixed in re-releases.
Do you recall a game released in the last 5-ish years that didn’t have a patch in the first week of release? I obviously haven’t played every game released in that time frame but it seems like many are still fixing day one bugs months after release.
Games have got a lot more expensive to make these days. It’s never laziness, it’s money. Everything is money. And it costs money to hold up a game release, but you had to back in the day because you had no choice. Now you do have a choice, because you can keep working on a game long after you send it for mastering and certification.
Sure, you can argue that publishers should spend more money on testing and stop being “lazy” but that extra cost is getting passed on to you. It’s already obscene how expensive some games are to produce.
For PC atleast, you could buy a magazine that came with a floppy disk containing patches.
Wow I completely forgot about this. Later on it was CDs with both patches and demos.
Also later printings of the games themselves could be patched out of the box. Somebody buying day one versus a year later could get a slightly different version of the game.
There were some infamous cases though, even in games that ended up being fucking brilliant. Like Master of Magic.
Which was sometimes frustrating, but when they are funny and good bugs it’s amazing they can’t be patched out.
There’s a reason so many speedruns on older consoles use the Japanese cartridges, because those versions came out first and have exploitable glitches which the western release later fixed.
Bugs at that time were almost never totally game-breaking either, fortunately. That could be a nightmare recall for the publisher, and so the final builds were tested more intensively than games now.
QA teams then were probably paid better than they are now.
They were probably paid about the same, maybe less, just money went further back then.
Nowadays you can finally play the old games with the bugs fixed, if they were popular enough.
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.
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.
It’s almost like there’s good and bad parts.
But beforehand a bad game was bad forever. Now it can be fixed.
Cyberpunk was a buggy mess at launch, but they did eventually fix it and make a solid game.
It’s rare when a company fixes a bad game.
Has The Lord of the Rings: Gollum been patched into a good game?
I don’t buy games until they’re good. No Man’s Sky and Cyberpunk were both games I waited years to buy.
They’re also rare exceptions. Most games that suck at launch are forever sucky, even if they’re improved somewhat.
Then just don’t play that game LMAO, like bad games are launched from time to time and we should learn to ignore them and move on to play the good games.
If your solution is “just don’t play a bad game” then you have no reason to complain about old bad games either.
“Just don’t play them”
It’s a shame they fixed Cyberpunk.
And once it’s sufficiently patched being angry about spending three years with an unfinished game is considered toxic entitled gamer behavior and you’re supposed to pretend like it didn’t happen.
Remember having to stop mid install to put the next disc in?
Windows 95 had a version that came on 30 floppy disks.
NOT fun.
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.
5 (6?) 3.5in floppies to get Dune 2 loaded on my Amiga 2000; at least I could take the time between disks to go to the bathroom, grab a snack, read a book etc. 😅
Still the only RTS I ever actually liked. Man that menu was mind blowing at the time.
Remember having to stop mid game and put the next disc in?
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.
Red screen of death shows up telling me the disc is invalid
laughs in unlocked PS2 with HDD
RRoD was 360. PS2 was one of the most durable consoles ever.
I think the 2600 and SNES take the prize for durability. 64 was durable, unless you have the DK64 nightmare game console and played in the sun.
They mean a red screen of death you’d get when the CD was invalid, not a RRoD.
For real. I remember that despite our best efforts discs would get scratched occasionally, and try keeping those disks pristine with kids. That mechanical drive was also a common and expensive point of failure that’s guaranteed to wear out eventually because of those moving parts.
It’s not all sunshine and rainbows, but I think there’s a tendency to glorify the past and hyperfocus on the disadvantages. We forget that there were parts of the past that really sucked.
Cartridge blow jobs
Me, an intellectual, modding a game for the next 36 hours straight…then quitting after 2 days
The likelihood of the game simply not working with that much modding done to it is very high, even with load order amenities
You’re not wrong, but I can’t help myself. Just one more mod…
In the early days, cartridges were kinda like swapping out the RAM/SSD each time, pre-loaded with a game. Wasteful and expensive, even back then, but it was the best way to do it for the time.
There was a short while there where DVDs and and CDs had a perfect balance between storage and read speed, where you could keep the game files on optical media while still accessing it fast enough to have reasonable load times. BluRay and hdDVD increased the capacity, but not the read speed enough to match.
We could go back to games coming on flash media, which switch does still do, but switch games don’t have 3d models and textures at the fidelity levels of other modern platforms.
With current technology, delivering digital media on a storage medium that has the performance to actually play from it, is kinda like gift cards. Like yeah, it’d be nice, but I’d rather just have the NVME storage drive/money so I can use it for whatever I want.
Maybe there will be another ultra cheap read-only storage medium one day, but right now, it’s not a thing.
Interestingly, the performance aspect is one of the reasons some phone manufactures quote for removing the SD card slot. The gap between the performance of onboard storage and SD cards keeps growing, so people that add an SD card to their Android phone and store all their apps on it have a bad experience because the software isn’t really designed with such slow storage in mind any more.
Maybe SD Express will help? There’s still some issues with it and it’s still expensive, but in theory it should be able to support 800+ MB/s read speeds. Not as fast as an NVMe drive of course, but faster than a SATA SSD.
Maybe the little storage cards from the Xbox Series X need to become a thing that’s more widely used. I’d guess they’re just M.2 2230 NVMe drives inside. Would be an interesting distribution mechanism for games (like a modern cartridge format) but they’re just too expensive for that at the moment.
Like, sure, if I could buy a storage drive that just comes with a console game I want already on it, that could be cool.
But really, I’d rather have a plain drive than a drive that can only store that one game.
there where DVDs and and CDs had a perfect balance between storage and read speed
90% of the games didn’t need that much storage. As someone growing up in a country with no copyright laws at the time, I was used to 100-200 games on a single CD. Then my dad got an official copy of MK Trilogy and I remember thinking how wasteful it was to use an entire CD for one game (you could physically see on the surface of the CD how much data was recorded on it, and it was mostly unused space).
Then there was the rare game that used not only the entire storage, but needed multiple CDs for the whole thing (e.g. Phantasmagoria).
We could go back to games coming on flash media, which switch does still do
Switch games get online updates too though. They’re not much different from other platform games in that regard.
The overall issue being discussed is not physical media vs downloading games. It’s the fact that the games you get are not a final playable version, but still need additional downloads to make them playable (zero-day patches are a norm these days).
I want this so much. I dream about making cartridges that are glorified PCIE NVME caddys and the slot on your console being essentially a PCIEx4 slot.
Maybe we could port some games and wrap them up as flatkpaks.
I’m just spit balling but it could work.
Why would you want that? Do you like getting gift cards instead of the money?
There’s a reason storage media gets cheaper per byte as you go up in capacity, because 30 small drives with their own PCBs and controllers and ram-caches, instead of one big one, isn’t better.
At most, I could get behind taking your memory card with you to a games store, and have them copy game files onto it from a local archive drive.
But who tf looks at all the BluRay boxes in the games section and thinks “these should all have an entire SSD in them.” At least optical media only distributes the actual storage component, all read/write components are in the drive.
Maybe the blue ray box should have an entire SSD in them or some kind of NextGen Compact flash as long as it’s a standard format and not a proprietary format like a switch game. You can buy blank CDs, DVDs, SD cards and there are standards in place to make them readable by entire fleets of devices.
It’s harder for games but I’m coming at this from a games preservation angle.
Games keep getting bigger and require installation to drive to effectively load assets quickly. I really envy the ability to not have to perform an installation to the device. If your game was simply its own storage device again then you could have that plug and play like experience back and also have that ~4GBps read that even the cheapest NVME drives can offer.
I have DVDs, but I also have MKV files, and I have the ability to go between these formats. I suggested something like flatpak because a universal physical media image format for games would be just one more way to easily preserve content offline indefinitely and neatly keep it pretty platform agnostic.
That was my train of thought. I know the likelihood of this being done by a real company is slim to none because of DMCA and over engineering another format is pointless if they can force everything to be download only IRL but I would like to push back and I can’t easily archive all this stuff forever on an ever growing 48TB Nas on my home. I would like offline ownership and convenience please.
If it’s going to be too expensive for a company to put Alan Wake Two onto physical media then I’d like a way to do it myself so it continues to work when epic decides they want to pull a Warner Bros and rip it off the internet forever and claim it was a loss to get tax breaks. It would also be cool if it didn’t have to install and it just started.
I understand the difficulty involved with that but we’re halfway there with software running containerized on Linux.
A man can dream.
…
How would what you’re suggesting be any improvement from that NAS you have?
You cite games preservation, but you’re essentially suggesting we do what some YouTubers do, storing all their footage on a bunch of individual usb drives.
Installation is just moving files.
Having a bunch of small drives instead of a large performant and redundant storage volume is not a good way to avoid having to move files onto the system where you want to run something.
You want the fast performance, but the faster the drives get, the less reason there is to move the physical drive instead of just the files.
Optical media makes sense when your internet is so slow, it’s faster to read a disk. That isn’t the case for some anymore. My connection could download/install a cracked copy of Alan Wake 2 in less than 20 minutes. Why would I prefer to go out and buy a tiny 86gb SSD to accomplish the same?
You want games to come on hardware so fast you don’t need to install them, but that same hardware would allow installing to be so fast it wouldn’t bother anyone anymore. And by then why would we store everything on individual loose drives, instead of redundant live storage?
If you need to get data from A to B, but there isn’t a fiber connection between them, that’s an argument for either disposable optical media, or taking a loose drive to A, loading it up with the data, taking it to B, then dumping the data. What it’s not, is an argument for storing everything on those loose drives. That’s the worst of bad practice.
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!”
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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.
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.
You only own the game as long as the support holds. Scratch the disk, empty the card ram battery, etc. You’re done.
So, the same as any other physical object you might purchase?
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.
How do I sell my Steam library? 🥲
There are websites where you can, but you get a terrible return.
I don’t really want to support them but google will point you in the right direction if you are in need.
I had to sell my vinyl collection, full of limited editions, tons of colored vinyl extras, old rarities …
Since i had to sell them or starve, the shop that bought them off, really fucked me completely over.
I try not to think too much about it.
2 things i learned from this:
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To not collect stuff the way i did before anymore.
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There’s no higher crime, than making a mistake on your tax declaration, at least in Germany.
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All I remember is having to go to the store, walk around the store and hope they still have it, go to the counter and pay for it and then having to go all the way back home to play it.
Now you click a button, make yourself a sandwich and the game is ready to go.
I have to admit, half the reason I stopped pirating was that Steam made it so easy to just click and play.
Yet I still go out of my way to get physical (especially for new games) because I want that trade-in credit when I’m done with it.
But you get obese if you make yourself a sandwich every time the game crashes, because only buggy messes get released nowadays…
That’s why you wait half a year and get the game for half the price without major bugs.
If you care about your health, don’t buy overpriced bugged crap!
I mean you DID get updates, just hidden in different print runs/regional releases of games.
Its why speedrunners prefer a lot of japanese releases of earlier titles; Because back when Japan was the center of videogame culture, they’d get the first release of most games which often meant the buggiest version.
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!
I never owned a NES, but had a SNES and my brother also borrowed his friend’s Mega Drive (Genesis for those of you in the US) from time-to-time. All of us would blow the connectors on the cartridges, regardless of console. If anything went wrong with a game, the first step to troubleshoot was to take the cartridge out and give it a good blow.
It was never about how the console actually worked, a five year-old isn’t going to logically think about that. It was all about a perceived performance increase by doing it.
in all your 12 years
I’m with you - I never had problems with my SNES games starting, whereas having to re-insert NES games was common. If other people had problems with SNES games, I never heard about it.
It was shocking when I learned many years later that blowing on the cartridge did nothing.
LOL, what load times? On old consoles, you hit the power switch and you’re instantly at the title screen.
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.
Well yes, of course Pepperridge Farm remembers this.
Chocolate cookies & goldfish crackers & breads & rolls & pastries. Pepperidge Farm.
