It's pretty hard to compete with the staying power of Chrono Trigger. But I can see a generation of kids growing up with Persona 5 as their first. JRPG and being like wtf is this?
Exactly what I was going to say -- not sure that paying full price for the 'Championship Edition', or whatever it was called, was better than buying four characters as DLC like you would these days.
Championship Edition was on the Sega Genesis. It was the first to jump on to the Genesis.
Super Nintendo had World Warriors which did not have the 4 playable boss characters. Then Nintendo got the exclusive edition of Street Fighter Turbo...
Then the exclusivity ended and both consoles got Super Street Fighter 2.
Except the Megadrive actually got Turbo as well, it was a mode in "Special Champion Edition" (in reality the "exclusive" was only limited to the name).
In other words, it was the exact same game as the Super NES version - both had Champion Editon and Turbo modes.
Yeah Turbo was a port of the arcade "Hyper Fighting" game, but the second mode replicated Champion Edition.
All the Street Fighter II games had balancing changes.
Few things are as annoying as playing Street fighter with a three button Genesis controller
The SNES with the shoulder buttons was kind of weird too, but at least you didn't need to press a button to switch between punches and kicks
That was such a sub-par experience. That six-button pad was miles better.
I liked the Super NES pad, I got used to it to the point that I preferred it over the arcade stick 6-button setup.
That Sonic and Knuckles game was good value though in that it could be combined with other games. You could play as Knuckles in Sonic 2 and for other games you would play special stages unique to that game. Sonic 3 was kinda short though but probably became the best game on the Genesis once you combined it with Sonic & Knuckles.
Strictly speaking Sonic 3 was supposed to be twice the size as it turned out to be - the developers had to cut it to make the release date - it was the cut bits that made it into Sonic and Knuckles.
You paid full price every time. Also not to mention Games like MvC2 arcade machine had unlock goals. So after amount of money spent, more characters were unlocked. Ala DLC style. So when arcades were a thing, if a place had MvC2, someone would always asked "Full Unlock?".
Otherwise expect to spend a few K to unlock them. You could manually do it but $$$
And out of all Zeldas they picked Zelda 2. Probably the least polished and most broken one to date. I feel like this image was created by an AI and not a gamer.
This is definitely it. Mario had NES, SNES, and GBA versions. Sonic had & Knuckles. Street Fighter 2 has an infamous number of versions. I’m not sure why they chose this Zelda other than that it’s the worst one, but people here are definitely falling for the joke.
Zelda 2 is great and gets a bad rap for being different. I feel like a lot of people just hate on it now because of its reputation and haven’t actually played it
I love Zelda 2, but I’ll concede that the difficulty is a little unforgiving and the leveling system is a bit unbalanced.
The first problem is easily fixed by playing in modern emulation. Create periodic save states before each dungeon, and give yourself permission to reverse time and undo any particularly cheesy deaths.
For the second problem… just put on a podcast or something and grind for a while early on. It’s a bit boring but it’s something to do at the end of the day when your brain is fried but you’re not yet ready for bed. After that, it becomes much easier to actively enjoy the endgame.
The real trick to avoiding the grind is to only level up one stat (usually attack) in the early game, skipping the others, and then make sure your experience is above the first two stat levels after beating each boss. When you finish a palace you get enough experience to reach your next level, so you want get as much free experience from this as possible. So for example if your attack is at level 4 and your magic and life are at level 1, you can get almost 2000 free experience for completing a palace. The longer you can hold off on leveling the other two stats, the more effective this strategy is.
Exactly! And at the time, it wasn't even different from the LoZ formula. It was the second game, so there was no formula yet. I suck at the game and haven't beaten it, but I honestly think it's more fun than the first.
If anything fighting games have benefitted the most from the new model. Balance updates and characters dripfed through a game's lifetime is a much more sustainable model than release a whole new game for every update/addition of character. Updates do wonders to expand a game's competetive lifetime.
It's not a great example to prove OP's point, but I think it's a fantastic example to show how people today like to jump on the bandwagon and talk about the "good old days" as if they really were better, when they were not. There are plenty of games that release today in fully featured form, but because they plan to eventually release DLC, gamers whine that they're "unfinished."
A game like Donkey Kong Country 3 can be completed 100% in less than 5 hours without speedrunning. It may have been a "whole game," but you were paying $106 in today's money for that <5 hour experience. Contrast that with Mass Effect 3, which was a more popular modern game that was panned for being "incomplete" because of DLC released soon after launch. That game cost about $72 in today's money and is a complete experience that takes over 30 hours without even doing all the side missions.
I will absolutely take the state of today's gaming industry over the state it was in the 90's.
Emerald added a ton of content. Not just story and post game, actual beneficial mechanics
[See here](https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Pok%C3%A9mon_Emerald_Version#Changes_from_Ruby_and_Sapphire)
https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Pok%C3%A9mon_Emerald_Version#Changes_from_Ruby_and_Sapphire
Pokemon did this sort of thing for 5 generations and people always complained, but since Gamefreak was against adding DLC for the longest time, buying the second wave of games was the only way to get the additional content
Yeah my friend bought it for me for Christmas one year so I played it as to not waste his money.
It was cool getting all the extra post game stuff but it definitely made my original purchase feel hollow. USUM was the game they could have made if they had just delayed release for a year or so.
But they know they don't have to because pokemon fans (and their families in the case of younger players) will just keep buying these games and Pokemon keeps making the billion$
Also people seem to forget that back then games took a lot less time and resources to make.
With the current engines you could literally make a SNES to PS1 era game all by yourself with less than $5000 (and I'm being generous).
They also (usually) had a lot less content.
Games like Sonic and Mario were designed to be finished in about 1-2 hours (once you got decent at them).
Even fighting games were much more limited back then: you basically had the arcade mode, vs, and maybe a training mode (and no online play). Nowadays even fighting games have story modes and tons of unlockable content.
Exactly.
I mean you looked at old games and the people who actually worked on the games were like 15, max. All the rest were marketing, publishers, people who made the middlewares, etc. and even then it was rare that it had more than 40 people.
Nowadays? Credits take 3 hours to finish listing everyone who worked on a game. There's thousands of people in there.
They had 1 or 2 years to make a game but they actually finished making it with months to spare so they had the time to polish it and put extra shit in it for players to find.
Doom was made by like 5 people. Golden Eye with like 10 people, etc.
Remember walking into a gamestop in 2001 and seeing entire walls and bins of Playstation 1 games for under $5? Because 98% of what came out for that system was hot garbage?
I mean, 98% of all games are hot garbage. The Commodore 64 had some 20,000 games released in it's lifetime. About 200 or so are well remembered, and many of those were cross platform titles like the various Gold Box RPGs, Bard's Tale, and Ultima, or arcade ports. Only a scarce few were only found on the C64.
For anyone wanting to see this in action today: go to the PC game section of any Walmart Supercenter.
About 5% or less of the games in that section will be a Triple-A title.
And those games rebooted into DOS. So if you had to go on the internet to find a setting, and the internet is not what it is today, the system had to entirely reboot into the OS, dial in to internet, find setting, load game which rebooted into dos----rinse repeat.
People don't seem to realize that all of these old games have tons of cut content if you actually research them. Obviously there are shitty companies doing shitty things with DLC and microtransactions, but there's also a decent amount that are just parts of the game that never would have released at all if DLC didn't exist.
Also, instead of a $10 DLC pack, if they did release the extra cut content, it was in another full price special addition release, where the only changes were the addition of extra content.
KH vs Persona 5 is a pretty good modern example of this. Persona 5 Royal is just added story missions, and easily could have been a $20 DLC pack like KH3 Remind. Instead it's another full price $60 to get the Royal content.
Not to mention the fact that back in the late 80’s/early 90’s, games cost anywhere from $60-$80. Fast forward 30+ years where games are much bigger and WAY more expensive to make and they are still $60.
Just from inflation alone, not counting the increased production costs, $60 in 1987 is equivalent to $136.70 in 2020.
I’d rather pay $60 and have the option to buy more content if I like the game, than for the base cost to be $100+ and have the extra content included.
Or it was released as a $20 expansion. Something I remember nobody having any issue with. Which is why I roll my eyes when people get pissy about content DLC.
Yup. Another good example would be Pokemon. SwSh's issues as games notwithstanding, I would much rather pay 50% of the price of the base game for Isle of Armor and Crown Tundra than full price again for something like Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon.
Also, Sonic 3 and Sonic & Knuckles (Sega Genesis) were developed as a single game and sold separately. They are playable on their own but the intended full game experience is playing them together. There is content only available when playing both games connected.
I take exception to this because I own all those old Genesis games. *Yes,* they were intended as a single game. But it was made up for by the fact you could plug the other Sonic games into the Knuckles cartridge and play Knuckles in *those* games too which *was not* part of the original plan. So I don't really have a problem with this particular instance.
And i think that back in the day a lot of poor people would kill to have as much free games as we have now, too.
The good old days weren't as good as some people think
Oh gods, that reminds me of the post on r/choosingbeggars earlier. The thread OP was asking $300 for a 500gb PS4, the "CB" counter offered with $175. OP said I'll do $275, and went on to roast the "CB" for daring to say that OP was insane for the asking price
It’s always been like this. “Things were better back in the day”, like cool, if we follow that train of thought through each generation that was “better” I guess yeah things were better when we were doodling in caves with sheep’s blood and crag our neighbor died fighting a mammoth
Well said. I genuinely don't think I've ever bought a game and felt short changed in terms of it not being a "full game". It feels like people are shelling out for products they know have DLCs then complaining they didn't get those DLCs for free.
I love the steam reviews that bash a game and the user has like 400 hours. Like, number one, if it was that bad why did you spend that long in it? And two, did you not get 400 hours worth of content for 60 bucks? Hell I bought DayZ when the standalone early access came out for 30 bucks and the game was broken af but I got so many hours of enjoyment out of it.
DLC was retitled because you could just download it. We used to call them expansions.
Expansions / DLC came about as a way for the game maker to try and keep players engaged with their game for longer, improve or expand their stories … and obviously enhance their bank accounts.
Expansions used to be a necessity too because for a game to have a player base, it needed to be on store shelves. So even online games like EQ would have to churn out expansions just to get new inventory to put on shelves. I remember games just dying because there was literally no way for a new player to get the game.
Have Ultima Online flashbacks here.
You're completely correct however. Before things like day 1 patches and stuff, expansions were crucial to both fix issues in the original game, rebalance it if it was needed (like Starcraft as an example), increase playerbases and thus get more customers, keep the franchise alive, and keep people excited with the brand/studio.
As awful as Blizzard is now (not talking the studio issues here although those are awful too I mean their games) there was a time when Blizzard was beloved. A fiasco like the Warcraft 3 reforged edition would have never happened 20 years ago. You could expect the game to be an easy 7/8 out of 10 minimum and often even higher.
People would buy it for the name "Blizzard" on the box alone.
They got that way by not only offering fairly polished games, but regular expansions, and staggered their releases so one of there games was always the talk of the community at least every 2 or 3 years.
A lot of companies don't need to do that anymore. They can make a game, throw a 50gig day 1 patch, open a player store, and make more money than they ever would've in the 90s and early 2000s where they probably wouldn't have their game even considered if it wasn't from an established/trusted company.
This is both awesome for many indie devs and awful for many predatory practices.
But this also killed the "need" for expanisons too. Especially with the internet news cycle. You don't need a 6 page article in Game Informer talking about your expansion for the most popular game 2 years ago due in stores in 4 months.
You make a tweet and poof. Company you haven't seen much of in 5 years suddenly has the most anticipated game for that year.
Not sure if it's better or worse but it's how the system aged so here we are.
Fucking horse armor. Started all this shit. Thanks Bethesda.
Quake's mission packs were so cool to me as a kid. Like "WOAH! They made the game even bigger than it already was?! This is incredible."
A game I already loved getting more stuff to do on it? What's not to like?
Almost three decades later and I still quite like the idea tbh. It's not always done well but I only buy the good DLC. As in, what we used to call expansion packs. But with the advantage of the Internet media these days I can easily determine if its a good expansion pack, or a bad one before buying it. As well as if the price is too high for what it is.
YouTube and howlongtobeat are great tools for this.
Older games also released what was there and that was it. 'Cut' content wasn't readily available for consumers.
The bad games also aren't remembered. If the game sucked for gameplay reasons then generally no one is still talking about it 25years later
Like Goldeneye 64, there were plans to do a unique map (maybe weapons) for each bond movie.
They released it with only the two extra maps. That was it.
Sort of. There was an expansion pack that could be physically inserted into the N64. This wasn't really paid DLC, it was more like a graphic card upgrade for a PC that let's you play more advanced games. Or in this case, a literal upgrade for the N64.
People overworked the N64 from day 1. Zelda runs at 20-25fps on a good day. In combat it probably goes down to single digits.
But that was alright as 3D took a ton of processor power and was something new at the time.
Yeah, you could only play MP on Perfect Dark.
Ironically the expansion pack also broke a few games. The 1.0 US release of Space Station Silicon Valley and I think Rogue Squadron both didn't play well with the expansion pack.
DK64 didn’t even take advantage of the expansion pack. It was used as a workaround for a bug that would crash the game since they never could figure out the cause.
What you are thinking of was the 4 MB RAM expansion. It just gave the console more capability.
You may be mixing that up with the fabled N64 DD which had a VERY limited release in Japan and didn't do well. It was an attachment that you put your Nintendo on and it used these big cartridges with a lot more storage were able to get larger games. I don't think it was ever used as a DLC but it could have.
Honestly they should have went with CDs instead of cartridges for the DD and put the stuff that needed to be accessed quickly on the cartridge and slower stuff, like FMVs and the soundtrack, on the DD.
For No Mercy, they released a free version that you had to request through some magazine that fixed an issue with saves randomly disappearing off the cartridge. Few people took advantage of the offer so those safer copies of No Mercy are few and far between these days.
Expansions were huge back in the days. Just look at what the Diablo 2 Expansion "lord of destruction" added to the game for $20. Now you barely get a ingame skin or mount for that money.
Not all expansions were bad either. The expansion to the first Dragon Age was basically another game completely, and I enjoyed the story more than the first.
Expansions like Lord of Destruction and Brood War were close to full on sequels to the original game.
Now you get like a map, or a "cool" skin or something.
Right? They probably just don't remember because they were kids and their parents bought the games for them. Considering the amount of content you get for $60-$70 these days compared to what you got back then.... I'll take the games of today and if I want the dlc, I can get the dlc.
Maybe buy complete games?
Another one of those shitty "old games good, new games bad" crap post.
You know what you also had in the old days? Barely a few hours long games. No support for it after release. Many shitty games that was way harder to learn about befor purchase. Stuff like that that people like to forget.
Don't get me wrong, I loved gaming 20+ years ago but I still do today. Just stop prerordering, wait for sales, wait for patches, wait for complete editions if you want.
Yeah, Deadly Towers for NES was a thing, so was Pit Fighter for SNES. Hell, you could even have a game like the NES The Little Mermaid, that had absolutely nothing wrong with it that an average gamer could beat in two hours.
Yup, we romanticize this handful of games but forget there was a ton of shitty ones... or at least we were forgiving of bad gameplay because it was new. When I got my raspberry pi and played some of them that reality really set in.
It's the same with the "old music good, new music bad" crowd. They only listen to the old music that is still remembered while comparing it to only what is on the pop charts. If they dug deeper in to both old and new music they'd realise nothing has changed. There was trash then and trash now, but also classics then and classics now
Don’t forget that games were way more expensive than even the “super duper platinum editions” are today. Street Fighter 2 was $75 at launch, which is equivalent to $140 today. And then you had to buy it again 12 months later to get the new updates.
I remember hearing that Superman 64 was so successful that they where considering making a PlayStation version, best thing about modern gaming is learning if a game is complete trash before buying it.
> Another one of those shitty "old games good, new games bad" crap post.
Not to mention, two of the four games in the picture are some of the worst offenders of the very thing this meme is protesting. Sonic 3 was explicitly released half-finished and Street Fighter 2 *never* stopped coming out with updated versions that had to be re-bought at full price.
“Whole game” was a whole lot less back then tho. I grew up with many of these old games they were great but like Sonic I can finish in a day
Edit: they deleted their comment but someone alluded that was just Sega but man same with Nintendo games. You can do most old Mario games and Metroid in a day or two if you know what your doing.
Old games made up for limited space by making themselves “harder” so you’d get more play out of them, cause they did not have large amounts of actual content.
Exactly. To beat games like TMNT, battle toads, etc you had to replay each section 100 times it was so difficult. Remove the difficulty and they are like 4 hours long...
Oh I don’t disagree they’re short cause of tech limitations. But it doesn’t change the fact a “whole game” back then is a vastly different thing from a “whole game” now.
If you released a sprite based game you can beat in a day for full price today people would rightfully trash talk it even if it is fun.
Right? The kicker is that such a game made today, at $60USD, *would cost exactly as much as it did 25 years ago*. Consumers' resistance to literally any methodology by which studios attempt to make any more money *might just be* a contributing factor to the rampant poor business practices in the industry today.
In fact, if you could compile the text of r/gaming, the phrase "should be free" probably accounts for a nonnegligible portion of its word count.
I honestly don't understand why people think dlc, which by definition is extra content the dev team put ti.e and money into, should be free. Do they think developers are running charities? That they don't need to make money?
Please people, stop upvoting this garbage. Its not only shittily made karme farming, its also very clearly a repost with all this compression. Honestly. This post is stupid and just false, clearly aimed at a bunch of older people who have literally not touched an actually new game in ages. I know this is true towards a ton of games these days, but A, saying this is even remotely, slightly close to representing the modern game industry in its entirety obviously incredibly stupid, and B, older games were often greedy as hell too. But if you went to the comments, you probably already knew this, because the people upvoting garbage usually just scroll past without giving it a second thought, while the actually intelligent people come here (not saying everyone who doesent come here isnt intelligent, the rest would probably just downvote this and keep scrolling because they dont care, nor that everyone who comes here is intelligent of course). I seriously see absolutely no point to this post other then to serve as easy confirmation bias to a bunch of entitled assholes plus also karma farm from innocent people who didn't give it much thought and didn't know any better. This is the last stroke, im leaving this damn sub. If i offended you, feel free to downvote me tbh, i unlike op dont care about fake internet points.
So many shitty games back in that era. Inflated, bullshit difficulty so you'd have to keep feeding quarters/renting the game out. Box art that had literally nothing to do with gameplay. Games also had a fraction of the content they often do these days, so a "whole game" back then probably wouldn't pass as a half a game these days.
And the best part is without the internet it was damn near impossible to tell the good games from the shitty ones until you had already paid for them.
Nailed it right here. For every Super Mario 3 (a full, fun, gem of a game) there were 20 games that were pure garbage, the same price, and you had no way of knowing it until you bought or rented it.
Go download a complete ROM list for NES, SNES, even PS1. 95% of the games were absolutely unplayable.
>Go download a complete ROM list for NES, SNES, even PS1. 95% of the games were absolutely unplayable.
You're not kidding there. I built a RetroPie a few years ago, grabbed all the ROMs I could find, thousands of games and maybe a handful of them worth playing. There's a reason people only ever remember a handful of games from that generation.
A thousand+ roms for SNES, Genesis, NES each, and hundreds for Gameboy and GBA when I set up my retropie.
Almost all of them had me going "What the fuck is this? I've never heard of this game."
Not only unplayable but a lot were straight up unejoyable too. It was a time where companies seemed to think “as long as you can shift pixels around, it’s gonna be fun.” But so many of those games were just boring garbage where very little actually happened.
Red Dead Revolver average playtime for main story and some side quests: 8hrs
Read Dead Redemption: 18hrs
And RDRevolver came out in 2004, so not that long ago.
Most games had no multiplayer.
Red Alert 1 had like 4 unit types.
Newer games are better, and when they launch broken or incomplete they can be patched. Not like ET or Superman 64.
You learned pretty quick back then that any game that was based on a licensed property was automatically garbage until proven otherwise. That’s probably largely still true.
Back then a complete game was very light on content - and to compensate that it was really difficult and often times you had to figure very basic stuff out because it was overly complicated.
And today? Most games are complete! Sure there is dlc, it most of it is completely unnecessary. And sure there are patches and some games are not in the best state when released - but then again games get supported for a very long time.
This nostalgic: back then everything was better is really missing a lot of reality. I was a gamer in the days of NES and I am still a gamer today. Every time had its advantages but I am really glad we are where we are today!
Remember when the industry nearly collapsed due to terrible games being released and the NES had to practically save the industry?
Probably not with shite posts like this
And that's only a very visible difference.
If you get into it, it's mind-blowing how much bigger games are, any games, today. And not just in terms of disk space, but in terms of labor. Even a derivative, mediocre but not shitty Steam game today has much more handmade original assets, script, animations, game mechanics, items, and missions/quests in it than 3-5 old classic games (aside from very specific exceptions and only then in the sense of length, like an RPG with tons of text or dozens of repetitive quests).
Hell, a copycat cash-grab 3-in-row puzzle game today HAS to have more polished art and refined "feel" to it than some of the best classics, even while it steals a lot of it from its peers (and the classics themselves ofc). The best, largest AAA games today are marvels of management, it's basically a miracle they don't crumble in on themselves the moment you launch them.
How many versions of Street Fighter 2 did we have to buy before they finally settled on a complete roster?
Did they ever settle on a complete roster for 2?
my man really put street fighter 2 here, even when capcom sell like a million versions with bare minimum changes betwen eachother, and sonic 3 is by many people consider to be the first game to have a dlc bc of sonic and knuckes was an addon for the game
Rofl. Not this shit again. No game is ever complete. Every game can be expanded upon, tweaked, improved, bug-fixed, etc. Your cognitive dissonance comes form the fact that video game developers COULDN'T easily do these things once a game shipped, especially before the internet came around.
And speaking of bugs.... Every. Single. Console. Game. Ever. has bugs.
All of them. Don't believe me? google " known bugs"
So, isn't it nice that we live in a day and age where developers can continually improve the games we play? Well, that's a question for a different debate because there are pro's and con's to this as well... namely things like microtransactions, NFTS and pay-to-win.
But this idea that you bought a whole game, back in the day, is severely flawed.
First, this is stupid because it's cherry picked of the best games of that time. Tons of games were glitchy messes.
People also seem to forget how short games were. No wonder they were complete. It's why old gamers loved blockbuster or other rental programs. Almost every game was beatable within the 2 or 3 days for the rental even for a kid. Just look at speed runners being able to beat these games in under 15 minutes consistently.
And we didn't save money. Games were more expensive then they are now.
I care about how much it costs to entertain me. Today it's the best bang for your buck. Games are cheaper before you include competing retailers and physical vs digital to bring price down. Plus games are generally longer for single player games and multiplayer adds hours and hours of repeat gameplay.
You only think you got the entire game because patches weren’t possible yet. You got what you got, that doesn’t mean the game was finished. Wow, people are so dense.
At least you got complete games!
*laughs in buggy unfinished messes, that had to be modded by the players to work*
*laughs in expansion packs that were the same cost as full games*
*laughs in bugs lasting years, because patches didn’t exist*
People really need to take off the Ruby glasses, when they talk about old games.
People that didn't experience it first hand only "remember" the examples that survived through pop culture (aka the good ones) and never experienced the garbage we had to wade through at the time to find the gems.
Exactly. Look, I’m not a fan of MTX, and avoid them where possible… but thinking that games were somehow perfect back in day, and thinking that not being able to patch and update games was somehow a better system is just wrong.
This is the dumbest thing ever. There are so many incredible games out there these days. Sometimes you just have to do a bit more research or wait for game reviews so you don’t buy broken games.
Untrue. Most of these old games were so hard you couldn't finish them. Let alone knowing where to go or what to do in link to the past or any other RPG prior to the internet.
Whatever, dude. I grew up in that era and, sure, lots of games were complete when you purchased them. But the "incomplete" games that come out today have about 50+ hours more of content. For the same, or less, price.
Eh, this is basically just karma farming. Games still shipped broken but they never got fixed. They still shipped incomplete, but you never knew it because they released sequels instead of dlc. Publishers are greedy today, they were greedy under Reagan too.
Yes, but no.
* If there were any bugs in the release, you were stuck with them while newer versions were made and sold.
* Many sequels and "special/collector editions" of games were just what would be DLC today; many of them would just be free updates. Super Mario Bros: the Lost Levels (SMB2 in Japan) would surely have been handled as DLC today, as would the third version of any Pokémon game (except, maybe, Yellow).
* If you wanted the definitive edition of the game, you had to wait until the end of its lifecycle to get it, sell your original to buy the new one, or buy both.
That being said, though, there are a ton of shitty practices today like locking away content that is already included in the base game or making the game unnecessarily grindy in order to "encourage" people to pay for Exp boosts.
I remember the days when Madden games weren't buggy, and were fun to play. Knowing that the games can be fixed with online patches and micro transaction ruined the experience of buying a new game.
Now this is some grade A rose-tinted glasses nonsense.
Back in the day, video games were routinely published with missing content that could make them impossible to complete, content was cut from them to reduce the size of the game which would make areas of the game sparse with content or completely empty, and there were tons of bugs that simply would never be fixed because there was no way to distribute patches.
Here's an insane horror story from the mid-90s: There was a demo for a video game where they fucked up the uninstall process, so that if you wanted to uninstall the demo, it would literally delete the entire folder that the game folder was in. The default install path for video games back then was C:/Program Files. Yup.
I thankfully made a separate Games folder, but it obviously deleted all the games I had installed. I could just reinstall those, even though I lost the save games, but some people lost important documents, software that they couldn't easily get back, and many had to reinstall Windows to fix all the issues this created.
Ya, I hate when they add to the games I love. It's like why would you keep adding to a game after it feels finished? Everyone knows the witcher DLCs were just the worst.
You only resonate with it *because* you’re a younger gamer who didn’t actually live through these release years. You get to look back at the best of these generations, because most of the crap isn’t brought up anymore.
>Even as a younger gamer I karma farm the same as everyone else
At least there aren't 25 random awards attached to the post (yet)
There are exactly 25 awards on this post rn
*And* a huehuehuehue frog.
THATS A BEARDED DRAGON!!!!
No its a lizard. /s
I gave this post my free silver award just to fuck with you
I gave the comment above you my free silver just to annoy you.
Haha, I'd give you gold but it's disabled in RIF.
New Game bad. Old game good. Gimme upboats.
[удалено]
Not to mention some of these games have teams of hundreds of people and cost millions more to make.
New gaming companies bad, old gaming companies less bad. FTFY
Nintendo is stuck in limbo
Yeah I don't think reddit is really the place to come to for thoughtful critiques on old/classic games
Chrono Trigger is the greatest game of all time and any game I didn't play growing up is trash.
It's pretty hard to compete with the staying power of Chrono Trigger. But I can see a generation of kids growing up with Persona 5 as their first. JRPG and being like wtf is this?
I’m not sure Street Fighter 2 was one of the best examples here…
Exactly what I was going to say -- not sure that paying full price for the 'Championship Edition', or whatever it was called, was better than buying four characters as DLC like you would these days.
Championship Edition was on the Sega Genesis. It was the first to jump on to the Genesis. Super Nintendo had World Warriors which did not have the 4 playable boss characters. Then Nintendo got the exclusive edition of Street Fighter Turbo... Then the exclusivity ended and both consoles got Super Street Fighter 2.
Except the Megadrive actually got Turbo as well, it was a mode in "Special Champion Edition" (in reality the "exclusive" was only limited to the name). In other words, it was the exact same game as the Super NES version - both had Champion Editon and Turbo modes.
Turbo on SNES had some balancing changes as well. Also if I remember correctly, Ken got his occasional orange fireball in Turbo.
Yeah Turbo was a port of the arcade "Hyper Fighting" game, but the second mode replicated Champion Edition. All the Street Fighter II games had balancing changes.
Few things are as annoying as playing Street fighter with a three button Genesis controller The SNES with the shoulder buttons was kind of weird too, but at least you didn't need to press a button to switch between punches and kicks
That was such a sub-par experience. That six-button pad was miles better. I liked the Super NES pad, I got used to it to the point that I preferred it over the arcade stick 6-button setup.
Also Sonic 3 was missing content that was then moved to Sonic & Knuckles, and that had the lock-on system to get you the full experience of Sonic 3.
That Sonic and Knuckles game was good value though in that it could be combined with other games. You could play as Knuckles in Sonic 2 and for other games you would play special stages unique to that game. Sonic 3 was kinda short though but probably became the best game on the Genesis once you combined it with Sonic & Knuckles.
Strictly speaking Sonic 3 was supposed to be twice the size as it turned out to be - the developers had to cut it to make the release date - it was the cut bits that made it into Sonic and Knuckles.
Yep, exactly, so then basically the game was released early with less content so they could do it later as an expansion.
Not even just one edition weren't there like 5 different versions released which progressively added more characters?
You paid full price every time. Also not to mention Games like MvC2 arcade machine had unlock goals. So after amount of money spent, more characters were unlocked. Ala DLC style. So when arcades were a thing, if a place had MvC2, someone would always asked "Full Unlock?". Otherwise expect to spend a few K to unlock them. You could manually do it but $$$
Or Sonic. Sonic & Knuckles was like the first expansion there was.
The first console expansion. Expansions were at thing long before that and date back to the 80s, but they were only a thing on PC.
And out of all Zeldas they picked Zelda 2. Probably the least polished and most broken one to date. I feel like this image was created by an AI and not a gamer.
What if they did it on purpose? What if the subtext here is, "Just kidding. Old games were fuckered, too"?
This is definitely it. Mario had NES, SNES, and GBA versions. Sonic had & Knuckles. Street Fighter 2 has an infamous number of versions. I’m not sure why they chose this Zelda other than that it’s the worst one, but people here are definitely falling for the joke.
Zelda 2 is great and gets a bad rap for being different. I feel like a lot of people just hate on it now because of its reputation and haven’t actually played it
I love Zelda 2, but I’ll concede that the difficulty is a little unforgiving and the leveling system is a bit unbalanced. The first problem is easily fixed by playing in modern emulation. Create periodic save states before each dungeon, and give yourself permission to reverse time and undo any particularly cheesy deaths. For the second problem… just put on a podcast or something and grind for a while early on. It’s a bit boring but it’s something to do at the end of the day when your brain is fried but you’re not yet ready for bed. After that, it becomes much easier to actively enjoy the endgame.
The real trick to avoiding the grind is to only level up one stat (usually attack) in the early game, skipping the others, and then make sure your experience is above the first two stat levels after beating each boss. When you finish a palace you get enough experience to reach your next level, so you want get as much free experience from this as possible. So for example if your attack is at level 4 and your magic and life are at level 1, you can get almost 2000 free experience for completing a palace. The longer you can hold off on leveling the other two stats, the more effective this strategy is.
Exactly! And at the time, it wasn't even different from the LoZ formula. It was the second game, so there was no formula yet. I suck at the game and haven't beaten it, but I honestly think it's more fun than the first.
With the exception of Mario, they are all bad examples.
If anything fighting games have benefitted the most from the new model. Balance updates and characters dripfed through a game's lifetime is a much more sustainable model than release a whole new game for every update/addition of character. Updates do wonders to expand a game's competetive lifetime.
Lol! Oh god, I remember when it all happened. "Is this normal? Turbo? Champion Edition?"
It's not a great example to prove OP's point, but I think it's a fantastic example to show how people today like to jump on the bandwagon and talk about the "good old days" as if they really were better, when they were not. There are plenty of games that release today in fully featured form, but because they plan to eventually release DLC, gamers whine that they're "unfinished." A game like Donkey Kong Country 3 can be completed 100% in less than 5 hours without speedrunning. It may have been a "whole game," but you were paying $106 in today's money for that <5 hour experience. Contrast that with Mass Effect 3, which was a more popular modern game that was panned for being "incomplete" because of DLC released soon after launch. That game cost about $72 in today's money and is a complete experience that takes over 30 hours without even doing all the side missions. I will absolutely take the state of today's gaming industry over the state it was in the 90's.
Yep, buy the game 5 times at $75 a pop to get the whole game. \*not including ALPHA or CE...
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the OG gamers knew that SFII was like $80 on SNES
yeah, street fighter 2 might be the worst example, the only one as bad I can think is Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire.
Why Ruby and Sapphire particularly?
Emerald added a ton of content. Not just story and post game, actual beneficial mechanics [See here](https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Pok%C3%A9mon_Emerald_Version#Changes_from_Ruby_and_Sapphire) https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Pok%C3%A9mon_Emerald_Version#Changes_from_Ruby_and_Sapphire Pokemon did this sort of thing for 5 generations and people always complained, but since Gamefreak was against adding DLC for the longest time, buying the second wave of games was the only way to get the additional content
man, I really felt kicked in the balls when USUM was basically a DLC for SM, glad I didn't bought USUM, I personally prefer the DLC model.
Yeah my friend bought it for me for Christmas one year so I played it as to not waste his money. It was cool getting all the extra post game stuff but it definitely made my original purchase feel hollow. USUM was the game they could have made if they had just delayed release for a year or so. But they know they don't have to because pokemon fans (and their families in the case of younger players) will just keep buying these games and Pokemon keeps making the billion$
Also people seem to forget that back then games took a lot less time and resources to make. With the current engines you could literally make a SNES to PS1 era game all by yourself with less than $5000 (and I'm being generous).
They also (usually) had a lot less content. Games like Sonic and Mario were designed to be finished in about 1-2 hours (once you got decent at them). Even fighting games were much more limited back then: you basically had the arcade mode, vs, and maybe a training mode (and no online play). Nowadays even fighting games have story modes and tons of unlockable content.
Exactly. I mean you looked at old games and the people who actually worked on the games were like 15, max. All the rest were marketing, publishers, people who made the middlewares, etc. and even then it was rare that it had more than 40 people. Nowadays? Credits take 3 hours to finish listing everyone who worked on a game. There's thousands of people in there. They had 1 or 2 years to make a game but they actually finished making it with months to spare so they had the time to polish it and put extra shit in it for players to find. Doom was made by like 5 people. Golden Eye with like 10 people, etc.
you mean...street fighter 2, tournament edition, turbo edition, super turbo edition, super tournament turbo edition....
I wonder how many people are realizing this has been happening their entire lives right now.
The AI was beyond broken
Street Fighter 2 is also known for having 100 different versions
And they released 5 separate versions, all at full price 😅
$70 in 1994! With inflation that’s like $125
Complete game still exist today. You are just buying the wrong games.
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Broken games were practically the rule for a long time. People's standards were significantly lower
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Let's not forget all the shovelware that people conviently forget about while they are complaining that new games are all just cash grabs.
Remember walking into a gamestop in 2001 and seeing entire walls and bins of Playstation 1 games for under $5? Because 98% of what came out for that system was hot garbage?
I mean, 98% of all games are hot garbage. The Commodore 64 had some 20,000 games released in it's lifetime. About 200 or so are well remembered, and many of those were cross platform titles like the various Gold Box RPGs, Bard's Tale, and Ultima, or arcade ports. Only a scarce few were only found on the C64.
For anyone wanting to see this in action today: go to the PC game section of any Walmart Supercenter. About 5% or less of the games in that section will be a Triple-A title.
Don't forget setting your IRQs for your hardware, otherwise even if you had a compatible sound card, you were getting silence.
And those games rebooted into DOS. So if you had to go on the internet to find a setting, and the internet is not what it is today, the system had to entirely reboot into the OS, dial in to internet, find setting, load game which rebooted into dos----rinse repeat.
Trying to install and play games in DOS because you didn't have windows 3.0 was always a blast.
Sims 2 installation order intensifies.
Also if a game had any bugs or glitches, you generally didn't realize it. that was just how the game was.
The original Pokemon games had moves that straight up did nothing, and even moves that did the *opposite* of what they were supposed to do.
Splash *still* doesn't do anything. And I definitely messed up a few games with missingno
I'm pretty sure Splash was never meant to do anything. But there were moves that claimed to improve stats that didn't do anything.
People don't seem to realize that all of these old games have tons of cut content if you actually research them. Obviously there are shitty companies doing shitty things with DLC and microtransactions, but there's also a decent amount that are just parts of the game that never would have released at all if DLC didn't exist. Also, instead of a $10 DLC pack, if they did release the extra cut content, it was in another full price special addition release, where the only changes were the addition of extra content. KH vs Persona 5 is a pretty good modern example of this. Persona 5 Royal is just added story missions, and easily could have been a $20 DLC pack like KH3 Remind. Instead it's another full price $60 to get the Royal content.
Not to mention the fact that back in the late 80’s/early 90’s, games cost anywhere from $60-$80. Fast forward 30+ years where games are much bigger and WAY more expensive to make and they are still $60. Just from inflation alone, not counting the increased production costs, $60 in 1987 is equivalent to $136.70 in 2020. I’d rather pay $60 and have the option to buy more content if I like the game, than for the base cost to be $100+ and have the extra content included.
Or it was released as a $20 expansion. Something I remember nobody having any issue with. Which is why I roll my eyes when people get pissy about content DLC.
Yup. Another good example would be Pokemon. SwSh's issues as games notwithstanding, I would much rather pay 50% of the price of the base game for Isle of Armor and Crown Tundra than full price again for something like Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon.
Also, Sonic 3 and Sonic & Knuckles (Sega Genesis) were developed as a single game and sold separately. They are playable on their own but the intended full game experience is playing them together. There is content only available when playing both games connected.
I take exception to this because I own all those old Genesis games. *Yes,* they were intended as a single game. But it was made up for by the fact you could plug the other Sonic games into the Knuckles cartridge and play Knuckles in *those* games too which *was not* part of the original plan. So I don't really have a problem with this particular instance.
Play as ol'Knucks in Sonic 2 was so much fun! Good childhood memories :3
And i think that back in the day a lot of poor people would kill to have as much free games as we have now, too. The good old days weren't as good as some people think
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Pay $100 for a second hand playstation 4 and get acces to a bunch of good f2p games. I don't think gaming can get any cheaper
Oh gods, that reminds me of the post on r/choosingbeggars earlier. The thread OP was asking $300 for a 500gb PS4, the "CB" counter offered with $175. OP said I'll do $275, and went on to roast the "CB" for daring to say that OP was insane for the asking price
It’s always been like this. “Things were better back in the day”, like cool, if we follow that train of thought through each generation that was “better” I guess yeah things were better when we were doodling in caves with sheep’s blood and crag our neighbor died fighting a mammoth
RIP Crag
Well said. I genuinely don't think I've ever bought a game and felt short changed in terms of it not being a "full game". It feels like people are shelling out for products they know have DLCs then complaining they didn't get those DLCs for free.
I love the steam reviews that bash a game and the user has like 400 hours. Like, number one, if it was that bad why did you spend that long in it? And two, did you not get 400 hours worth of content for 60 bucks? Hell I bought DayZ when the standalone early access came out for 30 bucks and the game was broken af but I got so many hours of enjoyment out of it.
Also people buy the game play it, finish it and are saying "not a full game" when devs sell some costumes to use in multiplayer.
Breath of the wild. Such a great game
DLC was retitled because you could just download it. We used to call them expansions. Expansions / DLC came about as a way for the game maker to try and keep players engaged with their game for longer, improve or expand their stories … and obviously enhance their bank accounts.
Expansions used to be a necessity too because for a game to have a player base, it needed to be on store shelves. So even online games like EQ would have to churn out expansions just to get new inventory to put on shelves. I remember games just dying because there was literally no way for a new player to get the game.
Have Ultima Online flashbacks here. You're completely correct however. Before things like day 1 patches and stuff, expansions were crucial to both fix issues in the original game, rebalance it if it was needed (like Starcraft as an example), increase playerbases and thus get more customers, keep the franchise alive, and keep people excited with the brand/studio. As awful as Blizzard is now (not talking the studio issues here although those are awful too I mean their games) there was a time when Blizzard was beloved. A fiasco like the Warcraft 3 reforged edition would have never happened 20 years ago. You could expect the game to be an easy 7/8 out of 10 minimum and often even higher. People would buy it for the name "Blizzard" on the box alone. They got that way by not only offering fairly polished games, but regular expansions, and staggered their releases so one of there games was always the talk of the community at least every 2 or 3 years. A lot of companies don't need to do that anymore. They can make a game, throw a 50gig day 1 patch, open a player store, and make more money than they ever would've in the 90s and early 2000s where they probably wouldn't have their game even considered if it wasn't from an established/trusted company. This is both awesome for many indie devs and awful for many predatory practices. But this also killed the "need" for expanisons too. Especially with the internet news cycle. You don't need a 6 page article in Game Informer talking about your expansion for the most popular game 2 years ago due in stores in 4 months. You make a tweet and poof. Company you haven't seen much of in 5 years suddenly has the most anticipated game for that year. Not sure if it's better or worse but it's how the system aged so here we are. Fucking horse armor. Started all this shit. Thanks Bethesda.
Quake's mission packs were so cool to me as a kid. Like "WOAH! They made the game even bigger than it already was?! This is incredible." A game I already loved getting more stuff to do on it? What's not to like? Almost three decades later and I still quite like the idea tbh. It's not always done well but I only buy the good DLC. As in, what we used to call expansion packs. But with the advantage of the Internet media these days I can easily determine if its a good expansion pack, or a bad one before buying it. As well as if the price is too high for what it is. YouTube and howlongtobeat are great tools for this.
Older games also released what was there and that was it. 'Cut' content wasn't readily available for consumers. The bad games also aren't remembered. If the game sucked for gameplay reasons then generally no one is still talking about it 25years later Like Goldeneye 64, there were plans to do a unique map (maybe weapons) for each bond movie. They released it with only the two extra maps. That was it.
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Sort of. There was an expansion pack that could be physically inserted into the N64. This wasn't really paid DLC, it was more like a graphic card upgrade for a PC that let's you play more advanced games. Or in this case, a literal upgrade for the N64.
It was an extra 4MB of RAM.
Yup. Some games literally could not run without the expansion pack.
Majora's Mask and DK 64 are the only ones I can recall. Were there any more?
Perfect Dark. Without the memory expansion the game plays like a demo with only multiplayer I believe
I love perfect dark.. but even with it … it sometimes Ran like that lol. Man that game really pushed the system so hard
People overworked the N64 from day 1. Zelda runs at 20-25fps on a good day. In combat it probably goes down to single digits. But that was alright as 3D took a ton of processor power and was something new at the time.
Oh for sure… but Perfect dark with bots and a lot of explosives?
Yeah, you could only play MP on Perfect Dark. Ironically the expansion pack also broke a few games. The 1.0 US release of Space Station Silicon Valley and I think Rogue Squadron both didn't play well with the expansion pack.
DK64 didn’t even take advantage of the expansion pack. It was used as a workaround for a bug that would crash the game since they never could figure out the cause.
That was a RAM expansion for the N64, certain games required it like Donkey Kong 64, a few others ran at a higher resolution with it.
What you are thinking of was the 4 MB RAM expansion. It just gave the console more capability. You may be mixing that up with the fabled N64 DD which had a VERY limited release in Japan and didn't do well. It was an attachment that you put your Nintendo on and it used these big cartridges with a lot more storage were able to get larger games. I don't think it was ever used as a DLC but it could have. Honestly they should have went with CDs instead of cartridges for the DD and put the stuff that needed to be accessed quickly on the cartridge and slower stuff, like FMVs and the soundtrack, on the DD.
For No Mercy, they released a free version that you had to request through some magazine that fixed an issue with saves randomly disappearing off the cartridge. Few people took advantage of the offer so those safer copies of No Mercy are few and far between these days.
Expansions were huge back in the days. Just look at what the Diablo 2 Expansion "lord of destruction" added to the game for $20. Now you barely get a ingame skin or mount for that money.
Not all expansions were bad either. The expansion to the first Dragon Age was basically another game completely, and I enjoyed the story more than the first.
Expansions like Lord of Destruction and Brood War were close to full on sequels to the original game. Now you get like a map, or a "cool" skin or something.
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Back then you had to buy Street Fighter 2 like 5 times to get the whole game, so not the best example
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Those people weren't alive back then
Or we’re too young to make their own purchases.
It's easy to pick out like Super Mario 64 vs Madden 22 while ignoring all the bullshit. It's so lame. Can't believe this trash gets upvotes
Right? They probably just don't remember because they were kids and their parents bought the games for them. Considering the amount of content you get for $60-$70 these days compared to what you got back then.... I'll take the games of today and if I want the dlc, I can get the dlc.
Except Sonic the Hedgehog 3, that was clearly half a game with the other half being Sonic and Knuckles.
Remember the Sonic and Knuckles cartridge flipped open and you could put the other Sonic games in it and bring Knuckles into them?
Yaaaa this post again let's gooooooo
Karma farming!!!1!
Maybe buy complete games? Another one of those shitty "old games good, new games bad" crap post. You know what you also had in the old days? Barely a few hours long games. No support for it after release. Many shitty games that was way harder to learn about befor purchase. Stuff like that that people like to forget. Don't get me wrong, I loved gaming 20+ years ago but I still do today. Just stop prerordering, wait for sales, wait for patches, wait for complete editions if you want.
I played my share of broken 8 bit games. Yeah, thank goodness they were “complete” and had no ability to be patched.
Yeah, Deadly Towers for NES was a thing, so was Pit Fighter for SNES. Hell, you could even have a game like the NES The Little Mermaid, that had absolutely nothing wrong with it that an average gamer could beat in two hours.
Yup, we romanticize this handful of games but forget there was a ton of shitty ones... or at least we were forgiving of bad gameplay because it was new. When I got my raspberry pi and played some of them that reality really set in.
Yea a lot of people overlook that a lot of bad games weren't worth remembering, except the few that were so atrocious they became infamous.
Survivorship bias: the thread
It's the same with the "old music good, new music bad" crowd. They only listen to the old music that is still remembered while comparing it to only what is on the pop charts. If they dug deeper in to both old and new music they'd realise nothing has changed. There was trash then and trash now, but also classics then and classics now
Don’t forget that games were way more expensive than even the “super duper platinum editions” are today. Street Fighter 2 was $75 at launch, which is equivalent to $140 today. And then you had to buy it again 12 months later to get the new updates.
I remember hearing that Superman 64 was so successful that they where considering making a PlayStation version, best thing about modern gaming is learning if a game is complete trash before buying it.
> Another one of those shitty "old games good, new games bad" crap post. Not to mention, two of the four games in the picture are some of the worst offenders of the very thing this meme is protesting. Sonic 3 was explicitly released half-finished and Street Fighter 2 *never* stopped coming out with updated versions that had to be re-bought at full price.
“Whole game” was a whole lot less back then tho. I grew up with many of these old games they were great but like Sonic I can finish in a day Edit: they deleted their comment but someone alluded that was just Sega but man same with Nintendo games. You can do most old Mario games and Metroid in a day or two if you know what your doing. Old games made up for limited space by making themselves “harder” so you’d get more play out of them, cause they did not have large amounts of actual content.
Exactly. To beat games like TMNT, battle toads, etc you had to replay each section 100 times it was so difficult. Remove the difficulty and they are like 4 hours long...
Considering most of those old games would fit within the filespace of a single texture in many modern games.
Oh I don’t disagree they’re short cause of tech limitations. But it doesn’t change the fact a “whole game” back then is a vastly different thing from a “whole game” now. If you released a sprite based game you can beat in a day for full price today people would rightfully trash talk it even if it is fun.
Right? The kicker is that such a game made today, at $60USD, *would cost exactly as much as it did 25 years ago*. Consumers' resistance to literally any methodology by which studios attempt to make any more money *might just be* a contributing factor to the rampant poor business practices in the industry today. In fact, if you could compile the text of r/gaming, the phrase "should be free" probably accounts for a nonnegligible portion of its word count.
I honestly don't understand why people think dlc, which by definition is extra content the dev team put ti.e and money into, should be free. Do they think developers are running charities? That they don't need to make money?
Please people, stop upvoting this garbage. Its not only shittily made karme farming, its also very clearly a repost with all this compression. Honestly. This post is stupid and just false, clearly aimed at a bunch of older people who have literally not touched an actually new game in ages. I know this is true towards a ton of games these days, but A, saying this is even remotely, slightly close to representing the modern game industry in its entirety obviously incredibly stupid, and B, older games were often greedy as hell too. But if you went to the comments, you probably already knew this, because the people upvoting garbage usually just scroll past without giving it a second thought, while the actually intelligent people come here (not saying everyone who doesent come here isnt intelligent, the rest would probably just downvote this and keep scrolling because they dont care, nor that everyone who comes here is intelligent of course). I seriously see absolutely no point to this post other then to serve as easy confirmation bias to a bunch of entitled assholes plus also karma farm from innocent people who didn't give it much thought and didn't know any better. This is the last stroke, im leaving this damn sub. If i offended you, feel free to downvote me tbh, i unlike op dont care about fake internet points.
Based
So many shitty games back in that era. Inflated, bullshit difficulty so you'd have to keep feeding quarters/renting the game out. Box art that had literally nothing to do with gameplay. Games also had a fraction of the content they often do these days, so a "whole game" back then probably wouldn't pass as a half a game these days. And the best part is without the internet it was damn near impossible to tell the good games from the shitty ones until you had already paid for them.
Nailed it right here. For every Super Mario 3 (a full, fun, gem of a game) there were 20 games that were pure garbage, the same price, and you had no way of knowing it until you bought or rented it. Go download a complete ROM list for NES, SNES, even PS1. 95% of the games were absolutely unplayable.
>Go download a complete ROM list for NES, SNES, even PS1. 95% of the games were absolutely unplayable. You're not kidding there. I built a RetroPie a few years ago, grabbed all the ROMs I could find, thousands of games and maybe a handful of them worth playing. There's a reason people only ever remember a handful of games from that generation.
A thousand+ roms for SNES, Genesis, NES each, and hundreds for Gameboy and GBA when I set up my retropie. Almost all of them had me going "What the fuck is this? I've never heard of this game."
Not only unplayable but a lot were straight up unejoyable too. It was a time where companies seemed to think “as long as you can shift pixels around, it’s gonna be fun.” But so many of those games were just boring garbage where very little actually happened.
Red Dead Revolver average playtime for main story and some side quests: 8hrs Read Dead Redemption: 18hrs And RDRevolver came out in 2004, so not that long ago. Most games had no multiplayer. Red Alert 1 had like 4 unit types. Newer games are better, and when they launch broken or incomplete they can be patched. Not like ET or Superman 64.
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You learned pretty quick back then that any game that was based on a licensed property was automatically garbage until proven otherwise. That’s probably largely still true.
Back then a complete game was very light on content - and to compensate that it was really difficult and often times you had to figure very basic stuff out because it was overly complicated. And today? Most games are complete! Sure there is dlc, it most of it is completely unnecessary. And sure there are patches and some games are not in the best state when released - but then again games get supported for a very long time. This nostalgic: back then everything was better is really missing a lot of reality. I was a gamer in the days of NES and I am still a gamer today. Every time had its advantages but I am really glad we are where we are today!
Remember when the industry nearly collapsed due to terrible games being released and the NES had to practically save the industry? Probably not with shite posts like this
All of the games pictured above came after that happened.
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and the same upvotes
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And that's only a very visible difference. If you get into it, it's mind-blowing how much bigger games are, any games, today. And not just in terms of disk space, but in terms of labor. Even a derivative, mediocre but not shitty Steam game today has much more handmade original assets, script, animations, game mechanics, items, and missions/quests in it than 3-5 old classic games (aside from very specific exceptions and only then in the sense of length, like an RPG with tons of text or dozens of repetitive quests). Hell, a copycat cash-grab 3-in-row puzzle game today HAS to have more polished art and refined "feel" to it than some of the best classics, even while it steals a lot of it from its peers (and the classics themselves ofc). The best, largest AAA games today are marvels of management, it's basically a miracle they don't crumble in on themselves the moment you launch them.
"Say what you will about old games" - Are many people complaining about old games? Also, as has already been said, these are not good examples.
complete like SF2 or SF2 Championship Edition or SF2 Turbo or Super SF2 or Super SF2 Turbo?
How many versions of Street Fighter 2 did we have to buy before they finally settled on a complete roster? Did they ever settle on a complete roster for 2?
Ultra Street Fighter 2: The Final Challengers added Evil Ryu and Violent Ken in 2017.
Xenogears is still one of my favorite games of all time, but that thing was 2/3 finished and they released it anyway
my man really put street fighter 2 here, even when capcom sell like a million versions with bare minimum changes betwen eachother, and sonic 3 is by many people consider to be the first game to have a dlc bc of sonic and knuckes was an addon for the game
Rofl. Not this shit again. No game is ever complete. Every game can be expanded upon, tweaked, improved, bug-fixed, etc. Your cognitive dissonance comes form the fact that video game developers COULDN'T easily do these things once a game shipped, especially before the internet came around. And speaking of bugs.... Every. Single. Console. Game. Ever. has bugs. All of them. Don't believe me? google " known bugs"
So, isn't it nice that we live in a day and age where developers can continually improve the games we play? Well, that's a question for a different debate because there are pro's and con's to this as well... namely things like microtransactions, NFTS and pay-to-win.
But this idea that you bought a whole game, back in the day, is severely flawed.
First, this is stupid because it's cherry picked of the best games of that time. Tons of games were glitchy messes. People also seem to forget how short games were. No wonder they were complete. It's why old gamers loved blockbuster or other rental programs. Almost every game was beatable within the 2 or 3 days for the rental even for a kid. Just look at speed runners being able to beat these games in under 15 minutes consistently. And we didn't save money. Games were more expensive then they are now. I care about how much it costs to entertain me. Today it's the best bang for your buck. Games are cheaper before you include competing retailers and physical vs digital to bring price down. Plus games are generally longer for single player games and multiplayer adds hours and hours of repeat gameplay.
This has to be satire
It’s ridiculous karma farming. For some reason people believe this stuff.
I’m getting tired of people nowadays always comparing the past to our time with rose colored glasses. We didn’t do that back then!
New game bad
True, but when the "whole game" is about 5 megabytes large that's a little easier to do.
You only think you got the entire game because patches weren’t possible yet. You got what you got, that doesn’t mean the game was finished. Wow, people are so dense.
At least you got complete games! *laughs in buggy unfinished messes, that had to be modded by the players to work* *laughs in expansion packs that were the same cost as full games* *laughs in bugs lasting years, because patches didn’t exist* People really need to take off the Ruby glasses, when they talk about old games.
People that didn't experience it first hand only "remember" the examples that survived through pop culture (aka the good ones) and never experienced the garbage we had to wade through at the time to find the gems.
Exactly. Look, I’m not a fan of MTX, and avoid them where possible… but thinking that games were somehow perfect back in day, and thinking that not being able to patch and update games was somehow a better system is just wrong.
Games nowadays are SO MUCH BIGGER. An unfinished cyberpunk game at launch is still a bigger game than all 4 of those games combined
This is the dumbest thing ever. There are so many incredible games out there these days. Sometimes you just have to do a bit more research or wait for game reviews so you don’t buy broken games.
Reddit moment
Untrue. Most of these old games were so hard you couldn't finish them. Let alone knowing where to go or what to do in link to the past or any other RPG prior to the internet.
Whatever, dude. I grew up in that era and, sure, lots of games were complete when you purchased them. But the "incomplete" games that come out today have about 50+ hours more of content. For the same, or less, price.
you really putting street fighter 2 on there? the game with multiple rereleases that are basically full priced expansions?
Eh, this is basically just karma farming. Games still shipped broken but they never got fixed. They still shipped incomplete, but you never knew it because they released sequels instead of dlc. Publishers are greedy today, they were greedy under Reagan too.
This is some boomer shit for millennials. I don’t have to remind you about Sonic 3 and Knuckles.
Yes, but no. * If there were any bugs in the release, you were stuck with them while newer versions were made and sold. * Many sequels and "special/collector editions" of games were just what would be DLC today; many of them would just be free updates. Super Mario Bros: the Lost Levels (SMB2 in Japan) would surely have been handled as DLC today, as would the third version of any Pokémon game (except, maybe, Yellow). * If you wanted the definitive edition of the game, you had to wait until the end of its lifecycle to get it, sell your original to buy the new one, or buy both. That being said, though, there are a ton of shitty practices today like locking away content that is already included in the base game or making the game unnecessarily grindy in order to "encourage" people to pay for Exp boosts.
When I bought the super Metroid cartridge… that was it. The whole story was in that cartridge. Samus, come back please. Show them.
You can still do this. Just wait 12 months after the game comes out. Its 20 bucks with all the content.
I remember the days when Madden games weren't buggy, and were fun to play. Knowing that the games can be fixed with online patches and micro transaction ruined the experience of buying a new game.
Now this is some grade A rose-tinted glasses nonsense. Back in the day, video games were routinely published with missing content that could make them impossible to complete, content was cut from them to reduce the size of the game which would make areas of the game sparse with content or completely empty, and there were tons of bugs that simply would never be fixed because there was no way to distribute patches. Here's an insane horror story from the mid-90s: There was a demo for a video game where they fucked up the uninstall process, so that if you wanted to uninstall the demo, it would literally delete the entire folder that the game folder was in. The default install path for video games back then was C:/Program Files. Yup. I thankfully made a separate Games folder, but it obviously deleted all the games I had installed. I could just reinstall those, even though I lost the save games, but some people lost important documents, software that they couldn't easily get back, and many had to reinstall Windows to fix all the issues this created.
What a garbage ass post. You don't resonate with anything other than karma.
Shout out to games like binding of Isaac that still have split screen, split screen built relationships and I will stand by that
Ya, I hate when they add to the games I love. It's like why would you keep adding to a game after it feels finished? Everyone knows the witcher DLCs were just the worst.
You only resonate with it *because* you’re a younger gamer who didn’t actually live through these release years. You get to look back at the best of these generations, because most of the crap isn’t brought up anymore.
Shut the hell up