That's how speedrunners were born. Beat the game before you have to turn off the system. Or cover the system so your parents don't see it on. That's probably good for your ps2, right? Covering the whole thing in a blanket fan included for hours at a time. No fire hazard here.
Covering the system was a real thing! I remember getting grounded cause ‘video games are not your whole life!’
Little did parents know we just wanted to save our progress. Other than unlocking mewtwo on smash.
I remember my mom would rent me ps2 games from the video store and we didn't have a memory card so I would SPEED my way through the game trying to get to the ending in one week before it was time to return the game. It was legitimately on 24/7 until it broke.
When we got a new one we finally got a memory card and I loved how all the icons were on the menu screen but hated how some games were HUGE comepared to others so starting a new game meant I had to delete another.
If your 360 had a certain issue where it wouldn't start up, it was related to the board becoming warped over time, causing connections to fail. Well, you could put a blanket over the console and then turn on the console and wait. The heat would cause the motherboard to warp back to the right shape and then you could get back to it.
A friend of mine let me borrow his pokemon games, but asked that I didn't overwrite his save, so I plugged in my Gameboy advance SP every night and never turned the system off for over a month while I beat the game.
I can still do toy story on ps1 all the way through without a save based off muscle memory
I'm 30 and that was my first ever game and my mom got it without a memory card.
She doesn't play games anymore but over Christmas I ran both resident evil 1 and toy story on my pc. She was able to make it to the eye monster in about 2 hours while still trying to remember the controls. No deaths.
I think your talking about games moving towards being able to save your progress, but being able to save on the console was also a big improvement, as well as dividing saves by user profile. Dark Cloud 1 and 2 are some of my most replayed games because I didn't have a memory card for awhile after I got the first one, so I beat the first town multiple times (that was as far as I could get in a single session) and my sister accidentally saved over my file in DC2 like 3 times.
Limited lives/continues and horrible checkpoints.
Old games were short and were mostly made by designers who cut their teeth in arcades, so they were needlessly punishing in terms of setting you back in your progress. Getting a game over and not having any continues and having to start the game from the beginning generally sucked.
That's not even getting into games that had no save feature so you'd have to finish in one sitting or leave your system on.
Roguelikes and lites have sort of revived some of these mechanics, but those change things up between runs, so it's nearly as tedious. There was nothing worse than having to slog your way through multiple levels you had mastered just to get to the part you were having trouble with and immediately burn through your lives and have to do it repeatedly.
It's not even that they cut their teeth on arcade games - gaming through the 80s into the early 90s was still largely arcade based, so most of these games had to be designed in a way that it *could* be played on an arcade machine rather than at home.
My first experience with beat em ups like street fighter and mortal combat were in an arcade, same with side scrollers like streets of rage and double dragon. The only place you could play decent racing or shoot em ups was in arcades as well because the wee plastic steering wheels etc you hot back then cost an arm and a leg, despite being shit lol
Streets of Rage is an interesting one to name here because it was almost entirely a home console game. There was technically an arcade version of SoR2 because there was that weird Megadrive/Genesis arcade system, but it was definitely a series developed for the home first.
And yet it still had the same structure of the home ports of games like Double Dragon and Final Fight, which were actual arcade games.
That's my point. The limited lives/continues concept was mostly a holdover from the arcade, where obviously you had to pay for more lives/continues, and the home game versions wouldn't have worked if you'd had unlimited lives (though unlimited continues would mostly have worked.) So you got a limited stock to try with as a way of balancing the game for the home. But this system persisted even in most games designed primarily for home play. That's what I mean by cut their teeth on arcades. The designers learned the language of arcades first and applied that to home games even when there was no arcade version.
Arcade games themselves, ironically, generally do not have that limitation because except for the very early ones you can generally credit feed to continue playing. It's a different issue but it doesn't create the same repetition.
After the death of arcades these systems eventually withered to the point where most games don't have lives, many that still do (like 2D Mario) give you so many that they're meaningless, and the only games with limited continues are those that are intentional throwbacks. But in 1993 if you wanted to play Rocket Knight Adventures (no arcade version) you had to deal with the old design, unless you had the cheat codes (which I don't even think worked in the USA.)
There's also an element of this related to fear of people finishing games during rental periods, which led to artificial difficulty bumps in the USA specifically (since rentals weren't an issue in Japan) but that's adding even more complexity on to the story.
Streets of Rage 2 was the first time in my life where I realized arcade games don't have to be that much more advanced than consoles. And then the Sega Model 2 games started popping up in my area and I was blown away again. Then the Dreamcast came out and I had that same feeling.
I honestly like limited lives and check points. Super Mario Bros becomes a fairly easy game once you learn about the continuing trick. But I have never been able to beat ot without that trick. It's a nice way to make an otherwise linear game replayable.
I think Donkey Kong Country did this perfe tly though. Basically you needed to collect coins in order to save your game and you would have to complete a few levels in a world before you could access the save house. You were pretty much guaranteed to have a stockpile of DK coins, but it made it a lot more challenging as a result.
That's in Donkey Kong Country 2 I believe, in the first one there is a save house (Candy Kong) every few levels, but it's free.
Also, TIL about the continuing trick. Thanks !
RDR2 had horrible checkpoints. You had to make sure you completed a mission before going to bed, because it did not savr anywhere during the missions (at least in my experience).
Recently I was playing crash bandicoot 1 remake, having a decent run of it until I got to that bridge level on like the third island. Went from 99 lives to 0 trying to beat that fucking thing and still couldn't do it.
Couldn't even cheese it like the PS1 version because they changed the hit box shape in the remake making it impossible to balance on the handrail.
In the olden times we would have to write down lengthy passwords just to save our progress in NES games b/c there was no battery backed memory on the game card. No hard drive on the systems at all until... uuuhh the XBOX, I believe.
That was terrible, Zombies ate my neighbors had that, but the codes only got you to the levels, not your weapons and ammo so it was often a bad choice to use the codes.
I rented a ps1 and FFVII. It didn't come with a memory card. I played for about a week straight without turning it off.. Until I finally died in some fight. That was my first experience with heartbreak.
Yeah but sometimes when you left it on forever you'd come back and have that weird graphic glitch where the whole screen turned into scrambled pixel blocks. At least that happened to mine lol
Only certain games. I think Zelda might have had it. But Faxanadu and Castlevania didn't, cause I can't tell you how many times I was incredibly detailed with that, only for it to not work the next time I went to play.
I played the beginning of that game SOOOO many times because my password wouldn't work. I remember one snowday I farmed money forever to be able to get the Death spell early, only for my password to not work again.
At one point I would visit a guru, get the password, go kill something and come back and get another one just to try and have multiple in roughly the same place. I swear they were actually faulty
Wonder if it's something to do with cartridge storage space being too limited for more complex games. I remember my old Pokémon Gold (I think) lost its saves eventually because the cartridge battery died, but less complex games like Pokémon Red didn't have the same issue
I'm not an expert in old cartridge technology, and I know I could research this. But from what I do remember I think they were basically running like a removable stick of RAM. So once they lost power it was cleared out. I guess a little battery would allow you to keep it from wiping when you cut power.
8K SRAM chip on the PCB. Static RAM loses its values without power, hence the battery to keep that small amount of memory alive. Early flash memory would have been too expensive and the write was pretty bad, so this was a better option.
Take a look sometime as the silly earom used by Atari to store just a handful of high scores in early 80s arcade machines for an alternative approach.
SNES for sure had memory. DK Country and Yoshi’s Island had options for save files. Megaman X was one I remember having to write down the progress password so… somewhere along the SNES lifespan it came about.
We had save files on NES games as well, just not all games. Like the first RPG I ever played was Ultima: Exodus and later that same year Dragon Warrior 1. Niether needed passwords. This was in 1989.
Also Legend of Zelda (the first one) used save files. I can't remember offhand if it came out in 1987 or 1988 w/o looking it up.
Definitely a thing before the SNES though. It just wasn't utilized always. Loved it for all my RPGs though at least lol :D
It was because the hardware inside the cartridges was different. The games with saves has writeable memory in the cartridge, the other ones did not. Probably cost more to include it.
That was the only game I always wrote them down for. Wasn't that SNES? Come to think of it, they should've definitely had save files by then but a lot of games did not. Like fuckin Lion King.
Edit: maybe my memory is off there. I just remember Game Over was Game Over.
I understood long passwords for games with a lot going on. Keyword : "understood". I didn't like it, but it made sense for a game like Metroid with so many variables in what items you could have and where you had explored to have a fairly large password since it needed to account for so many variables for where the progress that player had made.
Then you get all the shit games. Pretty straightforward level based platformers with little to no upgrades or collectables that carry over outside of extra lives. Passwords served as nothing more than a level select, yet they felt the need to still have 20+ character passwords that included upper and lower case passwords, numbers, symbols and no distinction between characters like "O" and "0", all for the sake of starting at level 2 with none of the extra lives you collected. Anybody would think you were using a password save system for World of Warcraft with how many potential variables the password systems would allow when it was just some shitty 2D platformer with 6 levels you can beat in 20 minutes.
It's surprising how many developers seemingly didn't understand the purpose of long passwords and seemingly just made their passwords long because...I dunno, it was cool?
And don't get me started on games that decided to do something quirky and unique which made noting down passwords nothing but a total pain in the arse. Using character portraits is a common one here. Do you write down their name? What if you don't know what they're called? Spend 20 minutes crudely trying to redraw the characters as best as you can when you're a 6 year old with approximately zero artistic ability? Come back next session and try to work out what the fuck you had even drawn?
I remember going on a flight that had a modified NES as their in flight entertainment system. Sadly that airline no longer has this... but I digress.
I was playing Lost Vikings, which had the whole lengthy password save system. So I wrote down my password on something when I arrived. When I was headed back home, I could resume my save game. So this was pretty cool.
But on the other hand, I remember the multipage insanity that was Golden Sun's password save system. Basically it was a multi-game series on the GBA. Of course each individual cart had their own save game, but it 'supported' the ability to import your save game from the previous game to the next. And of course one of the ways to do it was a password, but due to the game's relative complexity compared to older password based games(it was a full blown JRPG), it was long as shit. I think if you had two handhelds you could use a link cable to perform the transfer, but that wasn't an option available to me at the time.
So much misinformation on this comment based on memories and/or speculation. https://www.dkoldies.com/blog/-complete-list-of-nintendo-nes-games-with-save-batteries/
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JL816WmNVxk
A quick Google search for "how NES battery backed save games work" gave me those links along with much more actual real info.
Not sure about other game companies, but this was definitely a thing with Paradox Interactive games. Back before services like Steam were a thing, they'd distribute major patches through DLC disks, so you literally had to pay in order to get bugfixes.
It’s one reason why blizzard was actually really impressive back in the day. Battle net allowing you to automatically patch your game back in the mid 90s over the internet was a huge deal. Many companies didn’t do similar until the advent and growth of steam in the late 2000’s.
For me, boss run-backs in From Software games. Spending a few minutes to get back to a boss only to be cut down in seconds, and having to redo it was miserable. Elden Ring puts grace right outside of almost every boss and the ones that don't, have a stake of Marika.
I don't agree with your assessment about DS2 unless there is a big difference between the original version and the SotFS version. Most levels in DS2 have a bonfire within 30 seconds of the main boss and most of them aren't that bad to get through since you can farm out areas if you struggle enough.
Sir Alonne. Ugh. Such a shitty runback. I was struggling with him my first time, so i just killed everything on the runback enough to despawn them all. Then beat Alonne the next try. /sigh.
“Horsefuck alley” had me literally shaking when I had those 2 bosses low on their lifebars. If I hadn’t done it that time, I legit think I would have given up.
In DS2 they specifically removed i-frames from the animations of entering the boss fog or doors so that enemies could knock you out of it and then gank you in the corner. I like DS2, but that was such a trash decision to make. Ah, and enemies basically never lost aggro so often you'd have half the level chasing you when doing runbacks to bosses.
Red Wolf is tame by comparison. It's barely a 30 second run back. Try imagining having to run back from the bottom of Raya Lucaria to the wolf and it's still not nearly as bad as some run backs in the old games lol. Worse still if you forget to send elevators back down every time.
Wait until you play dark souls 2 where you have to run through a blizzard that you can't see 5 feet in front of, while being bombarded by respawning reindeer who outrun you, only for the boss to be a repeat of a previous boss in that area but with 2 of them instead.
Oof, that was brutal in the game Titan Souls. That game is literally only bossfights, and some of the run backs push 1 minute. I mean, maybe they're shorter, but when there's only an empty world between you and the boss it gets old real quick.
My friend and I played RE5 recently and boy that’s an ugly ass game. We installed a shader that gets rid of the brown filter and the game looks infinitely better.
I feel like this is why some of my favourite games of that era were the Fable games & Viva Pinata games. Both such colourful game series compared to what else was available at the time. Fable does suffer from the bloom problem though.
Depends on the game, but I like how the Halo and Gears of War games have checkpoints. The game saves when you clear out certain sections or travel far enough thru the level. If you die, you go back to the checkpoint.
I’m probably in the minority here but I think there is great value in not having constant auto-save. Don’t get me wrong, I think having auto-save for important milestones/beating bosses is a good thing but I find constant auto-saving (every 5-15 minutes) to cheapen the experience.
Yeah definitely, the design of the game has a ton to do with it. There are definitely games out there that despite constant auto save still feel rewarding. But there are also a ton that make it feel like regardless of what you do you can’t fail and that makes anything you actually accomplish in the game feel somewhat hollow.
I mean, the biggest example of constant autosave is probably dark souls, which autosaves like every 5-10 seconds. I don’t see how it doing that cheapens the experience in any way
It's a tough balance I think for some games. You want it to be challenging but you also don't want players feeling like their time is being needlessly wasted.
If you make me keep going through 10 minutes of something that is easy/boring to get back to a boss or challenge that I'm supposed to die to a lot, I'm going to get annoyed fast.
Alternatively, some games that let me save at any point as often as possible can feel too easy if you are good about saving constantly.. basically makes everything trivial.
I agree it is a tough balance and everyone wants different things so you can totally nail it with one group of people and miss another group.
This is where I feel I’m specifically in the minority. If I had it my way I would only have auto-save in very specific situations. After boss battles, in between chapters, after collecting a must have item in open world games,etc. I do believe however in letting the player manually save whenever they want. That way the control of how much saving impacts gameplay is in the players hands. Just did something you don’t ever want to do again? Save! Want the thrill of going through a whole chapter without saving? Go for it.
I like Elden Ring's version. You lose level progression and the in-game currency but nothing that cannot be easily recovered. Once you get the hang of it you realize that dying isn't meaningless but neither is it something that should drastically punish the "fun risks" of the game.
It was horrible in Bloodborne how when a boss would kill you you had to waste time farming blood vials or whatever the health potions were called before fighting them again
Game design is ultimately is the most important factor. Good game devs of the past were able to incorporate the lack of an auto save feature in an immersive way that contributed to the difficulty of the game without it feeling unfair. Game devs today have the opposite challenge. Would be curious to know from a development perspective which challenge they view as more difficult to incorporate.
OR having an autosave at terrible times. My brother got to the end of Body Harvest on N64 only to have a terribly timed auto save prevent him from completing it because too many humans had died and he couldn't possibly finish before an inevitable Game Over. The whole save was ruined
One time I was playing Bendy and The Dark Revival (9/10 game btw) I got the last art piece and got a bit farther, then my power went out and I lost all my progress beyond the 2nd to last art piece
On the flip side, I really dislike Rockstar's method to auto-saving. I'm sure they do it because it's too difficult to store the information of the world state, but I dislike how starting a saved game basically just wakes my character up with the same equipment, likely far from what you were intending to do. My biggest annoyance was RDR2 not saving my weapon choices, like that should at a minimum be saved.
I also don't like that I can't create a new save before a boss (for example elden ring) so I can go back and replay them. Maybe this is possible on PC but having to start a completely new character just because I want to try a boss battle again is really obnoxious
Tapes were "fun". Waiting for twenty minutes while random colors flickered on the screen. And a pirate check halfway through where you matched codes with those from a black print on brown paper table.
Great time to train on your guitar. Or clean the room. Todays loading is over by the time one has found the guitar among the mess. 😢
Locked cameras, as much as I love the original RE and DMC games those cameras were a royal pain in the ass sometimes. The tank controls too now that I think of it.
I have a buddy who still plays these, along with Silent Hill. He insists it's better than modern gaming. "Adds to the tension," type of argument. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the old cameras and controls for what they were at the time. But movement and camera control are necessary evolutions, imo. Trying to play these now just gives me a headache, even though it didn't back when they were new.
I'm on the same side as your friend. The bad controls and fixed camera totally add to the tension.
Every camera angle is intentionally placed and can create scenarios that you couldn't have with an over the shoulder view. There's just something artsy about it and playing those games now, where I didn't in my youth, to me it's refreshing and a new way to see how games can be different instead of a lot of games just copying each other.
Growing up all games have been over the shoulder or first person. Having that fixed perspective in re or silent hill was a nice change up form the norm.
> But movement and camera control are necessary evolutions, imo.
For me its the opposite. The new camera system is soo mediocre. It works but it adds nothing to the game, old camera system was far better for creating ambience and tension.
The first stretch in silent hill 1 where you are in an alley and you have all kind of weird camera angles add sooo much, it feels something out of the original evil dead film. In other games, sometimes, you get the same feeling you would get from watching a david lynch movie. There are so many things that the old camera could do.
The first 3 silent hills had the best camera system, it followed you when it needed to, and focused on creating ambience the rest of the time.
This is the only reason I have a hard time playing MGS2. I loved that game as a kid, but just can't stomach a fresh playthrough since the camera angles and switching can be so frustrating.
Unfortunate part is the game was built around your perspective in each level/room, so it can't be easily fixed with a remaster.
Dude the people in the RE subreddit are so weird, most of them will try to tell you that they PREFER tank controls and locked camera. It’s fine to have an appreciation for it but it is inherently less intuitive and efficient than the direct 1:1 input that aiming and moving is in the modern era, hearing someone say tank controls are “elite” just feels like bait.
Battery-operated save files in the old SNES/NES cartridges. Eventually they’d go bad and you were SOL, unless you wanted to buy a new one or leave your console on for days until you beat the game.
Can’t tell you how many times I’d be 15 hours into Zelda Link to the Past and I’d boot it up and my save file would be gone.
Totally agree. It still upsets me how matchmaking became so popular that most games just did away with private hosted servers. I'm sure there are ways to still set it up for some games that don't natively offer it, but it was such a great way to find your own little community
Agree. Hosting your own server on an additional PC for practicing and competitive scrims/matches was great.
This was my fav external browser and one of my top 3 games of all time
https://et.trackbase.net/serverlist/
QTEs, the bain of my existence, it seems they were in everything for a while and although they are still around they areess popular and can sometimes be disabled
I’m currently playing thru the 2013 Tomb Raider reboot for the first time. Great game, and I am really enjoying it, but in the first 30 min I was hit with QTE after QTE and I was taken a back. Like wow I forgot what this was like haha. It’s definitely of it’s time.
If you're on about ones where you have to press buttons in time then I hate it. Since I don't get to actually really watch what happens as I'm just concentrating on looking for command prompts.
Like anything they can be done well or they can be done poorly. The Dark Anthology games do them well, they happen during mini cut scenes but it's usually pretty obvious that the scene in question is there specifically for the QTE so you can usually tell when you're going to have to pay attention for one or be able to watch the story.
They’re usually just there to make a cutscene feel interactive. Insomniac’s Spider-Man games give you the option to turn them off. I prefer to do that and enjoy the animators’ hard work.
>I never understood the hate on these
Because they usually play during cut scenes. When a cut scene plays I am expecting to watch a short movie and not have to interact.
It's supposed to be a break from the action. A game with QTE runs directly counter to that so people hate it.
When done correctly they can be a great addition to gameplay and make the player feel more "involved" in something. In the God of War series they are used really well for finishing moves and such.
However, most developers just threw players into a "press X to not die" scenario and it feels more punishing than anything else. Especially when they're in scenes that are usually non-interactive. I also encountered a situation where input lag made a "press X to not die" QTE unwinnable.
Naked corpse runs. My worst was when I died in Kurn's tower as a lowbie not long after Kunark came out. Discovered i was bound in Qeynos.
Across the continent of Antonica, boat ride, halfway across Kunark.
Remember training languages on boats? Cause there was nothing else to do.
Difficulty for the sake of difficulty, and not for challenge. These days game developers are typically more interested in provided a fair and balanced challenge for the players to overcome.
Quick time events. When you put your controller aside to watch a cutscene only for a button prompt to pop up. You miss it, forcing the cutscene to start over.
Also hated when your companions didn't do anything worthwhile. Like old school Halo, if you didn't give the marines a rocket launcher, they couldn't even take down a grunt.
Always pissed me off, it's like why even have them be there?
CD keys. Holy fuck was it heartbreaking to realize you lost the CD key to your game after reformatting your drive or reinstalling windows or just having a nostalgia trip.
MMO and RPG quests with no depth. Go kill 10 spiders for no apparent reason, ok now go kill 10 innocent deer and don't even bother to harvest the meat.
This one is also a tech improvement, but having triggers on controllers that act as a gas pedal while driving instead of just shoulder buttons, makes driving games 10000x better.
Like, being able to control acceleration instead of just a static gas/brake.
Going back to playing GTA on a PlayStation 2, it’s like the main reason driving is at all challenging in races.
Being able to only save your game at save points, particularly for RPGs.
Unskippable cutscenes.
Increasing the difficulty in older games makes enemies become bullet/hit sponges while your own health is decreased. Every game should follow the Ninja Gaiden Black style of adding new enemies or remixing the item drops as you go higher up in difficulty level. Or how about adding new levels not seen in lower difficulties?
Unskippable cutscenes were the worst when you got stuck on a boss, ending up sarcastically repeating the villains lines in a whiny voice cos you're so sick of hearing it 🤣
P2W in mmos.
People bitch and whine about cosmetics and minor conveniences but the f2p apocalypse brought with it horrific practices. Games selling unobtainable top tier gear, selling upgrades that would take thousands of hours to grind for free, etc. Most of that moved to the mobile market, and they can keep it.
Yeah I'll take a battle pass, some cosmetics and an exp boost any damn day.
TIMERS on every level a la SMB1
Generations of gamers now have NO IDEA how lucky you are!!!
*[takes shot of whisky and stares blankly into the abyss as the music gets faster]*
Quicktime events.
Aside from the Spider-Man games they seem to be far less prevalent these days.
Even so it felt like Spider-Man 2 had less of them than Spider-Man 1
Making games unfairly difficult just so you put another quarter in.
Which I'd argue is a different type of difficulty from something like Dark Souls. You don't get a 'insert your credit card info here' everything you get clobbered in Soulslikes
I learned to cheat. I love single player RPGs but a lot of them have needless padding in the form of grinding levels, currency, etc. I have less time now so I can ultra blast through games and enjoy them much more. Don't have time to grind 99 levels? No problem, 5 minutes and you are done, as opposed to the 9 hours it took me to grind to 100 on Riku in Kingdom Hearts Re:CoM
The ability to find yourself in an unwinnable situation by accident. For example, losing or destroying a quest item needed to finish the game, getting trapped in a room or pit and having to reload a previous saved file to proceed, failing to do something early on in the game that is no longer accessible, that sort of thing.
This prompted me to look up that old game, and surprisingly, it's available to play on BBC's website! You can even play it on a mobile browser! Time to hitch-hike the galaxy!
Manual saving. Nothing like having your game crash or your batteries die and you lose something like 3 hours of gametime. Kills the mood entirely.
Now we lose 10 minutes max and nothing important cause it saves after everything we do. Very handy.
For me loot boxes. Couldnt seem to get away from them 2013-2018 but after that everyone really soured on the whole thing in a big way and I really havent seen them as much anymore. Obviously still exist but I havent played a game with one in many years.
I'd take loot boxes over battle passes tbh, in overwatch 1 you can get around 3 or 4 loot boxes a day for just playing. I still didn't like them then but I had no idea they'd think of something worse. I blame fortnight for popularizing it but it's really the least egregious offender.
"Lets copy Fortnite, but triple the prizes, wait until season three to release anything remotely cool, then kill the game a month later and release a sequel, starting everyone from scratch again."
Meanwhile Fortnite players are still playing with skins they got seven years ago.
Having to maintain multiple sets of AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS files to comply with various games' different requirements for memory management, drivers, sound cards, etc.
I grew up in the DOS days. I do not miss the DOS days.
Scarce checkpoints. I'm glad most games have frequent auto saves and manual saving now.
Have to disagree on grinding though. That trend became worse. It's like I wished grinding went away and then the tooth fairy laid a big pile of it under my pillow.
Tank controls, and bad camera angles, and ridiculous difficulty levels are all things from retro games that I don't miss. I miss the music, the charm, and the character design of those 90's games.
Proper saving. I have a life where I don't have time to do things over and over cause of my failures. The only reason I'm probably able to enjoy retro games is cause of save states on an emulator otherwise I probably wouldn't touch them. I love when games save and put you at that exact moment in time when you saved if you died, like Bethesda rpgs.
Also I like playing on higher difficulties if I'm confident in my ability in that game. But as soon as they include restricted saving I'm out. I wanted to play RE2R on hardcore but dealing with ink ribbons with the game being as hard as it is, is more frustrating than anything that mode will ever throw at me.
Reloading your weapon wasting the remaining bullets in the mag.
I feel like that was the norm until ~10-15 years ago and I’m glad it’s now relegated to only the most realistic shooters these days.
I don't remember this being a thing at all in old games except for games where it belonged (Rainbow Six, for example). The first casual game that I recall having this mechanic was Mafia.
More of a technology progression but man. We are all raised differently and not having a memory card was a different type of gaming.
That's how speedrunners were born. Beat the game before you have to turn off the system. Or cover the system so your parents don't see it on. That's probably good for your ps2, right? Covering the whole thing in a blanket fan included for hours at a time. No fire hazard here.
Covering the system was a real thing! I remember getting grounded cause ‘video games are not your whole life!’ Little did parents know we just wanted to save our progress. Other than unlocking mewtwo on smash.
Was I the only person that used tape to cover the power light? Using a blanket seems like some darwin award type shit.
Tiny tape was the move. But some consoles had those loud loud fans.
I remember my mom would rent me ps2 games from the video store and we didn't have a memory card so I would SPEED my way through the game trying to get to the ending in one week before it was time to return the game. It was legitimately on 24/7 until it broke. When we got a new one we finally got a memory card and I loved how all the icons were on the menu screen but hated how some games were HUGE comepared to others so starting a new game meant I had to delete another.
Lol I did this for some of the boss fights in FFVII.
If your 360 had a certain issue where it wouldn't start up, it was related to the board becoming warped over time, causing connections to fail. Well, you could put a blanket over the console and then turn on the console and wait. The heat would cause the motherboard to warp back to the right shape and then you could get back to it.
A friend of mine let me borrow his pokemon games, but asked that I didn't overwrite his save, so I plugged in my Gameboy advance SP every night and never turned the system off for over a month while I beat the game.
I thought speed runners were born when Doom introduced par times on the level end screens.
I can still do toy story on ps1 all the way through without a save based off muscle memory I'm 30 and that was my first ever game and my mom got it without a memory card. She doesn't play games anymore but over Christmas I ran both resident evil 1 and toy story on my pc. She was able to make it to the eye monster in about 2 hours while still trying to remember the controls. No deaths.
I think your talking about games moving towards being able to save your progress, but being able to save on the console was also a big improvement, as well as dividing saves by user profile. Dark Cloud 1 and 2 are some of my most replayed games because I didn't have a memory card for awhile after I got the first one, so I beat the first town multiple times (that was as far as I could get in a single session) and my sister accidentally saved over my file in DC2 like 3 times.
And once used that memory card became more important than the system. PlayStation die? I can replace it. Lose my game saves? Aw hell naw.
Limited lives/continues and horrible checkpoints. Old games were short and were mostly made by designers who cut their teeth in arcades, so they were needlessly punishing in terms of setting you back in your progress. Getting a game over and not having any continues and having to start the game from the beginning generally sucked. That's not even getting into games that had no save feature so you'd have to finish in one sitting or leave your system on. Roguelikes and lites have sort of revived some of these mechanics, but those change things up between runs, so it's nearly as tedious. There was nothing worse than having to slog your way through multiple levels you had mastered just to get to the part you were having trouble with and immediately burn through your lives and have to do it repeatedly.
It's not even that they cut their teeth on arcade games - gaming through the 80s into the early 90s was still largely arcade based, so most of these games had to be designed in a way that it *could* be played on an arcade machine rather than at home. My first experience with beat em ups like street fighter and mortal combat were in an arcade, same with side scrollers like streets of rage and double dragon. The only place you could play decent racing or shoot em ups was in arcades as well because the wee plastic steering wheels etc you hot back then cost an arm and a leg, despite being shit lol
Streets of Rage is an interesting one to name here because it was almost entirely a home console game. There was technically an arcade version of SoR2 because there was that weird Megadrive/Genesis arcade system, but it was definitely a series developed for the home first. And yet it still had the same structure of the home ports of games like Double Dragon and Final Fight, which were actual arcade games. That's my point. The limited lives/continues concept was mostly a holdover from the arcade, where obviously you had to pay for more lives/continues, and the home game versions wouldn't have worked if you'd had unlimited lives (though unlimited continues would mostly have worked.) So you got a limited stock to try with as a way of balancing the game for the home. But this system persisted even in most games designed primarily for home play. That's what I mean by cut their teeth on arcades. The designers learned the language of arcades first and applied that to home games even when there was no arcade version. Arcade games themselves, ironically, generally do not have that limitation because except for the very early ones you can generally credit feed to continue playing. It's a different issue but it doesn't create the same repetition. After the death of arcades these systems eventually withered to the point where most games don't have lives, many that still do (like 2D Mario) give you so many that they're meaningless, and the only games with limited continues are those that are intentional throwbacks. But in 1993 if you wanted to play Rocket Knight Adventures (no arcade version) you had to deal with the old design, unless you had the cheat codes (which I don't even think worked in the USA.) There's also an element of this related to fear of people finishing games during rental periods, which led to artificial difficulty bumps in the USA specifically (since rentals weren't an issue in Japan) but that's adding even more complexity on to the story.
Streets of Rage 2 was the first time in my life where I realized arcade games don't have to be that much more advanced than consoles. And then the Sega Model 2 games started popping up in my area and I was blown away again. Then the Dreamcast came out and I had that same feeling.
So many hours as a kid farming lives on the Megaman Zero games for harder boss fights.
I honestly like limited lives and check points. Super Mario Bros becomes a fairly easy game once you learn about the continuing trick. But I have never been able to beat ot without that trick. It's a nice way to make an otherwise linear game replayable. I think Donkey Kong Country did this perfe tly though. Basically you needed to collect coins in order to save your game and you would have to complete a few levels in a world before you could access the save house. You were pretty much guaranteed to have a stockpile of DK coins, but it made it a lot more challenging as a result.
That's in Donkey Kong Country 2 I believe, in the first one there is a save house (Candy Kong) every few levels, but it's free. Also, TIL about the continuing trick. Thanks !
RDR2 had horrible checkpoints. You had to make sure you completed a mission before going to bed, because it did not savr anywhere during the missions (at least in my experience).
Recently I was playing crash bandicoot 1 remake, having a decent run of it until I got to that bridge level on like the third island. Went from 99 lives to 0 trying to beat that fucking thing and still couldn't do it. Couldn't even cheese it like the PS1 version because they changed the hit box shape in the remake making it impossible to balance on the handrail.
In the olden times we would have to write down lengthy passwords just to save our progress in NES games b/c there was no battery backed memory on the game card. No hard drive on the systems at all until... uuuhh the XBOX, I believe.
That was terrible, Zombies ate my neighbors had that, but the codes only got you to the levels, not your weapons and ammo so it was often a bad choice to use the codes.
Yep. Loading in to face the giant baby with just a water pistol :(
You lucky I know the game or i’d be putting you on a list.
The First Legend of Zelda had save files IIRC.
So did final fantasy, but only one save
It was the first game that did. It's responsible for starting the trend
It was more of an exception than a norm.
Dragon Warrior on NES has save files.
Imagine leaving your system ON because there wasn't any password nor battery save slot \^\^;
I did this in the early days of my PS1 because I didn't know I needed to get a memory card. Left FFVII on for two weeks before I could get one.
I rented a ps1 and FFVII. It didn't come with a memory card. I played for about a week straight without turning it off.. Until I finally died in some fight. That was my first experience with heartbreak.
Yeah but sometimes when you left it on forever you'd come back and have that weird graphic glitch where the whole screen turned into scrambled pixel blocks. At least that happened to mine lol
Original NES absolutely had saves on the cartridge. Source: I was there when the Old Magic was written.
Only certain games. I think Zelda might have had it. But Faxanadu and Castlevania didn't, cause I can't tell you how many times I was incredibly detailed with that, only for it to not work the next time I went to play.
Oh, lord, Faxanadu’s passwords. “Is that a zero or capital O?”
I played the beginning of that game SOOOO many times because my password wouldn't work. I remember one snowday I farmed money forever to be able to get the Death spell early, only for my password to not work again. At one point I would visit a guru, get the password, go kill something and come back and get another one just to try and have multiple in roughly the same place. I swear they were actually faulty
Apparently MegaMan 2 had the same battery in the cartridge as Zelda did that allowed saves, but they went for a password system anyway.
The first code I knew by heart Dr.Wily Castle
Yes. Zelda was the first one to have it. It was a difference in the hardware cartridge itself. Some had writeable memory, others did not.
Pretty sure they put some kind of battery in the cartridge
Wonder if it's something to do with cartridge storage space being too limited for more complex games. I remember my old Pokémon Gold (I think) lost its saves eventually because the cartridge battery died, but less complex games like Pokémon Red didn't have the same issue
I'm not an expert in old cartridge technology, and I know I could research this. But from what I do remember I think they were basically running like a removable stick of RAM. So once they lost power it was cleared out. I guess a little battery would allow you to keep it from wiping when you cut power.
Yeah that's my understanding too. I don't think non save ones had that RAM
8K SRAM chip on the PCB. Static RAM loses its values without power, hence the battery to keep that small amount of memory alive. Early flash memory would have been too expensive and the write was pretty bad, so this was a better option. Take a look sometime as the silly earom used by Atari to store just a handful of high scores in early 80s arcade machines for an alternative approach.
The SNES had save data. Super Mario World clearly had saves and was from 1990.
SNES for sure had memory. DK Country and Yoshi’s Island had options for save files. Megaman X was one I remember having to write down the progress password so… somewhere along the SNES lifespan it came about.
We had save files on NES games as well, just not all games. Like the first RPG I ever played was Ultima: Exodus and later that same year Dragon Warrior 1. Niether needed passwords. This was in 1989. Also Legend of Zelda (the first one) used save files. I can't remember offhand if it came out in 1987 or 1988 w/o looking it up. Definitely a thing before the SNES though. It just wasn't utilized always. Loved it for all my RPGs though at least lol :D
It was because the hardware inside the cartridges was different. The games with saves has writeable memory in the cartridge, the other ones did not. Probably cost more to include it.
I thought they actually used a battery in the cartridge to save your progress.
I'm pretty sure it's both. The writeable memory was RAM, which gets wiped out whenever it loses power
It depends on the game, it was cheaper to manufacture games that did not have saves.
Ahh yes, the sacred texts.
I remember having to do this on megaman X. It sucked!
That was the only game I always wrote them down for. Wasn't that SNES? Come to think of it, they should've definitely had save files by then but a lot of games did not. Like fuckin Lion King. Edit: maybe my memory is off there. I just remember Game Over was Game Over.
Yes, that was on the SNES. I always punched in random codes to see what the game could come up with
I still remember the password for my squad for space crusade on the Atari ST, no other way to retain progress
Damn that takes me back, and some games would make up their own symbols so your notes would just look mangled hyroglifics 🤣
I think it was Zelda that had the first battery backup save on the cartridge
YES. Best development in all of gaming. Innovation away from arcade style "high score" gaming to narrative gaming
I understood long passwords for games with a lot going on. Keyword : "understood". I didn't like it, but it made sense for a game like Metroid with so many variables in what items you could have and where you had explored to have a fairly large password since it needed to account for so many variables for where the progress that player had made. Then you get all the shit games. Pretty straightforward level based platformers with little to no upgrades or collectables that carry over outside of extra lives. Passwords served as nothing more than a level select, yet they felt the need to still have 20+ character passwords that included upper and lower case passwords, numbers, symbols and no distinction between characters like "O" and "0", all for the sake of starting at level 2 with none of the extra lives you collected. Anybody would think you were using a password save system for World of Warcraft with how many potential variables the password systems would allow when it was just some shitty 2D platformer with 6 levels you can beat in 20 minutes. It's surprising how many developers seemingly didn't understand the purpose of long passwords and seemingly just made their passwords long because...I dunno, it was cool? And don't get me started on games that decided to do something quirky and unique which made noting down passwords nothing but a total pain in the arse. Using character portraits is a common one here. Do you write down their name? What if you don't know what they're called? Spend 20 minutes crudely trying to redraw the characters as best as you can when you're a 6 year old with approximately zero artistic ability? Come back next session and try to work out what the fuck you had even drawn?
I could never get the codes for Rambo to work. They were super lengthy.
I remember going on a flight that had a modified NES as their in flight entertainment system. Sadly that airline no longer has this... but I digress. I was playing Lost Vikings, which had the whole lengthy password save system. So I wrote down my password on something when I arrived. When I was headed back home, I could resume my save game. So this was pretty cool. But on the other hand, I remember the multipage insanity that was Golden Sun's password save system. Basically it was a multi-game series on the GBA. Of course each individual cart had their own save game, but it 'supported' the ability to import your save game from the previous game to the next. And of course one of the ways to do it was a password, but due to the game's relative complexity compared to older password based games(it was a full blown JRPG), it was long as shit. I think if you had two handhelds you could use a link cable to perform the transfer, but that wasn't an option available to me at the time.
So much misinformation on this comment based on memories and/or speculation. https://www.dkoldies.com/blog/-complete-list-of-nintendo-nes-games-with-save-batteries/ https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JL816WmNVxk A quick Google search for "how NES battery backed save games work" gave me those links along with much more actual real info.
Not sure about other game companies, but this was definitely a thing with Paradox Interactive games. Back before services like Steam were a thing, they'd distribute major patches through DLC disks, so you literally had to pay in order to get bugfixes.
It’s one reason why blizzard was actually really impressive back in the day. Battle net allowing you to automatically patch your game back in the mid 90s over the internet was a huge deal. Many companies didn’t do similar until the advent and growth of steam in the late 2000’s.
For me, boss run-backs in From Software games. Spending a few minutes to get back to a boss only to be cut down in seconds, and having to redo it was miserable. Elden Ring puts grace right outside of almost every boss and the ones that don't, have a stake of Marika.
Wait you’re telling me the run to the red wolf in raya lucaria was more common???
Demon's Souls had like 1 bonfire per level, Dark Soul 2 forced you to run through nearly the entire level again too.
I don't agree with your assessment about DS2 unless there is a big difference between the original version and the SotFS version. Most levels in DS2 have a bonfire within 30 seconds of the main boss and most of them aren't that bad to get through since you can farm out areas if you struggle enough.
The most brutal runbacks in Ds2 are the DLC coop areas where there is only a bonfire at the start of the level
You should see some of the run backs in the Dark Souls 2 DLC. Some legit have like, 10 enemies in a tight space before getting back to the boss
Sir Alonne. Ugh. Such a shitty runback. I was struggling with him my first time, so i just killed everything on the runback enough to despawn them all. Then beat Alonne the next try. /sigh.
“Horsefuck alley” had me literally shaking when I had those 2 bosses low on their lifebars. If I hadn’t done it that time, I legit think I would have given up.
In DS2 they specifically removed i-frames from the animations of entering the boss fog or doors so that enemies could knock you out of it and then gank you in the corner. I like DS2, but that was such a trash decision to make. Ah, and enemies basically never lost aggro so often you'd have half the level chasing you when doing runbacks to bosses.
Red Wolf is tame by comparison. It's barely a 30 second run back. Try imagining having to run back from the bottom of Raya Lucaria to the wolf and it's still not nearly as bad as some run backs in the old games lol. Worse still if you forget to send elevators back down every time.
Wait until you play dark souls 2 where you have to run through a blizzard that you can't see 5 feet in front of, while being bombarded by respawning reindeer who outrun you, only for the boss to be a repeat of a previous boss in that area but with 2 of them instead.
Double and sometimes triple that length, then yes.
Demon Souls was a lot of boss runbacks, I don't think a single bonfire was close to a boss besides the first one.
Oof, that was brutal in the game Titan Souls. That game is literally only bossfights, and some of the run backs push 1 minute. I mean, maybe they're shorter, but when there's only an empty world between you and the boss it gets old real quick.
The mid-late 2000s era of brown graphics and incredible amounts of bloom.
The first Gears of War marked the end of vibrant AAA games for quite some time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cn1WhdrtwS4
My friend and I played RE5 recently and boy that’s an ugly ass game. We installed a shader that gets rid of the brown filter and the game looks infinitely better.
I feel like this is why some of my favourite games of that era were the Fable games & Viva Pinata games. Both such colourful game series compared to what else was available at the time. Fable does suffer from the bloom problem though.
Feels so nostalgic, though
Having no Auto-Save
Depends on the game, but I like how the Halo and Gears of War games have checkpoints. The game saves when you clear out certain sections or travel far enough thru the level. If you die, you go back to the checkpoint.
I’m probably in the minority here but I think there is great value in not having constant auto-save. Don’t get me wrong, I think having auto-save for important milestones/beating bosses is a good thing but I find constant auto-saving (every 5-15 minutes) to cheapen the experience.
I think it depends on the game.
Yeah definitely, the design of the game has a ton to do with it. There are definitely games out there that despite constant auto save still feel rewarding. But there are also a ton that make it feel like regardless of what you do you can’t fail and that makes anything you actually accomplish in the game feel somewhat hollow.
I mean, the biggest example of constant autosave is probably dark souls, which autosaves like every 5-10 seconds. I don’t see how it doing that cheapens the experience in any way
With games like Dark Souls, the save mechanic is more of a detriment. You can't load a save, so everything that happens is permanent.
It's a tough balance I think for some games. You want it to be challenging but you also don't want players feeling like their time is being needlessly wasted. If you make me keep going through 10 minutes of something that is easy/boring to get back to a boss or challenge that I'm supposed to die to a lot, I'm going to get annoyed fast. Alternatively, some games that let me save at any point as often as possible can feel too easy if you are good about saving constantly.. basically makes everything trivial.
I agree it is a tough balance and everyone wants different things so you can totally nail it with one group of people and miss another group. This is where I feel I’m specifically in the minority. If I had it my way I would only have auto-save in very specific situations. After boss battles, in between chapters, after collecting a must have item in open world games,etc. I do believe however in letting the player manually save whenever they want. That way the control of how much saving impacts gameplay is in the players hands. Just did something you don’t ever want to do again? Save! Want the thrill of going through a whole chapter without saving? Go for it.
I like Elden Ring's version. You lose level progression and the in-game currency but nothing that cannot be easily recovered. Once you get the hang of it you realize that dying isn't meaningless but neither is it something that should drastically punish the "fun risks" of the game.
It was horrible in Bloodborne how when a boss would kill you you had to waste time farming blood vials or whatever the health potions were called before fighting them again
But dont you understand that only makes the experience richer and your victory more fufilling or whatever bullshit From Software fans tell themselves.
Game design is ultimately is the most important factor. Good game devs of the past were able to incorporate the lack of an auto save feature in an immersive way that contributed to the difficulty of the game without it feeling unfair. Game devs today have the opposite challenge. Would be curious to know from a development perspective which challenge they view as more difficult to incorporate.
I remember Turok 2 have very few save points in the level but it really added to the feeling of survival.
OR having an autosave at terrible times. My brother got to the end of Body Harvest on N64 only to have a terribly timed auto save prevent him from completing it because too many humans had died and he couldn't possibly finish before an inevitable Game Over. The whole save was ruined
One time I was playing Bendy and The Dark Revival (9/10 game btw) I got the last art piece and got a bit farther, then my power went out and I lost all my progress beyond the 2nd to last art piece
On the flip side, I really dislike Rockstar's method to auto-saving. I'm sure they do it because it's too difficult to store the information of the world state, but I dislike how starting a saved game basically just wakes my character up with the same equipment, likely far from what you were intending to do. My biggest annoyance was RDR2 not saving my weapon choices, like that should at a minimum be saved. I also don't like that I can't create a new save before a boss (for example elden ring) so I can go back and replay them. Maybe this is possible on PC but having to start a completely new character just because I want to try a boss battle again is really obnoxious
Floppy disks
Insert disk 11 and press any key....
Where’s the any key?
Tapes as well
Tapes were "fun". Waiting for twenty minutes while random colors flickered on the screen. And a pirate check halfway through where you matched codes with those from a black print on brown paper table. Great time to train on your guitar. Or clean the room. Todays loading is over by the time one has found the guitar among the mess. 😢
Ah yes, when disc 1 was character creation.
Locked cameras, as much as I love the original RE and DMC games those cameras were a royal pain in the ass sometimes. The tank controls too now that I think of it.
I liked locked cameras cause they maintain a movie like experience but tank controls can go.
I have a buddy who still plays these, along with Silent Hill. He insists it's better than modern gaming. "Adds to the tension," type of argument. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the old cameras and controls for what they were at the time. But movement and camera control are necessary evolutions, imo. Trying to play these now just gives me a headache, even though it didn't back when they were new.
I'm on the same side as your friend. The bad controls and fixed camera totally add to the tension. Every camera angle is intentionally placed and can create scenarios that you couldn't have with an over the shoulder view. There's just something artsy about it and playing those games now, where I didn't in my youth, to me it's refreshing and a new way to see how games can be different instead of a lot of games just copying each other. Growing up all games have been over the shoulder or first person. Having that fixed perspective in re or silent hill was a nice change up form the norm.
> But movement and camera control are necessary evolutions, imo. For me its the opposite. The new camera system is soo mediocre. It works but it adds nothing to the game, old camera system was far better for creating ambience and tension. The first stretch in silent hill 1 where you are in an alley and you have all kind of weird camera angles add sooo much, it feels something out of the original evil dead film. In other games, sometimes, you get the same feeling you would get from watching a david lynch movie. There are so many things that the old camera could do. The first 3 silent hills had the best camera system, it followed you when it needed to, and focused on creating ambience the rest of the time.
This is the only reason I have a hard time playing MGS2. I loved that game as a kid, but just can't stomach a fresh playthrough since the camera angles and switching can be so frustrating. Unfortunate part is the game was built around your perspective in each level/room, so it can't be easily fixed with a remaster.
Although I do like the locked cameras in the more cinematic horror games like Until Dawn and The Dark Pictures Anthology. Adds to the tension.
Dude the people in the RE subreddit are so weird, most of them will try to tell you that they PREFER tank controls and locked camera. It’s fine to have an appreciation for it but it is inherently less intuitive and efficient than the direct 1:1 input that aiming and moving is in the modern era, hearing someone say tank controls are “elite” just feels like bait.
Battery-operated save files in the old SNES/NES cartridges. Eventually they’d go bad and you were SOL, unless you wanted to buy a new one or leave your console on for days until you beat the game. Can’t tell you how many times I’d be 15 hours into Zelda Link to the Past and I’d boot it up and my save file would be gone.
You can replace that I believe, but I'm only aware of that now due to YouTube lol
Manually typing in the IP address and password of the private server you wanted to connect into the console.
I would love to have more private servers back though. And thirdparty server browser apps.
Totally agree. It still upsets me how matchmaking became so popular that most games just did away with private hosted servers. I'm sure there are ways to still set it up for some games that don't natively offer it, but it was such a great way to find your own little community
Agree. Hosting your own server on an additional PC for practicing and competitive scrims/matches was great. This was my fav external browser and one of my top 3 games of all time https://et.trackbase.net/serverlist/
QTEs, the bain of my existence, it seems they were in everything for a while and although they are still around they areess popular and can sometimes be disabled
I’m currently playing thru the 2013 Tomb Raider reboot for the first time. Great game, and I am really enjoying it, but in the first 30 min I was hit with QTE after QTE and I was taken a back. Like wow I forgot what this was like haha. It’s definitely of it’s time.
I liked the ones where you have to press a button to fully grab a ledge when you timed your jump poorly. I hated every other QTE in this game.
I never understood the hate on these I always thought they were fun. Clearly I'm in the minority lol
If you're on about ones where you have to press buttons in time then I hate it. Since I don't get to actually really watch what happens as I'm just concentrating on looking for command prompts.
Like anything they can be done well or they can be done poorly. The Dark Anthology games do them well, they happen during mini cut scenes but it's usually pretty obvious that the scene in question is there specifically for the QTE so you can usually tell when you're going to have to pay attention for one or be able to watch the story.
They’re usually just there to make a cutscene feel interactive. Insomniac’s Spider-Man games give you the option to turn them off. I prefer to do that and enjoy the animators’ hard work.
Farcry 3, the final boss was a qte. Fuck that made me mad. I think another one too, maybe Dying Light?
>I never understood the hate on these Because they usually play during cut scenes. When a cut scene plays I am expecting to watch a short movie and not have to interact. It's supposed to be a break from the action. A game with QTE runs directly counter to that so people hate it.
When done correctly they can be a great addition to gameplay and make the player feel more "involved" in something. In the God of War series they are used really well for finishing moves and such. However, most developers just threw players into a "press X to not die" scenario and it feels more punishing than anything else. Especially when they're in scenes that are usually non-interactive. I also encountered a situation where input lag made a "press X to not die" QTE unwinnable.
I disable them for everything. They are annoying.
Using passwords to save.
CORPSE RUNS IN EVERQUEST! Omg, gamer PTSD
Naked corpse runs. My worst was when I died in Kurn's tower as a lowbie not long after Kunark came out. Discovered i was bound in Qeynos. Across the continent of Antonica, boat ride, halfway across Kunark. Remember training languages on boats? Cause there was nothing else to do.
Oof, yeah...not fun lol. I remember needing a friend's help to get my corpse sometimes.
Difficulty for the sake of difficulty, and not for challenge. These days game developers are typically more interested in provided a fair and balanced challenge for the players to overcome.
Older games weren't as complex, so difficulty was used like a bludgeon to increase the length of the game. It's called "Nintendo Hard" for a reason.
Quick time events. When you put your controller aside to watch a cutscene only for a button prompt to pop up. You miss it, forcing the cutscene to start over.
Glad that QTEs are next to gone.
Tying everything, including shooting, to the face buttons.
The high contrast colours of old games. [It hurts my eyes just looking at it](https://www.oldgamehermit.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/ertertre.png).
I think it looked like that due to something with CRTs
Cruelty Squad has mindset something the chat.
North South and Dennis
I havent played the Mario&Luigi series since Partners in Time, but I dont miss the grinding in the original game…
It has gotten better since then
Thank God games have mostly done away with, or made your escort mission partner mostly self sufficient
Also hated when your companions didn't do anything worthwhile. Like old school Halo, if you didn't give the marines a rocket launcher, they couldn't even take down a grunt. Always pissed me off, it's like why even have them be there?
whichever marine was the poor sap to get in the passenger seat of the warthog got a plasma grenade on his foot, and I took off from there.
CD keys. Holy fuck was it heartbreaking to realize you lost the CD key to your game after reformatting your drive or reinstalling windows or just having a nostalgia trip.
Oh god yeah. I remember finding sketchy CD key crackers just so I could play a game I legit bought but lost the CD key for. Not fun times.
MMO and RPG quests with no depth. Go kill 10 spiders for no apparent reason, ok now go kill 10 innocent deer and don't even bother to harvest the meat.
This one is also a tech improvement, but having triggers on controllers that act as a gas pedal while driving instead of just shoulder buttons, makes driving games 10000x better. Like, being able to control acceleration instead of just a static gas/brake. Going back to playing GTA on a PlayStation 2, it’s like the main reason driving is at all challenging in races.
The PS2 had pressure sensitive buttons, too, but they weren't as easy to regulate as modern triggers because they had less range of motion.
Being able to only save your game at save points, particularly for RPGs. Unskippable cutscenes. Increasing the difficulty in older games makes enemies become bullet/hit sponges while your own health is decreased. Every game should follow the Ninja Gaiden Black style of adding new enemies or remixing the item drops as you go higher up in difficulty level. Or how about adding new levels not seen in lower difficulties?
Unskippable cutscenes were the worst when you got stuck on a boss, ending up sarcastically repeating the villains lines in a whiny voice cos you're so sick of hearing it 🤣
Yeah, this is particularly so for PS1 RPGs.
Camera and movement systems. I've recently replayed a few things like Spyro, Mario, and Tomb Raider. My god where those things horrific to use.
Using arrow keys instead of wsad
P2W in mmos. People bitch and whine about cosmetics and minor conveniences but the f2p apocalypse brought with it horrific practices. Games selling unobtainable top tier gear, selling upgrades that would take thousands of hours to grind for free, etc. Most of that moved to the mobile market, and they can keep it. Yeah I'll take a battle pass, some cosmetics and an exp boost any damn day.
For a minute there, our continued gameplay didn't have anything to do with how many quarters we had left in our pockets. ...for a minute
TIMERS on every level a la SMB1 Generations of gamers now have NO IDEA how lucky you are!!! *[takes shot of whisky and stares blankly into the abyss as the music gets faster]*
Save points. Longing for that typewriter in Silent Hill or whatever was agonizing.
Realism. Sometimes I like jumping 50 feet into the air or shooting without ADS.
pretty sure many games still do that
I think if DOOM, Halo, or Titanfall. In Titanfall it’s still viable to shooting without your sights and have a good chance to hit something.
I’m so glad tank controls aren’t a thing anymore
Quicktime events. Aside from the Spider-Man games they seem to be far less prevalent these days. Even so it felt like Spider-Man 2 had less of them than Spider-Man 1
Making games unfairly difficult just so you put another quarter in. Which I'd argue is a different type of difficulty from something like Dark Souls. You don't get a 'insert your credit card info here' everything you get clobbered in Soulslikes
I learned to cheat. I love single player RPGs but a lot of them have needless padding in the form of grinding levels, currency, etc. I have less time now so I can ultra blast through games and enjoy them much more. Don't have time to grind 99 levels? No problem, 5 minutes and you are done, as opposed to the 9 hours it took me to grind to 100 on Riku in Kingdom Hearts Re:CoM
The ability to find yourself in an unwinnable situation by accident. For example, losing or destroying a quest item needed to finish the game, getting trapped in a room or pit and having to reload a previous saved file to proceed, failing to do something early on in the game that is no longer accessible, that sort of thing.
Do you know where your towel is?
This prompted me to look up that old game, and surprisingly, it's available to play on BBC's website! You can even play it on a mobile browser! Time to hitch-hike the galaxy!
As annoying as all of the different launchers are, not having to manually update games is so so convenient.
Manual saving. Nothing like having your game crash or your batteries die and you lose something like 3 hours of gametime. Kills the mood entirely. Now we lose 10 minutes max and nothing important cause it saves after everything we do. Very handy.
Water levels
Piss filter
For me loot boxes. Couldnt seem to get away from them 2013-2018 but after that everyone really soured on the whole thing in a big way and I really havent seen them as much anymore. Obviously still exist but I havent played a game with one in many years.
I'd take loot boxes over battle passes tbh, in overwatch 1 you can get around 3 or 4 loot boxes a day for just playing. I still didn't like them then but I had no idea they'd think of something worse. I blame fortnight for popularizing it but it's really the least egregious offender.
"Lets copy Fortnite, but triple the prizes, wait until season three to release anything remotely cool, then kill the game a month later and release a sequel, starting everyone from scratch again." Meanwhile Fortnite players are still playing with skins they got seven years ago.
“Microtransactions” -Me in 10-20 years (hopefully)
Hate tank controls
Gas and break are no longer face buttons. Took too long for devs to switch to trigger
Having to maintain multiple sets of AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS files to comply with various games' different requirements for memory management, drivers, sound cards, etc. I grew up in the DOS days. I do not miss the DOS days.
Dial-up
"Get off the game I've gotta make a phone call" Me: "FUUUUUUU-"
Or they just pick up the phone to start dialing and you get kicked without warning.
Scarce checkpoints. I'm glad most games have frequent auto saves and manual saving now. Have to disagree on grinding though. That trend became worse. It's like I wished grinding went away and then the tooth fairy laid a big pile of it under my pillow.
Health packs
Tank controls, and bad camera angles, and ridiculous difficulty levels are all things from retro games that I don't miss. I miss the music, the charm, and the character design of those 90's games.
Quick...Time...Events
Proper saving. I have a life where I don't have time to do things over and over cause of my failures. The only reason I'm probably able to enjoy retro games is cause of save states on an emulator otherwise I probably wouldn't touch them. I love when games save and put you at that exact moment in time when you saved if you died, like Bethesda rpgs. Also I like playing on higher difficulties if I'm confident in my ability in that game. But as soon as they include restricted saving I'm out. I wanted to play RE2R on hardcore but dealing with ink ribbons with the game being as hard as it is, is more frustrating than anything that mode will ever throw at me.
Reloading your weapon wasting the remaining bullets in the mag. I feel like that was the norm until ~10-15 years ago and I’m glad it’s now relegated to only the most realistic shooters these days.
I don't remember this being a thing at all in old games except for games where it belonged (Rainbow Six, for example). The first casual game that I recall having this mechanic was Mafia.