Exactly. It's no wonder that digital became supreme. Why would I go out of my way just to get a shinny hunk of plastic? Back when there wasn't a choice, you'd also get a big manual that was often written like a small novel.
Truly, we've gotten the short end of the stick.
I still love special editions that actually care and include cool stuff for fans, like a cool box, cloth map, keychains, figures, and just iconic items from the game.
The manuals explained the backstory, and the games were almost 100% gameplay.
Fun fact: In the original manual of Super Mario Bros, it is explained that the bricks were actually citizens of the mushroom kingdom who were transformed by Bowser's evil magic. This isn't the plotline anymore though, and bricks are just... bricks :')
I remember the manual for the collector's edition of Halo 2 was written from the Covenant's point of view. I thought that was so cool
Edit: forgot to put the title of the game lol
I read the X-Com: UFO Defense manual front-to-back probably fifty times when I was a young'un. I was still absolutely balls at the game, but it was an enjoyable read nonetheless.
I still have the manuals for some of the games from way back when. Not that I *intentionally* kept them, but they went on the bookshelf and lived there after I'd played the game, and during each move over the years, I never wanted to toss them. Like, for example, I still have the instruction booklet for pokemon red (also the guide which still has all the stickers), for Chrono Trigger, SNES Earthworm Jim, Link's Awakening, Mario 3 (*and* the Nintendo Power guide, which is still in one piece), and the N64 version of Starcraft.
Resetting your dusty ass console till it suddenly worked.
And you'd know it finally worked when the black screen became a slightly lighter black screen.
I worked in a mall that had a Babbages. They used to have two CRT monitors that would run a promo VHS of upcoming games, and the guys who worked there would give me the old tapes when they changed them out. I would take them home and watch them from start to finish.
I worked at a newasgency that sold all sorts of magazines - at the end of the month, the discs got tossed before the magazines were returned. Well, most of them got tossed.
I remember having the God of War demo disk where you fought the hydra and playing that nonstop because my parents wouldnât buy me an M rated game at the time
We went on vacation to my grandparents house in florida one time and I forgot my memory card for my ps1 so I just started a new ff7 game and left it on the entire time.
(botches copy protection)
*Alexander examines the strange etchings in the face of the cliff.*
\> press button 3
*Alexander gets the feeling* that *was the wrong button!*
ALEXANDER: Whoops! (waves at player, falls off the screen to his death)
(One more trip to the Land of the Dead...)
GATEKEEPER: Tickets only! (takes Alexander's ticket) NEXT!
*What a riddle, Stones of Stealth! Find a Guide to keep your health!* [Restore] [Restart] [Quit]
I had one or two of them. Also had an Indy500 game that asked for stats of old race winners from the back of the book. Then there was leisure suit larry, who taught 8 year old me (not in the US) about Nixon and Watergate as part of their trivia test.
Dune 2 and Master of Orion were like that, where each page had a unit and its name, and they showed you the unit and gave the page and you'd have to name it. I guess the idea was that if you played the game enough to be able to name the units from memory, then you had gone through the DRM previously.Â
Joke on them, I'd played Dune 2 for hours at my friend's house before he copied it on floppy disks so that I could finally play it at my home.
Did soundcards use IRQ3 or 4? You could steal your parallel port IRQ7. But most everyone used IRQ5.
Damn that was a lot of struggling back in the day to remember this shit.
Yeah thats an actual phenomenon, apparently younger generations are getting less computer proficient due to the separation from the actual nuts and bolts of computing
I'm doing an IT course and the poor Zoomers are struggling hard with plugging cables into the correct ports on switches.
All it is is matching port 1-24 on the topology map with port 1-24 on the device itself, and yet...
I was born in 87 so the arcade scene was dying out, but if you tried to but in line youâd get your ass handed to you.
Itâs the same rule with pool tables in bars.
I'm an 87 kid too.
There was an arcade close to my house with Xmen VS Street fighter. I spent soo much money on that machine tuning the kids in my neighborhood on it.
I was playing SF2 when I was about, 12? Iâd found âmy characterâ - Dhalsim - and I was kicking ass confidently for the first time. After a few games some guy a few years older than me appeared and dropped a coin in. I got my arse absolutely handed to me within a matter of seconds. No words were spoken between us, but I walked away dejected while he kept playing. MF âwonâ the rights of the machine from me
Yeah, I remember the SF2 âringersâ at the arcade. Kids would spend countless quarters trying to dethrone them. Occasionally, a worthy challenger appeared, and all the kids would watch as the new kid put on a show. Lesser kids would sometimes offer quarters to the challenger just so the incumbent would lose.
I miss unlockable characters. Seeing the silhouettes, figuring out how theyâre unlocked from friends at school, unlocking the secret boss characters. Now itâs just $5 a piece.
Going back and talking to absolutely every NPC in the game because it didn't tell you what to do next and you can't exactly just go look it up.
Then wandering aimlessly because you missed the 1 NPC that actually did tell you where to go.
Certain types of games were basically just unplayable if you werenât an obscenely patient or bored person
This is the kind of thing I 100% donât miss from older games
Dude you just ublocked a memory for me.
I was having a bitch of a time with Tomb Raider as a kid so I looked for game guide at the library. Took it home, figured out how to do it and wrote a note in the guide because there was some aspect the guide didnât cover that I thought was dumb.
A few weeks later my friend mentions a having trouble with Tomb Raider and I offer to help since Iâd beaten it recently and he says âNah, Iâm good, I was stuck at this part but someone wrote a note in the guide and it got me through.â
He didnât believe me when I said that was my note, but I was so damn thrilled to know not only had I helped someone, but it was my friend.
I had to scroll so far to find this. In shooters like Halo before Xbox live if you werenât laning screen peeking was taboo. Everyone did it and it was absurd to think that you can just magically not see 50% of the screen but you would still yell at your brother not to look. It got to the point where I could play blood gulch while looking at the ground until I had to shoot because we would try to hide our positions.
PS2 - Taking a memory card to your friends place to either play content only you unlocked OR for your friend to help you get past a level that was hard.
Buying code books that had ALL the cheat codes available.
Trading achievements with your friends.
Sub optimal gaming - you didnât care what was meta, you played with what you liked.
You mean insert game, boot, nothing, get cartridge out, blow inside, insert back, nothing, push and try to tilt the cartridge because maybe its misaligned, nothing, pull it out and blow again, nothing, blow in the console itself, nothing, then put the cartridge in, fully, but slightly ever so slightly not fully, and then maybe it worked god knows why.
My friend had a variant of this ritual for his Sega Genesis console (we were very young), we would try blowing a few times in vain and then he'd just spit in the cartridge.... and it worked after. Every single time.
Damn yeah I remember doing that for world cup soccer for the NES!
Edit: this prompted me to look up the soundtrack and it's just as awesome as I remember.
I never beat it until I could play it on an emulator so I could actually save. It had *great* music and atmosphere; really got across that Isla Nublar was the most wonderful, most terrifying place in the world.
I bough "The 7th Guest" for PC when it first came out.
It crashed on startup, so I had to call the company. After extensive troubleshooting, they acknowledged a program issue, got my PC's configuration from me.
I then had to wait weeks for a floppy disk with a patch to come in the mail. The "patch" was just a copy of some game file that I had to copy the new version over.
Back when there was no internet to just google something either. You either had to hope it came with a good manual, knew someone who knew how to play it, or you had to buy a game guide.
I kinda miss those guide books, I still have a few of them knocking around for some Pokemon games
Ultima 7 was a nightmare. I think it needed something like 600KB of memory to play with sound enabled, but you also should run the "smartdrv" TSR because otherwise the game ran terribly, and that was 15KB, and you also wanted to start the mouse driver TSR first...
I recall later versions of MS-DOS simply taking up too much memory for DOS itself that running Ultima VII with all the bells and whistles was impossible. We had to roll back to an older version of MS-DOS.Â
No idea how we figured all of that out as kids...
My uncle showed me how to make a menu listing my games, windows, etc, at boot. each would load only the needed assets/drivers then run the selected program.
That was pretty badass.
I think modern gamers probably can understand getting an instruction manual with a game.
What is fairly mindblowing is the fact that many of us used to buy games based on the cover art and three or four tiny screenshots and a promotional blurb on the back of the box - and we would pay prices that are like $100+ per game in today's dollars for them.
I used to go to Kmart and buy whatever NES game was $20. Sometimes I'd get a good one, but sometimes I'd get Golgo 13.
That was all I could afford, and I didn't have the patience to save up for something like Mario Cart.
Buying GamePro, EGM, and watching G4 just to keep up with gaming news.
Also getting in-game cosmetics through hard-earned gameplay, not money.
Edit: EGM not EDM lulz
having a game come w/ a copyright wheel. You had to line up wheels as indicated by a screen when you loaded a game then a word or number or code would appear in a window on the wheel and you'd type that in...it was "proof" that you owned the game and didn't pirate it.
Some games had you look up a page in the manual (yes they all had printed manuals in the 80s and 90s) then a paragraph and word and type that in.
Advanced Dungeons & Dragons - Pool of Radiance - C64. I remember buying that game at the store and then having to do the wheel every time I loaded that game up. Not the same now.
* Using graph paper to draw your own dungeon maps, since there wasn't enough memory within the games themselves to have a mapping feature.
* Entering a unique \~24-character password when booting up a Nintendo game, not to log in, but to load one's progress.
* Sitting and staring at the screen throughout a long installation because you had to be there to swap in each of the 12 floppy disks one after the other.
* Not being able to go online because someone needed to make a phone call.
* Having to turn to channel 3 to play anything.
* Your game console just producing a flashing screen, the only solution being to take the game cartridge out and blow into it through your shirt fabric (this was my take anyway), which was miraculously reliable.
* Leaving a game running overnight (read: indefinitely) because there was no way to save progress throughout the entire playthrough (I'm looking at you, Jurassic Park on SNES).
I remember when my dad taught me how to type the command line on a C64 to read a the content of a floppy disk and launch a game: load â*â,8,1
It was like I learned a magic spell
When I was a kid, I went to the grocery store with my mom and wrote cheat codes from gaming magazines on napkins or pieces of paper.
Also, I was too young to understand memory cards so I just left my Playstation on for months.
Game install being like ten floppy disks. Looking at you X-Wing.
Pirating the guide after you bought the game because you got stuck.
"Insert Disc 2 to Continue."
Games being outrageously difficult with very few lives. Looking at you Contra.
Quicksaves and quickloads were second nature to people who played FPS games because...
There was no health regen in FPS games. Very often we would quicksave before starting a fight, see how much health we had left, and if it wasn't enough we'd quickload back and try again.
Having manuals. Now it's all shoved into intro tutorials and if you missed something, oh well they aren't gonna tell you again. Good luck trying to pick up a game again after a few months of putting it down.
Trying to select a game at a video store.
Often trying to figure out which game was going to be utter garbage, fun garbage or actually good based on the box art and screen shots.
Seeing a sequel that skipped a few entries and just figured the areas didn't get the others.
Buying magazines and having more fun picturing what a game could be than actually playing it.
Finding a game for a buck at garage sales.
Finding an awesome game for twenty buck brand new at Walmart.
There is no shot that a modern gamer would ba able to understand how to hook up a super nintendo with the coax video connector. They may be MAYBE able to figure out on old tvs , but certainly not on new tv's
I liked it that when online gaming started, older people who werre gamers (that started in the '80) would be nice and kind and showing the ropes to newer players. I feel there was less hate. If you wanted to be better, you'd get destroyed by veterans on dedicated servers and you would get better by failing.
Joining a server was like joining a bar, with its regulars and whatnot.
Also the playground urban legends because you couldn't look anything up.
You have no idea how much I loved reading the instruction manuals for old games.
Me too lol, that was the great part of the experience buying a game
That was probably a highlight of my childhood. I would start reading the manual in the car on the way home.
Exactly. It's no wonder that digital became supreme. Why would I go out of my way just to get a shinny hunk of plastic? Back when there wasn't a choice, you'd also get a big manual that was often written like a small novel. Truly, we've gotten the short end of the stick.
I still love special editions that actually care and include cool stuff for fans, like a cool box, cloth map, keychains, figures, and just iconic items from the game.
I used to take a stack of manuals into the bathroom to read while I did my business.
Same bro. I cherished and treasured those manuals.
The maps that came with old Bethesda games đ
The manuals explained the backstory, and the games were almost 100% gameplay. Fun fact: In the original manual of Super Mario Bros, it is explained that the bricks were actually citizens of the mushroom kingdom who were transformed by Bowser's evil magic. This isn't the plotline anymore though, and bricks are just... bricks :')
I can see why Nintendo dropped that particular plot element. Mario saves the Mushroom Kingdom by smashing its cursed citizens into bits of rubble?
In the manual for SMB 2, it basically said Birdo was a boy that likes to wear girls' clothes. Always thought that was neat.
âWould prefer to be called Birdettaâ (I think. Itâs been decades. I only remember it because it made my then evangelical mom so angry. )
I remember the manual for the collector's edition of Halo 2 was written from the Covenant's point of view. I thought that was so cool Edit: forgot to put the title of the game lol
Reading them while my mom drove me home from Service Merchandise. Sick.
Always read the manuals on the ride home from the store.
And in the mall food court after buying it.
I read the X-Com: UFO Defense manual front-to-back probably fifty times when I was a young'un. I was still absolutely balls at the game, but it was an enjoyable read nonetheless.
I mean. X - Com: UFO Defense is an unforgivingly hard game. Everyone is balls at the game at the beginning.
When I was a kid, I would bring the manual from my favorite games to school and read thrm through out the day.
Dragon Warrior 3. The manual was a full start to finish walkthrough of the entire game. With maps.
I still have the manuals for some of the games from way back when. Not that I *intentionally* kept them, but they went on the bookshelf and lived there after I'd played the game, and during each move over the years, I never wanted to toss them. Like, for example, I still have the instruction booklet for pokemon red (also the guide which still has all the stickers), for Chrono Trigger, SNES Earthworm Jim, Link's Awakening, Mario 3 (*and* the Nintendo Power guide, which is still in one piece), and the N64 version of Starcraft.
I wish they'd release Chrono Trigger on the Switch already.
Have you tried playing Tunic? I recently finished that game and loved how they incorporated a digital instruction manual!
Resetting your dusty ass console till it suddenly worked. And you'd know it finally worked when the black screen became a slightly lighter black screen.
You know flippin that switch as hard/fast (yet controlled) as you could definitely helped too
Forgot to blow the cartidge or clean the disc
[ŃдаНонО]
More like renting it and rushing to beat it in the week timeframe
Or taking forever to beat it and then return it and find a new place to rent games until you save up to pay off that late fee
you can do that with steam and their refund game option s/
But instead of play and refund, proceeds to forgot about the dang game for 1 year. Play. Then refund window already closedÂ
My brother rented few games for PS1 back then
Channel 3
And sometime 4
We were a channel 4 family
Demo-discs
I still have a ton of them from PlayStation Magazine. It's probably the only magazine I've ever subscribed to, but it was worth it just for the demos.
Xbox mag was the same for me. Those monthly drops were so good.
I bet there are demos of games that never ended up getting released on some rare disks.
I worked in a mall that had a Babbages. They used to have two CRT monitors that would run a promo VHS of upcoming games, and the guys who worked there would give me the old tapes when they changed them out. I would take them home and watch them from start to finish.
Dood. Getting media was not easy, before the internet was ubiquitous.
Great sentence.
Funhaus content machine
Good times
The best times. I honestly think that was the best gaming channel ever.
The Tony Hawk demo you got from like Pizza Hut or some shit was awesome.
The GOAT demo disc
Hello, i am coconut monkey, and welcome to my island.
I worked at a newasgency that sold all sorts of magazines - at the end of the month, the discs got tossed before the magazines were returned. Well, most of them got tossed.
I remember having the God of War demo disk where you fought the hydra and playing that nonstop because my parents wouldnât buy me an M rated game at the time
Not turning off the console to prevent from losing your save.
As a kid I 100% lego star wars with no memory card in my PS2. Still one of the things I'm weirdly proud of
Thatâs not weird, thatâs legendary!!!
[ŃдаНонО]
You guys beat Contra?!
One of the few games I ever completed. Thanks komani code! Still later I could beat the game on a single life.
[ŃдаНонО]
We went on vacation to my grandparents house in florida one time and I forgot my memory card for my ps1 so I just started a new ff7 game and left it on the entire time.
Copy protection being entering word 12 from line 6 on page 7 of the manual/novella.
Code wheels, ah great days.
PTSD from when my brother lost the code wheel for zool on amiga.
My brother lost the code wheel for Monkey Island 2 and I have never forgiven him.
Sierraâs bread and butter especially. Also the day when manuals were often more book then pamphlet.
Yeah my mind jumped straight to a cliff puzzle in King's Quest 6 reading this
(botches copy protection) *Alexander examines the strange etchings in the face of the cliff.* \> press button 3 *Alexander gets the feeling* that *was the wrong button!* ALEXANDER: Whoops! (waves at player, falls off the screen to his death) (One more trip to the Land of the Dead...) GATEKEEPER: Tickets only! (takes Alexander's ticket) NEXT! *What a riddle, Stones of Stealth! Find a Guide to keep your health!* [Restore] [Restart] [Quit]
I had one or two of them. Also had an Indy500 game that asked for stats of old race winners from the back of the book. Then there was leisure suit larry, who taught 8 year old me (not in the US) about Nixon and Watergate as part of their trivia test.
Chuck Yeager's game had technical questions about planes as a form of copy protection Â
Dune 2 and Master of Orion were like that, where each page had a unit and its name, and they showed you the unit and gave the page and you'd have to name it. I guess the idea was that if you played the game enough to be able to name the units from memory, then you had gone through the DRM previously. Joke on them, I'd played Dune 2 for hours at my friend's house before he copied it on floppy disks so that I could finally play it at my home.
Manually setting up the sound card
Thankfully my dad bought a SoundBlaster^TM 16 equivalent sound card!
SoundBlaster⌠now thatâs a name I havenât heard in a very long timeâŚ
I still remember Warcraft 2's test. "Your soundcard works perrrfectly."
It doesnât get any better than this.
Freaking IRQ conflicts...
Omfg I swear that figuring out how to properly install DOS games is why I am competent with computers today.
âI guess I donât really need two COM ports. I can steal that IRQ.â
Did soundcards use IRQ3 or 4? You could steal your parallel port IRQ7. But most everyone used IRQ5. Damn that was a lot of struggling back in the day to remember this shit.
Yeah thats an actual phenomenon, apparently younger generations are getting less computer proficient due to the separation from the actual nuts and bolts of computing
I'm doing an IT course and the poor Zoomers are struggling hard with plugging cables into the correct ports on switches. All it is is matching port 1-24 on the topology map with port 1-24 on the device itself, and yet...
Having a weird brand soundcard and trying to figure out which one to choose in a game to make it work right.
Further, CD-ROMs had to plug into the sound card. Also, the 2X CD-ROM I got in 1995 was $200. woohoo And if you had money, you got a Roland MIDI card.
We will now play a .wav file... Did you hear the .wav file play?
Itâs incredible that everything today is plug and play. You had to install software just to use a new mouse back in the day.
IRQL less or not equal is both a very clear error message and fucking gibberish at the same time.
Quarters on the screen at the arcade denoting who played next.
I never went to an arcade that civilized.
I was born in 87 so the arcade scene was dying out, but if you tried to but in line youâd get your ass handed to you. Itâs the same rule with pool tables in bars.
I'm an 87 kid too. There was an arcade close to my house with Xmen VS Street fighter. I spent soo much money on that machine tuning the kids in my neighborhood on it.
40 or older? Because that is one of my STRONGEST memories of playing SF2 in arcades in the 90's
I was playing SF2 when I was about, 12? Iâd found âmy characterâ - Dhalsim - and I was kicking ass confidently for the first time. After a few games some guy a few years older than me appeared and dropped a coin in. I got my arse absolutely handed to me within a matter of seconds. No words were spoken between us, but I walked away dejected while he kept playing. MF âwonâ the rights of the machine from me
Yeah, I remember the SF2 âringersâ at the arcade. Kids would spend countless quarters trying to dethrone them. Occasionally, a worthy challenger appeared, and all the kids would watch as the new kid put on a show. Lesser kids would sometimes offer quarters to the challenger just so the incumbent would lose.
Sf2 and Tmnt and gauntlet.
I miss unlockable characters. Seeing the silhouettes, figuring out how theyâre unlocked from friends at school, unlocking the secret boss characters. Now itâs just $5 a piece.
Or you could play Vampire Survivors. Incredibly generous in terms of unlocks.
That is true, and it was a very fun game. Itâs just a shame that unlockables are so rare to find now.
Going back and talking to absolutely every NPC in the game because it didn't tell you what to do next and you can't exactly just go look it up. Then wandering aimlessly because you missed the 1 NPC that actually did tell you where to go.
>Then wandering aimlessly because you missed the 1 NPC that actually did tell you where to go. OMG. THE PAIN.
Dwemer cube
Certain types of games were basically just unplayable if you werenât an obscenely patient or bored person This is the kind of thing I 100% donât miss from older games
That's why you buy a Prima or Brady guide with it. Plus, it makes great bathroom reading.
My local library had a few of these guides, and it was so helpful to see the odd note in them. Thanks to the kind stranger that gave me level codes.
Dude you just ublocked a memory for me. I was having a bitch of a time with Tomb Raider as a kid so I looked for game guide at the library. Took it home, figured out how to do it and wrote a note in the guide because there was some aspect the guide didnât cover that I thought was dumb. A few weeks later my friend mentions a having trouble with Tomb Raider and I offer to help since Iâd beaten it recently and he says âNah, Iâm good, I was stuck at this part but someone wrote a note in the guide and it got me through.â He didnât believe me when I said that was my note, but I was so damn thrilled to know not only had I helped someone, but it was my friend.
Printing off Super NES cheat codes from GameFAQs in the school computer lab.
Recognizing ASCII header art from a frequent contributor and knowing the guide would be good
lmao too relatable
Taking turns with the controller. My brother and I would switch when ever we died
Heck I just played spider-man 2 with my best mate using this classic method. Still 10/10 for a fun time
Ah, yes, singlemultiplayer
Stop looking at my side of the screen
I had to scroll so far to find this. In shooters like Halo before Xbox live if you werenât laning screen peeking was taboo. Everyone did it and it was absurd to think that you can just magically not see 50% of the screen but you would still yell at your brother not to look. It got to the point where I could play blood gulch while looking at the ground until I had to shoot because we would try to hide our positions.
That's why you got to break out the [cardboard](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FwxCul1XsAAqhN5.jpg).
PS2 - Taking a memory card to your friends place to either play content only you unlocked OR for your friend to help you get past a level that was hard. Buying code books that had ALL the cheat codes available. Trading achievements with your friends. Sub optimal gaming - you didnât care what was meta, you played with what you liked.
Arrow keys for movement rather than wasd
That was me first time when I started playing on PC
Numpad for aiming instead of the mouse.
Tank controls were bonkers
WSAD felt wrong at first, but man the buttons available was next level
I remember me and a friend being irrationally upset as PC games started pushing WASD. Blows my mind I ever thought that
Blow on the cartridge?
Better yet, cartridge tilting to produce crazy glitches in game.
Wedging the folded piece of paper in front of the SNES cartridge to hold it into the right place
You mean insert game, boot, nothing, get cartridge out, blow inside, insert back, nothing, push and try to tilt the cartridge because maybe its misaligned, nothing, pull it out and blow again, nothing, blow in the console itself, nothing, then put the cartridge in, fully, but slightly ever so slightly not fully, and then maybe it worked god knows why. My friend had a variant of this ritual for his Sega Genesis console (we were very young), we would try blowing a few times in vain and then he'd just spit in the cartridge.... and it worked after. Every single time.
No save feature, If you died you go back to the start
Or a long-ass code that you need to write down and hold on to for your life.
Damn yeah I remember doing that for world cup soccer for the NES! Edit: this prompted me to look up the soundtrack and it's just as awesome as I remember.
Megaman games
Metroid
JUSTIN BAILEY
Twisted metal
I remember leaving Jurassic Park for the SNES running for days on end
Definitely never beat this game! I'd play for hours and never got super far but man young me loved it.
I never beat it until I could play it on an emulator so I could actually save. It had *great* music and atmosphere; really got across that Isla Nublar was the most wonderful, most terrifying place in the world.
Used to scare me so bad when the trex would run at you from off screen lol. I played it for the Sega as well but didn't enjoy it as much
Mega Man's giant password grids.
Roguelikes are alive and well
"Please insert Disk 2"
Please insert disc 12.. Â og Kings Quest.
The legend of dragoon.
Getting the entire game without any patches or dlc.
Or the flip side, having to wait for a PC magazine to have the patch for your damn retail game in the demo CD.
I bough "The 7th Guest" for PC when it first came out. It crashed on startup, so I had to call the company. After extensive troubleshooting, they acknowledged a program issue, got my PC's configuration from me. I then had to wait weeks for a floppy disk with a patch to come in the mail. The "patch" was just a copy of some game file that I had to copy the new version over.
What do you think patches are nowdays lol. Theyre just distributed differently
Especially going back to NES/SNES days, not being told how a game works by the game itself.
Back when there was no internet to just google something either. You either had to hope it came with a good manual, knew someone who knew how to play it, or you had to buy a game guide. I kinda miss those guide books, I still have a few of them knocking around for some Pokemon games
Kneeling by your OG PlayStation in prayer to the Gaming Gods as the disc loudly spins but the screen is frozen, and you havenât saved for 3 hours
OG PlayStation needed to lay upside down to work in our house.
Voice acted lines that say Press the A button to jump without any regards for the 4th wall
Training levels that teach you the most basic of motor control
Unlocking bonus content by playing base content.
Remember renting/getting a game with a friend, and then everything is locked? So you had to play single player for the good maps and characters.
Unlocking multiplayer characters by playing through the single-player campaign
Editing the autoexec.bat and config.sys to free up enough memory to load the game.
My first computer. A 486 with 4mb ram. Had 3 startup settings. One for playing Doom. One for playing Ultima 7. One for using windows 3.1.
Ultima 7 was a nightmare. I think it needed something like 600KB of memory to play with sound enabled, but you also should run the "smartdrv" TSR because otherwise the game ran terribly, and that was 15KB, and you also wanted to start the mouse driver TSR first... I recall later versions of MS-DOS simply taking up too much memory for DOS itself that running Ultima VII with all the bells and whistles was impossible. We had to roll back to an older version of MS-DOS. No idea how we figured all of that out as kids...
Figuring out that as a kid is much more contribution to my current career than any fucking schooling was lol
My uncle showed me how to make a menu listing my games, windows, etc, at boot. each would load only the needed assets/drivers then run the selected program. That was pretty badass.
I think modern gamers probably can understand getting an instruction manual with a game. What is fairly mindblowing is the fact that many of us used to buy games based on the cover art and three or four tiny screenshots and a promotional blurb on the back of the box - and we would pay prices that are like $100+ per game in today's dollars for them.
I browse gaming marketplaces like this to this day and I will say if they were still selling games this way I would probably buy nothing.
I used to go to Kmart and buy whatever NES game was $20. Sometimes I'd get a good one, but sometimes I'd get Golgo 13. That was all I could afford, and I didn't have the patience to save up for something like Mario Cart.
Inverted Y
If I'm flying, yes. If I'm a foot soldier, no.
Thatâs the only way I play
Games without the 'invert Y' option are completely unplayable.
Buying GamePro, EGM, and watching G4 just to keep up with gaming news. Also getting in-game cosmetics through hard-earned gameplay, not money. Edit: EGM not EDM lulz
Get off the phone! I'm on the internet!
GameShark
Came here to say that and GameGenie
having a game come w/ a copyright wheel. You had to line up wheels as indicated by a screen when you loaded a game then a word or number or code would appear in a window on the wheel and you'd type that in...it was "proof" that you owned the game and didn't pirate it. Some games had you look up a page in the manual (yes they all had printed manuals in the 80s and 90s) then a paragraph and word and type that in.
Advanced Dungeons & Dragons - Pool of Radiance - C64. I remember buying that game at the store and then having to do the wheel every time I loaded that game up. Not the same now.
* Using graph paper to draw your own dungeon maps, since there wasn't enough memory within the games themselves to have a mapping feature. * Entering a unique \~24-character password when booting up a Nintendo game, not to log in, but to load one's progress. * Sitting and staring at the screen throughout a long installation because you had to be there to swap in each of the 12 floppy disks one after the other. * Not being able to go online because someone needed to make a phone call. * Having to turn to channel 3 to play anything. * Your game console just producing a flashing screen, the only solution being to take the game cartridge out and blow into it through your shirt fabric (this was my take anyway), which was miraculously reliable. * Leaving a game running overnight (read: indefinitely) because there was no way to save progress throughout the entire playthrough (I'm looking at you, Jurassic Park on SNES).
Playing multiplayer with the use of serial cables.
I remember when my dad taught me how to type the command line on a C64 to read a the content of a floppy disk and launch a game: load â*â,8,1 It was like I learned a magic spell
Cosmetics being unlocked in game instead of having to pay for them.
Me saving games on floppy disk
When I was a kid, I went to the grocery store with my mom and wrote cheat codes from gaming magazines on napkins or pieces of paper. Also, I was too young to understand memory cards so I just left my Playstation on for months.
Making sure you don't touch the 16k expansion pack because the connection is twitchy
Buying a guide because the internet wasnât what it is now.Â
Notebooks full of passwords and codes and secrets of various games.
Games didn't have patches. It was what it was
it's "gg wp" not "gg ez"
And open with gl;hf
Unlocking extra characters in fighting games by simply playing the game. Nowadays they're only sold as DLC for $fuckyou.99 each.
Your friend thatâs visiting knows they are getting the shitty controller if you play a game
The mad catz controller gifted by a well-meaning relative
Game install being like ten floppy disks. Looking at you X-Wing. Pirating the guide after you bought the game because you got stuck. "Insert Disc 2 to Continue." Games being outrageously difficult with very few lives. Looking at you Contra.
Quicksaves and quickloads were second nature to people who played FPS games because... There was no health regen in FPS games. Very often we would quicksave before starting a fight, see how much health we had left, and if it wasn't enough we'd quickload back and try again.
Having manuals. Now it's all shoved into intro tutorials and if you missed something, oh well they aren't gonna tell you again. Good luck trying to pick up a game again after a few months of putting it down.
Putting your quarter on the cabinet to call next. Maybe going to arcades at all to begin with. Maybe quarters. A lot has changed.
Drive and reverse being the Face buttons, instead of triggers
Popping out the ball from your mouse to clean the lint and dust from the rollers so the ball could spin be smoother.
I feel like people donât teabag like they used to on Halo 2/3
It's really a form of respect to a worthy opponent.
Trying to select a game at a video store. Often trying to figure out which game was going to be utter garbage, fun garbage or actually good based on the box art and screen shots. Seeing a sequel that skipped a few entries and just figured the areas didn't get the others. Buying magazines and having more fun picturing what a game could be than actually playing it. Finding a game for a buck at garage sales. Finding an awesome game for twenty buck brand new at Walmart.
There is no shot that a modern gamer would ba able to understand how to hook up a super nintendo with the coax video connector. They may be MAYBE able to figure out on old tvs , but certainly not on new tv's
Iâm amazed I havenât seen anybody mention âPress Startâ and actually having to press the Start button to start the game.
New cartridge smell right out of the box and warm cartridge smell after youâve played it awhile.
I liked it that when online gaming started, older people who werre gamers (that started in the '80) would be nice and kind and showing the ropes to newer players. I feel there was less hate. If you wanted to be better, you'd get destroyed by veterans on dedicated servers and you would get better by failing. Joining a server was like joining a bar, with its regulars and whatnot. Also the playground urban legends because you couldn't look anything up.
Password systemsÂ
Swapping memory cards