So Holla Forums I figure plenty of us are pretty old...

so Holla Forums I figure plenty of us are pretty old. Most of us have lived through many different console generations and have watched video games evolve in many different ways. The industry evolve, all sorts of stuff.
So lets get a bit nostalgic and wallow in our yester-years.

Holla Forums, What is something you miss most from the past. Now, no need to get bitter about it and everything (although if you need to vent that, do so) but lets just take it a bit easy if we can.

Me, I miss renting a video game over the weekend and really the whole notion of video rental stores all together.
There was something a bit magical about picking a game off the shelf knowing you only had about 2 days to get through it, to sample it.
Maybe you were able to get it because your parents (in my case my grandparents) were looking to rent a movie over the weekend and they figured they would get you something too…
Maybe you saved up lunch or allowance money every week to pay the 5 bucks needed.
Maybe if you really loved it you would seek it out as a birthday or christmas gift.
And of course it allowed you to experiment in so many wild ways. If it wasn't for a rental store I would have never picked up the likes of SimAnt or SimCity for the SNES. I would have never fallen in love with so many genres and had such a wide variety of taste.

So how about you, Holla Forums? What do you miss about years gone by in vidya?

Games either coming with as much as they were ever going to on release, or if they did see more content, it was as a full on expansion or Director's Cut. No culling shit from a game prior to release for use in paid DLC.

It's especially bad if you've followed a long standing series, and you see optional stuff that used to be an unlockable to reward good play or exploration of the game (or even just cheat code related shit the devs put in when fucking around, like a big head mode or something), and it's all now locked behind a $4 or so price tag on top of the base price of the game to use it with.

ur gay

The first thing comes to mind is the resident evil series.

You figure wrong.

Nothing really, video games r just a hobby. It has been going to shit for almost 35 years now. I do miss old dos games for the first time.

Being able to look forward to a video game.

Fucking this.
I miss games coming out as complete experiences, not half the game with the other half sold to me in several bits that make the complete game cost around $150+. I also miss them coming out without save file corrupting bugs or other shit that requires a day one patch.
Also, physical releases for PC games were great. No limits on how many times you could install it or things like that. It was nice to actually own my games rather than just lease them through Steam.

Like fucking grow up already, god.

I missed popping in a game and playing straight off the bat. You wanted to play some Mario 64? Then jump right into your last save and go nuts. One of the things that annoys me about "Modern" gaming is the load times. I know it's a part of a growing technology and having games load virtually instantaneously will never happen considering the amount of rendering that needs to be done.

well i'm going to be 30 in a couple of months.
I've had video games as my main hobby since I was 5. I've watched this hobby morph and change in so many damn ways in such a quick fucking way.
Such rapid change can accelerate the nostalgic feelings, ya know?


Oh man, you know what I miss MOST about that? The manuals that were like short novels. I hate that I lost my Diablo, Diablo 2, and starcraft manuals…

But I have held on, tooth and nail, to my alpha centauri manual.


I just wish modern games would have an option to completely turn off the "tutorial" level. I want to just jump right into the game. Let me figure out the controls. I'm tired of spending the first 5 hours LEARNING the game.
I have to wonder what sort of special-ed retard has to be in the testing groups that requires a game to give tutorial prompts several hours into the game. By the time the game is telling me how to do something i've long since figured it out on my own.

Do people just not experiment anymore?

Lol fuck off grandpa

The thing with not having tutorials or at least skipping it is that it makes you feel more achieved for working the special shit out.

Atari

I'm not joking.

Too bad a literally jewish game based off a jew movie by a slimy jew had to ruin them.

I was thinking more along the line of Tales.
Maybe it's just me, but I much preferred how it was in Symphonia, Abyss, and Vesperia, where bonus stuff like costumes was the reward for accomplishing a particular task (like beating a bonus boss on the hardest difficulty for Luke's Tactical Leader outfit), beating some minigame, beating bosses in a certain way (Yuri's True Knight one requires you to effectively get a skill point on 23-25 bosses, depending on the version), or following through on a subplot. Now the emphasis is on just buying shit on the PSN instead. Don't like Leia, Rowen, or Elize's default outfits in X1? Better fork over $3-4 each for an alternate one, since they have jack shit ingame.

Not real sure is Zestiria changed the trend, but I can only imagine it's stayed the same if not gotten worse.


Was going to mention that too. While I suppose the ability to patch games that need it is handy (especially compared to the threat of a game needing a full recall or being forever broken), all it's done is encourage dev/publisher laziness, with various games still being buggy or incomplete at release, which probably wouldn't happen as often if systems didn't have connection to the internet to be patched, and wouldn't have as much of a "but they can just patch it" defense.

Imagine what might happen for someone new to, say, a PS3, and the PSN service for it has been shut down. In addition to a lot of digital only releases (another issue) no longer having a legit means of purchase anymore, they'll be shit out of luck for legit ways to download patches to fix/touch up games, possibly just being stuck with a broken game (imagine being stuck with ZoE HD without the patch HexaDrive made) unless they mod the system and pirate stuff.

Not completely vidya, but I miss the old internet from the 00s. I miss making fun of emos, I miss fursecution, I miss shitty old-school memes like lazors and lolcats [they were fucking annoying back then, but looking back, it's hard not to kind of miss them.] I miss the exploding van, I miss hackers on steroids. It's stupid to stay in the past, though. We have our modern followups to those things. Instead of shitting on furries and emos, we shit on liberals [Fursecution is still alive and well, though, just not the focus]. Instead of old shitty memes, we have new shitty memes. Instead of exploding vans, we get Intimidation Game.

I miss good multiplayer games. I miss setting my spray to be a cute anime girl. These games get a lot of shit nowadays, but Gmod and TF2 were fucking awesome before 2010 or so.

Yeah okay.

it was satisfying in its own way, but i really do not miss it

that materialistic garbage used to come with the game as part of the purchase.

Now you need to pay an extra 20 dollars for a "special collectors edition" for that shit.

All of it is free on the internet.

Oh, and to add on to that thing about Xillia 2, Namco acted even more jewish than they did with Japan, since the prior first print bonus Japan got for it (Jude's Yuri outfit, Milla's Asbel outift, and Ludger's Emil outfit; Milla actually rocks the disco-knight coat much better than Asbel ever did) was made exclusive to the Collector's Edition here, which cost $130 plus tax and possibly shipping.

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Maybe this may be the wrong thread to ask, but if there are oldfags in this thread, does anyone remember pre-1993 Usenet? Anyone here before the first Eternal September? What was the community like? Is 2007 really considered the second Eternal September?

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Quality was assured, releasing a broken game would bring great shame to the devs and their families and ancestors. Now they are taking advantage of fat kids in sweat pants getting the 2 year scratch protection for the discs, and returning the game next week.

1996-2006, the silver age of gaming. Gold is coming.

I miss being a creative little faggot. I grew up with so many shit games that I always found a way to get creative with, even though they all tried their best to make me play it the right way. I'd roleplay in freeroam Tony Hawk games. Mostly I'd just play and make Starcraft 1 custom maps. I didn't use the internet outside of newgrounds so I didn't know there were games like Deus Ex or System Shock that would let me play like the faggot I was. There was a little golden era where I found out about Oblivion and Fallout 3. Played them to death. I think the last game I played before I finally lost all sort of vidya creativity was GTA4. Easily logged in thousands of hours on it doing everything I wanted to do. Same with MGS4 and Peace Walker. They were very open ended for MGS games, which meant I fucked around as much as humanly possible. It was great.

And now here I am, with every video game known to man at my fingertips, and I don't have a single bit of childlike creative energy left in me. MGSV brought the fire out in me a bit but ultimately it's not enough. It's not fucking fair, anons. It's not.

I could do without the copy of Spore sitting there mocking me, I'll give you that.

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hello anita, sexy birtch

ok faggot.

I miss being able to play co-op with friends when they came over, instead of being in different places and wearing headsets.

I only play MATURE GAMES for MATURE GAMERS such as myself

This. Something doesn't feel right even with playing splitscreen. Add on the fact that nobody wants to stay up till dawn playing shit like Dynasty Warriors and Battlefront on the PS2 anymore. Everyone is either tired, or has work. fuck me up

I miss arcades

more specifically I miss arcades that cost no more than 50 cents a credit, aren't >70% ticket redemption crap and I miss that fucking atmosphere that for the most part is long dead, outside of the rare spot or an event like California Extreme (the one year I went was bretty gud).

I bet you fags have special edition "action figures"

There's still a few games/series that allow for that, Tales being one of the few JRPG series in general to do so, has done so since the PS1 entries for almost all of the console entries in it, and continues to do so.

Unfortunately, I think the idea is why would a publisher want to sell one copy of a game when they can sell four copies, and the company that owns the system can ensure all people playing it own the system themselves (until the advent of an emulator anyhow), and either the system owner or the publisher can even make more money off an online pass needed to connect for multiplayer.

...

I miss the days before Sony, especially the PS2. They've been responsible for just about every malpractice in the industry today and the PS2 gave birth to the casual audience and commercialized the fuck out of everything.

Sony is pretty fucked up.

What the absolute fuck is this nigger shit? Is this in China or something? Why does it only have a few buttons and two joysticks? What the fucking is going on here?

wew lad

Fuck…ya know what though? I don't mind the ticket scamming shit. As a kid it was fun as fuck, trying to win and save tickets to get that one crazy prize that you probably spent more in credits than you would have if you just bought it.

I still remember the day I was at an arcade when I was like 10. My grandfather had enough of the place and my allotment of tokens and shit was gone. I was BEGGING him for just ONE MORE play at that one ticket game where you were supposed to flip a token up (through a gun) into a dinosaur's head for ticket points.
Some black dude passed by and gave me a token, said "Here you go, good luck buddy" and then left. I took it, played it, won 500 tickets.

Fucking crazy.
With all the tickets I saved up over the weeks I ended up trading them in for this portable little radio thing. A piece of shit but back then it was a trophy.

I find it kind of funny though that arcades have a whole section that caters to adults. Dave & Busters and the now defunct "Gameworks" all have a restaurant, pool table, and of course bar component to them.

Shit, the last time I was at Dave & Busters was at a surprise birthday party for a friend (who died 5 years ago)….
Shit.

fuck if I know, I just pulled up a random picture with rows of cabinets

Even if you're only looking at the PS2 gen alone, you're still terribly wrong
Sony did nothing that Sega wasn't doing before them, and Microsoft took everything Sega was doing and turned it up to 11.

Closest things left to arcades where I live is a Gameworks in one of the malls, the machines some pizza places have, and one of the theaters having a small set up in the lobby with stuff like Mortal Kombat 4 and Ghost Squad, and some shooters and racers.

You don't have to pretend though
triggered huh lad tbqh wuuw

I miss unique game boxes, and manuals that weren't just inserts or technical documents, but part of the lore of the game in itself.

I remember playing afterburner in a fucking pizzahut.

yeah I played my fair share of the ticket games at chuck e cheese (or as we used to call it Showbiz Pizza), it just bothers me that they dominate what little arcade space that's left now when it used to be the other way round

I miss playing some water jet racing game at Eatza Pizza.

In some ways, I miss when gamers were an insular bunch of autistic nerds. There used to be some genuine solidarity in the hobby. I remember when pick-up co-op was a thing in arcades. One person would be playing something like The Simpsons or X-Men, and other people would come up and drop their quarters in and join in, and as long as they played together they were a team.

Or you plunk your tokens down as a challenge in a fighter.

Story Time:
I worked at a bowling alley when I was 16 and it had Marvel vs Capcom 2. During my lunch break I would fuck around in the arcade.
One time I was playing through MVC2 getting close to the end with the scrubbiest of teams (Ryu and Wolverine) and some dude comes in and plunks his tokens in to challenge.

I ended up unleashing a hell upon this man that I'm sure he won't forget. I didn't change my attitude I just played the game. I was trying all sorts of combos and super move shit (but i'm not entirely used to an arcade stick).

Here's the thing, did you know that you could change Ryu from a white gi to a red gi and he will be like ken? did you know you could go a step further and he will get a black gi and become like Akuma?
I didn't, but it fucking happened in my frantic playing. And that guy didn't know either.

Still, I played it cool, as if I intended to pull those changes out during the fight the entire time. I ended up actually finishing this fucker off with one of Akuma's super moves (as Ryu, mind you).

His gaggle of like 3 friends all did their "AAWWW" and "OOOOOHHHH" shit as he walked away defeated.

Shit was like a scene out of a fucking shitty movie.

I miss going to gamestores, and reading their game magazines. Now all the hot info is on the more convenient and accessible internet. Also some magazines used to come with a Demo. I remember trying out Yakuza demo, and it had some disgaea promo stuff in it.

Its all just nostalgia though, so I can live without.

I MISS BUYING A GAME AND GETTING MY FUCKING MONEYS WORTH OUT OF IT

i'm getting tired of every game i even show fucking interest in getting butchered to shit by release

I miss when that was what nerds actually were, instead of the "huuurrr I'm such a nerd xDD" shit happening now.

But gamers back then were super dedicated, little to no casuals, and even made their own fanzines. I miss that.

I miss color in video games. Everthing now is either really brown or really dark.

And what happened to all the mascot platformers?

Maybe you should get some taste and avoid AAA trash

I can't even handle this thread right now.
You're at least 10 years too late for that, OP.

wow, look at you old ass faggots in here, maybe you should do something better with your time than moping about dumb video games. you wanna know what a real man does? he goes outside, he gets pussies, he gets a life and laid, and he plays good games to keep friends around. like no mans sky, or destiny, or cod, or gta, or games that you can play with friends and keep a social life with

fuckin homos haha

You got something against homos, boy?

Japan still seems to get that some games/genres do well with color (though it depends on the vibe; a game with a dark tone but cheery graphics can be dissonant as hell, but sometimes that's what the company goes for). The push for realism hasn't helped too much (both graphical style and color usage), and I'd wager that for some companies/customers, brown and bloom is what they find to fits that bill.

yeah it means ur a weiner boy WOAAAAAGH

None of what you described sounds like a man to me.
What you just described is a vapid cunt.

Responding to obvious bait, come on man.

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Nice try. The Xbox isn't the system that sold more than the Wii. You're a fool if you don't see how the PS2 ruined everything.

The posting style around here says otherwise.

It sold well, but didn't do the shit that actually ruined everything. You can argue that due to it selling better it invited more casuals, but the Xbox was the one that invited the specific kinds of casuals who ruined everything. The Xbox was the one that actually pioneered and popularized the extremely shitty practices that we see today. The 360 and Steam helping that along one gen later. It took until the PS4 for Sony to catch up to Microsoft's jewry, and they got away with it because the shit eating casuals that Microsoft had brought in by that point were willing to jump ship to the PS4, which only had an equal amount of industry-ruining tactics compared to the 360, while, the Microsoft made the Xbone in an attempt to become even more jewish than they were before.

amen

bunch of godamn manchildren

smells a bit manchild in here

Just thought of something else I miss…
Conspiring with friends over which consoles who was getting.
This wasn't to make sure everyone could play online together but to make sure we wouldn't be out of the range of games.

So in the early days you would get an SNES and your friend would get a Sega.
It is truly kind of odd to me how it all morphed to a point of people trying to make sure they got the same consoles as their friends rather than striving for variety.

Couch multiplayer dying down, maybe? Especially since (to my knowledge anyhow) you generally can't even play online with people that don't use the same system as you in multiplat games.

Me and my friends played whatever we could get our hands on. Trying to figure out who buys what is some dumb shit.

There are a few games like shadowrun 2007 that can play pc vs 360. And I know for a fact you can play PC games with mac fags. Like Left 4 dead 2.

It's hard to see the little dino heads that give you big ticket prizes in this pic, but that game was called Dinoscore.

I miss giving my cartridges blowjobs

Sorry, that was the wrong pic. Pic related is correct. I thought it was impossible to actually get a coin in the small dino heads, but I guess you can.

On a side note, I bet your grandpa was fuming when he saw you won a big prize. He might have smiled at you but on the inside he was screaming. Worst part it he didn't even know how long it would take to spit out the rest of the stupid motherfucking tickets.


Gameworks is still going strong. They had about two dozen locations a decade ago and then went through a horrible downturn and lost like 20 of them. Now they are back up to 7 and usually quite busy. When consoles crash hard, and they will eventually, then the arcades of North America will come back to life in a huge way.

Im 32 and i miss reading print magazines.

At some point in my life I realized nostalgia is the stupidest sentiment ever, so I don't miss anything.

I miss Game mags like Nintendo power or demo discs from PC gaming mags back when they were still about gaming.

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Holla Forums is the wrong board to find those people. Imageboards as a whole might be the wrong place too. Even our older posters were too young for the time frame you are talking about.

Hey, almost 30 isn't old, I don't feel old! But that's because I got off my as to do shit srsly.

Overall lots of shit has changed, some for bad, most for good, that's more or less evolution of videogames - I don't want a whole stack of magazines piling up or cd discs to bother with, I like how it's going now.
But there's one thing I miss in like 98% of modern videogame industry - it's not about fun anymore, it's all about shearing the sheeple. I miss journalism where games were portrayed in both lights, critiqued and praised, those helped me to get good and fun games and reading about them was half the fun. I miss poorly made games which lacked controls or graphics but were enjoyable because that was the aim of videogames, not polishing, e-spurts, politics, "exploration of nothing", cinematic experience, instant gratification and other "important gameplay elements" that are only important to businessmen.
Saying all that it's not like there aren't good games, it's just hard to find them among heaps of steamlined shit with no demos and only piracy combated by DRM and copywrong jews.

Among recent games I really enjoyed Steamworld Heist mix of Worms and Shadowrun-tier TBT with good gameplay and every little element accounted for, made with love, Underrail good, long oldskool Fallout-tier RPG and EDF 4.1 pure fun and carnage, I don't need anything else. There are also fightans but they'll live as long as Japan isn't nuked.
So, I still do love and enjoy my videogames, Holla Forums.

Shareware. There was nothing better than every month having a magazine filled with shit to play discovering new games no one had even heard of before. I miss those days where developers had to prove their shit before they charged you for it. I miss bargain bin diving and finding games like Enemy Nations, Little Big Adventure and Space Empires as if it hadn't been for that I'd never had discovered those games.

I miss the mass of people not talking about games, because when someone you met did finally talk about a game they didn't just follow the popular opinion as at that time there was no such thing as every gamer was isolated and had 5 competing magazines telling them different things on PC. (unless you were a console fag and read Nintendo Power like a faggot.)

I miss having to know what the fuck you were doing to even start playing a game. Allocate the required EMS, Make sure the IRQ is set for soundcards, Ensure the Mouse driver was installed.

I miss games magazines being more a catalogue of shit you could buy but having multiple retailers all competing on price instead of the current system of everyone charges the same price that steam sells for. Back in the day you could really shop around.

I miss walking into a retailer, picking up a game and having no attitude at all from the cashier, not asking me about disc insurance or VIP clubs or any of that bullshit, just "Let me get a bag for you" and that's it. Then opening the box at the Supermarket because you were such an impatient little shit that you wanted to see what the CD looked like and read the manual. Then accidentally walking into a pole because you were too busy reading the manual.

I miss not having patches, and just having a game that worked straight off the disk.

I miss the coming soon videos that used to run during install or start up to showcase the other games the developers had made.

I miss install times being 10 mins long, instead of the 14 hours GTA 5 took off the DVDs. I especially miss the old DOS style installer because they were so minimalist. The closest thing now is cracking a game as they still use a similar format.

I miss Windows not being a shithead and interrupting my game because it needs to install an update. I also miss having native dos as dosbox is no where near as good.

I've used usenet post eternal summer in the 90s and experienced it being ruined by newer users later on too. I can't imagine what it was like pre-eternal summer.

What I miss most is arcades.

Vidya wasn't born a hobby for isolated autistis and nerds, it was a gathering place for boys of all ages. And if you're too green to remember that time, you might have trouble understanding the fine print.

Like that arcades weren't extended Gamestops, but small scale conventions side by side to cinema and outdoor activities. All perfectly normal and healthy. It's 32 bits consoles that brought that smell of stagnant isolation to the hobby, killing the social fabric of arcades. You could say the internet itself replaces arcades, as the surroundings for vidya, but we all know that the people you contact over the net aren't real.

youngfag here, the one thing I really miss the most is couch multiplayer.
I miss playing zDoom with my dad and aunt, or playing Super Mario World with my cousins at my aunts house. I miss having friends over and playing Half-life: DM, 007 Nightfire and Halo. I still can occasionally get my friends over for a LAN but all we play is CS:GO, which is alright but I wish I could convince them to try out 1.6 for once.


I still go to an arcade near my area from time to time but I imagine it's simply not the same as it was before my time. I probably spend more time playing skeeball and air hockey than vidya there. The jewish token system certainly doesn't help either.

Your taste is good user. I'm 32 and I agree with you, games aren't as fun as they used to be aside from some standout releases.

No budget
Yearly release dev cycles
Handing off the IPs to people who have never developed a videogame before
Refusing to greenlight anything that isn't [CURRENT YEAR] trend

That's what happened.

Seriously, anons? Obvious bait is obvious.

Hello darkness my old friend. ♫

I miss going over to other kids houses just to play video games, even though I wasn't friends with them.
I miss the excitement of buying a game at a store and waiting to get home to read the instruction manual and then play the game.
I miss split screen multiplayer and punching the friend next to you for being cheap or looking at your part of the screen.
I miss arcades.
I miss blowing into cartridges to make them work.
I miss having no load times.
I miss controllers only having a few buttons and a d-pad.

God damn user. Your are causing some deep feels.

My Dad actually used to run a video rental store (not a franchise one either like Blockbuster or Video Ezy) and so from the very beginning I was able to 'rent' any game in the store for free for pretty much as long as I wanted (unless it was a brand new game or in high demand, in which case I'd only be able to play it for a day or so). Until I got my N64 I didn't actually 'own' games of my own, just the hardware itself.

So yeah, I got to sample a lot of great NES/SNES/N64 games that I likely wouldn't have otherwise had the chance to play until much later on via emulators otherwise, examples being Secret of Evermore (and Mana of course, though SoE was my favourite even if it wasn't a true Seiken Densetsu entry), Simcity NES and 2000, Breath of Fire II, and even relatively obscure shit like Aidyn Chronicles. Somehow we even managed to get a hold of Starcraft 64 which was apparently supposed to be a Blockbuster exclusive at the time in Australia and I played the everloving shit out of that. I remember Dad saying at one point that one of the games we got in was so rare at the time that there was only like 10 other copies in the country (can't remember which game it was for the life of me now though), but he certainly wasn't the type of person to exaggerate either.

Probably the only downside was that he only ever stocked Nintendo products and refused to stock Sega, Microsoft or even Sony products (at least until about a decade ago, from memory he eventually caved in and started stocking PS2 games or something), so I did miss out on the other platforms until I convinced him to buy me the original Xbox Huge back when Halo LAN parties were the in thing and I also picked up something like 20 miscellaneous junk computers from a high school auction for $5 and put together my own 166mhz Pentium 1 desktop with 64MB of RAM and a S3 Graphics GPU with 4MB of VRAM taken from other GPUs I had laying around (since back then you could get GPUs with slots for more VRAM) out of what still worked (this was back in like 2002 when Pentium 4 was the current standard) and he bought me Starcraft with Brood War as my first PC game as well. And that's ultimately what got me hooked onto PC gaming (as well as the possibility of emulating any games I missed in my childhood).

Also

I read the instruction manuals so much as a kid that I pretty much taught myself how to read from the fucking things. I remember I was a good year or two above other kids in terms of reading, spelling and vocabulary throughout much of primary school thanks to that.

Being able to binge play multiple all nighters. I wish I still had that much time.

I mostly miss the games, just games with rock solid but simple gameplay that posed a good challenge.

I also miss arcades, i met good friends there.

No DLC, no patches. Game was either good or bad, and you knew it wouldn't get better or worse.

Oh, and level load times. They used to be nearly instant at one point, but then games got bigger faster than technology could keep up with and we got stuck with minute long load times until SSDs came along. I fully expect developers to fuck it up again however.

I miss renting games. I miss video stores with that trademark smell of dust and carpeting. I miss the big, interesting game boxes. I miss not having the internet and having to tough out a hard game or get creative and make my own maps and notes ("this enemy is weak to ice", "you can't open this chest without the silver key" etc. I miss when I had a subscription to PC Gamer and it was a fat, thick magazine that was actually worth reading.

I blame Big Bang Theory and Halo exclusively for the decline of our hobby.

They even did away with that on racing-games like Need For Speed.

That was the only reason i played those games in the first place.

And iThings, don't forget those.

2007

woah checked

speaking of summer

This. Sure, arcade games were cheap as fuck and designed to kill you quickly so you dump in more money, but they did allow you to git gud and play longer, rewarding your skill. Maybe I mostly miss skill-based games in general, which arcades had a large influence on. I can't stand games that lead you by the nose through everything there is to see like a goddamn Disney World ride.

There was also a weird sort of camaraderie in arcades. Even if you were complete strangers, everyone was there for the same reason. This is absent in multipurpose establishments like Dave & Busters or various barcades where the games are often an afterthought and the real money is made on typical restaurant and bar food and beverage markups.

How many times are you dipshits going to fall for it?

My country used to play around with inflationary politics in the 80s, so we used to play 50c in the late 70s for a single play and that turned out literally 10X higher after a decade.

Physical game releases with proper thick manuals. Not only were they are large contributor to the classic new game smell but reading about the plot, characters and weapons in the game on the way home got you hyped up.

Oh and multiplayer games without persistent unlock systems. If I want to play on a level playing field now I've got to put 40+ hours in grinding for every fucking game. Also it's used as a replacement for actual quality content. Where before people would keep playing a game because it was fun or because people were making custom content like maps (which unlock systems normally prevent since devs are scared of XP farming maps) now people are just playing to see their little xp bar increase.

there's probably a couple, but i'ld guess most of the oldfags were part of the initial wave of people who ruined shit in the 90s since all that takes is around 30 instead of mid 40s.

Galloping Ghost in Illinois. Something like 300+ cabinets.

Shut up kid, when adults are talking.

They could revive the arcades by having machines that are ultra high end computers in a LAN, the problem is there aren't many video games to make use of these machines.

No, you get recycled office machines, clean them, add in a $40 GPU and load them with LAN games like Halo CE, CS, UT2k4, etc. Perfect. I remember one user actually had a plan similar to that, he owned his own LAN party center somewhere in Eastern Europe.

Remembering all the vidya I beat on 2 day rentals just cements the fact that back then most vidya wasn't worth full price either. Don't get me wrong, I played a lot of good games on those rentals, but that shit still wasn't worth buying at release day. I knew people with 50+ of each NES/SNES/Genesis games and I can't fucking see how.

I knew, the stank was great but I came later. Even though I knew of LOD and all. Being older than western boards is a curse and a gift.
Mainly a curse when tryhards to to display their colors like a common nigger. A newfag will never be a true oldfag.

You're a racist!

This is going to sound bizarre, but I wish I was born earlier so I could game during the days when shareware was huge. You never knew what you were going to get from small developers with shareware games; there was sort of an air of mystery to it. Those games were usually hard as balls, too. Games these days are basically made with kid gloves, but you can play NetHack for decades and never see the end. NetHack even has predecessors whose content have never been fully mapped because the source code isn't available.

Atari killed Atari. Idiot yuppie executives ran the company into the ground, not understanding jack fuck about what they were doing. Treat programmers and developers like assembly line workers, and tell Nintendo to kick rocks? Yeah, good way to stay in business and not get bought by the French.


2007 was September 1993, but cubed.
I had EXTREMELY limited access to the computainment megafreeway when it was in its early days. I didn't get my own internet connection until fucking 1999, when I ordered my first computer from a catalog and called a local ISP to set up service.

I miss trading floppies and ROMs for HOLY SHIT NES EMULATORS. Now I can play ROMs on my actual NES, so it's gone kinda' weird.

Those already existed and they died off, they're called LAN houses.

I am talking about arcade games.

The one thing that I miss the most are editors that would sometimes come with games.
Fucking around in them and just exploring things even if you didn't know how to use them was sometimes more fun than the actual game.

Warcraft 3 would have been a footnote in the history of vidya and wouldn't have catapulted WoW as hard as it did had there not been a great editor that allowed the community to make their own custom maps and campaigns which are still being made to this day.

Devs are too afraid of autists making better content than them, so they stopped releasing them.
Honestly, when was the last time an editor was released together with a game?

I think it's more the publishers, but not that devs are all saints or anything. Keeping an old game alive with content releases, patches, and community events and the like doesn't make money, it just fosters, you know, GOODWILL, and everyone knows that Goodwill is where like, poor people shop, right?

Fuck off gook.

I know it probably sounds bitter and maybe it is but I actually miss pic related, it was the ultimate casual filter and consoles were just sticking to what they were good at (platformers and fighters mainly).

I miss the days of "DRM" being nothing more than a .bat file looking for the disk and you could redirect it yourself.
I miss my mate finding a good game and 5 of us spending a day spanning it over 50+ floppy disks.
I miss going in with those guys for the first CD burner any of us had ever seen.
I miss selling pirate music CDs at school to pay for weekend beers.

I think most of all I miss vidya being a nerdy hobby, we never had a problem with being nerds and it kept the normalfags out even though I had no idea they needed to be kept out back then.
I actually remember around '94 talking with my mates about how much better vidya were going to get now it was a growing market

I miss really good B and C grade dungeon crawlers. Grimrock has been really nice. There are a few things on Vita worth playing. That's about it now though.

I also miss games with strong summoning mechanics with game-breaking late-game chain of abilities. I miss creature, elemental, demon summoning in games with elements of skill and danger to balance out their use.

What I miss most though is games demanding something out of the player. Some skill required. Quest markers, automaps, GPS turn-by-turn markers, meaningless powerups (can't have a retard build a gimp character!), collision barriers around all ledges, levels designed like amusement parks, carefully sanitized and meaningless dialog.

Once a game goes mainstream, to as large an audience as possible, it looses anything worth while.

I miss not having to worry if I'm funding a company that hates me or will actively try to rob me by cutting content and selling it to me as DLC or by adding microtransactions to a game.
I miss not having to worry that the money I give to a publisher is being used to fund foreign wars.
I miss being able to be 12 and look at cute girls in games without feeling like a pervert for doing it.
I miss games that didn't need to be multiplayer to be good.
I miss games that didn't need day one patches to work properly

Devs and publishers are more often than not in bed with each other nowadays.

Yeah, and I really believe that we have social media to blame. It lets the most delusional fucks spread their crazy to others, forming amoeba-like cults that merge into the shitshow we have today.

Truly, the web was a mistake. The future really is made of virtual insanity.

Atari would've died regardless.

you're the normalfag here

Hey look, it's the faggot that probably begged his mom for Xbox Live so he can play with other goyim on Halo 2. The game that's part of a series that killed FPS games everywhere.

The only thing the PS2 did was kill off the Dreamcast.

Even years ago some DRM could fuck your shit up.

The rental thing is the same with me OP. I played so many games that were rented. It was almost a game in itself, deciding which game to try out for the weekend. I usually ended up renting two games whenever I did rent. Usually a game I knew would be good and one I had never played before.

I even rented a PS1 before deciding if I wanted one. I rented Intelligent Cube with it. I wasn't disappointed.

I remember that faggot having the unmitigated gall to refer to that shit as No Cash, then crying about people trading it for free. Fuck that dickass. Everyone I know used VGB-DOS and their own custom front ends anyway.

This user speaks with wisdom.

I miss the early to mid-90s era of PC games, when video animation was making its way onto the scene but the tech couldn't handle free roam rendering so you had to click in one direction. Myst, for example.

Does anyone here remember the Journeyman Project? It shipped with Windows 95. It's one of my favorite series of all time, and barely anyone knows it ever existed. I even wrote the developer, Presto Studios, as a kid with some suggestions for the sequels, and they wrote me back discussing what they thought of my ideas. Imagine a modern developer doing that.

A game with huge ideas way before its time. They don't make them like that anymore.

effort

i bet you have a special edition prostate tickler

How come we don't see more mascot platformers from indie devs?

mascots of what? they're indie, they have nothing to make a mascot for

80s was comfy. Nobody even bothered saying a game sucks, it was either "that game is awesome!" or "that game isn't as awesome!".

i miss beautiful pre-rendered environments

Mascots of the developer's company.

The silly promo videos that you can't take seriously. Also, I miss how covers were drawn rather than CG.

What'd you guys do to all the games when the shop closed? you get to keep the good copies?

At this point I miss when the biggest things to gripe about were all the dipshits driving up Madden and Call of Duty sales numbers. I can honestly say I'd rather have those assholes back than the current assholes shitting up the place with walking simulators.

Sure the Dew addicts were obnoxious, but at least they weren't demanding for games to change for the sake of their delicate sensibilities, or ugly up female characters for "realism" and "inclusitivity. They just called each other faggots on Xbox Live.

i miss being able to pick up pretty much any game and enjoy it. im not sure why im so picky lately. i cant even go back and enjoy the things i used to.

I miss when I didn't fuck everything up for me, and didn't even realize that I would be such a failure.

I was pretty surprised that you can play Rocket League PC vs console. Can't even think of another game that does it.

Well jokes on you my first console was a gbc

i think shadow run did it. the game was a disaster though. never got a good chance to judge it properly as a lot of the earliest 'games for windows live' games were just impossibly laggy.

It was all so simple.

I remember visiting my grandparents in Vegas and them getting me Naruto: Ultimate Ninja. I must have read that fucking manual a hundred times during the last three days I was there.

Feels good, man.
If I had to say I miss anything else, I miss the days when Gamestop wasn't the only vidya store. I haven't seen a mom and pop place in years.

god damn game stop. and why did they stop carrying ps2/gcn era or earlier shit?

Shit, I did that so often. The hype just kept building.

I still have my copy of Harvest Moon: Back to Nature's manual. It was my first game, I don't even have the game anymore though. Mum just brought it home for me one day, what a great choice. Shame what happened to the franchise though.

Beats me. I heard stories about how they would break any unsold discs just so people wouldn't rummage through the trash and take them, too, so I wouldn't be surprised if that's what happened to the PS2 era games as well.

Cheat codes. Legit cheat codes and also the ability to earn cheats through special actions that unlock them.

Yeah, I know. We have trainers and cheat engine. That isn't the same as typing out or inputting the buttons to get said cheat. GTA San Andreas for example. Specific button presses could give you flying cars or all weapons. Now a days it's paid DLC to get cheats. Fuck I hate what THAT specifically has become.