cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/13809164
Ignoring the lack of updates if the game is buggy, games back then were also more focused on quality and make gamers replay the game with unlockable features based on skills, not money. I can’t count the number of times I played Metal Gear Solid games over and over to unlock new features playing the hardest difficulty and with handicap features, and also to find Easter eggs. Speaking of Easter eggs, you’d lose a number of hours exploring every nook and cranny finding them!
Everything that is now a DLC or microtransaction was instead some cool secret you could find or unlock, the games were smaller but that discovery meant they FELT so much bigger.
It’s interesting how games from the 80s and 90s, in general, required less time to complete than the crop that came with the PS2 era. DVDs allowed for much, much longer games, sometimes to a fault, other times the extra time to complete was in the form of challenges or unlockable characters.
Let’s not forget that half of the replayability of NES/SNES/PSX era titles came from “my entire collection is 25 games”
There’s no doubt that most new games are much better than most old games.
I and everyone else has the possibility to play the old games whenever they want. Most run on your phone.
Why don’t we do it? Marketing of course, but also, has anyone ever actually tried one of the old games that they haven’t played before? For example, I tried to play Ocarina of Time, and the controls as well as the graphics are terrible. So much shit is just plain annoying and clunky. Everyone decries it as “one of the best games”, but I can’t see how it is better than almost any modern action RPG.
The main reason why everyone likes it and other old games is nostalgia, almost nothing else.
Want full games without online play that are hard, you die, you try again? Play something like hollow knight/silksong. There’s so many easter eggs in so many games. You got more diversity in style of games now than ever.
No doubt there are also much more shitty games now. If you have a problem with games today, you’re just bad at picking the right one for you.
These older games also pioneered a lot of things that are taken for granted in modern games. People decide to try these games and since a lot of mechanics and types of storytelling are the norm know, they don’t get the appeal.
Exactly. For their time, all these games were incredible, just not always compared to today.
OoT hasn’t aged the best, but it’s still a solid experience for a game that pioneered mainstream 3D graphics. The Ps1/N64 generation was all about innovation and experimentation, so it’s a bit unfair to judge those games so harshly. Now the Ps2/Gamecube gen was when things became refined. In the same franchise, Wind Waker is a retro game and still one of the absolute best in the series.
It’s a case by case basis. I’ve heard the Dynasty Warriors Origins is really good but I can’t speak for that since I haven’t played it. Other than that, compare the Ps2 musuo games to more modern ones like DW8/9, or the Pirate Warriors series. The classics are way more fun and engaging.
Or just look at Square Enix. Some of what they do now days is good, but most of their stuff is gacha-laden garbage now. Even their Pixel Remaster collection traded in a legacy of their own source code for a toy built in Unity, for a pseudo-classic experience that doesn’t even have the additional content of previous remasters.
Or, in the fps genre, I dare you to find a modern fps that’s as packed full of amazing content and features as Time Splitters 3: Future Perfect.
That depends on the definition of “better.” Don’t mistake me, I LOVE modern games but there was something magical about needing months to beat one game. And while old games didn’t have online components they were definitely a community effort. Siblings, neighbors, friends from school, all coming over and collaborated with to beat each game. Together we discovered every secret place and learned every trick. If someone figured something out it became local game lore and everyone would try to replicate it. We used to all pile in a room to play Mario bros and work together to knock out every level in an afternoon (if you you know), then run it again with the worp whistle trick because we could. There were games we never beat. Simon’s Quest haunted us (I looked it up as an adult and beat it on nesticle - screw you garlic merchant). But that was part of it too, we didn’t have the safety net of a search engine to bail us out when we got stuck. Frustrating? Yes. But it forced us to slow down and think about the challenges in front of us. It wasn’t better or worse, just different then now. (Also please try to keep in mind part of the reason your controls might feel clunky is the game was designed for a different controller then you are using).
That being said I will never miss that hinky as fuck Nintendo cartridge nonsense that required a ritual involving alcohol, prayer, and the breath of life to get it read a game cartridge. Fuck the NES - again if you know, you know.
You’re kinda talking about gaming culture though, not the games themselves. There are plenty of hard games that need months to beat (depending on time investment).
Older games were a lot simpler too. No loot boxes, multiple forms of currency - some of which could only be bought with real money, invasive DRM, season passes, content pulled back by selling it to you as DLC, extremely long game times artificially extended by things like mapping gimmicks, giant and almost barren worlds, unoptomized graphics requiring top of the line graphics cards that would still turn your room to a furnace, and massive amounts of bugs and glitches that may or may not be patched out at a later time.
whoopse I tripped and dropped my https://finji.itch.io/tunic link
the same developers as A Night in the Woods you say?
Look, I have been replaying Prince of Persia Sands of Time these last few days and it’s just fucking incredible how streamlined it is.
the pause menu is just resume/options/quit? no inventory management, skill tree, quest tracker, or other bullshit? Remember this is the IP that spawned Assassin’s Creed
also… it still looks great, with relatively detailed interiors and architecture, great animations and soundtrack, characters quipping about and it all manages to run on 256Mb of ram??
32MB of RAM.
That shit was on the PS2.
I just reported the number on the cd cover, I guess they optimized even further on consoles, absolutely incredible… nowadays android apps will recommend 4gb ram for smooth performance jfc
Freelancer was a space shooter that ran on a pentium 3 laptop with an ATI RAGE 8MB video card.
It was dope.
Sands of Time is straight-up one of the best games of all time, and that’s even including the not-great combat which makes up a lot of it, and a few puzzles which just grind the whole thing to a complete stop. Its quality is not completely representative of its era.
What is representative of its era, is that it’s a complete bastard to run nowadays. Requires a GPU with hardware transform and lighting, but also a single-core CPU, which means you need a very specific age of computer to run it. Even patched up, there’s some things that just don’t look right - I’ve never managed to get it running with the portals to secret areas looking the way they should.
I am quite envious of you being able to replay it, tho. Think I gave up the last time I tried.
maybe Bottles on Linux is doing some magic behind the scenes, but I didn’t have trouble running it on a intel N100 mini pc
I haven’t done a ton of research, but it seems like it runs fine?
I miss that games were completely finished and polished, put on a disk, and never touched again.
“Completely finished and polished”, except in the cases they weren’t, like the mountains of shovelware in every gen 🙃
Never touched again was only true up to PS2 era and only for consoles, PC had update patches since the 90s
I miss that you used to truly own them. They really were entirely yours.
Except there was no online play
That was a feature, not a limitation.
Updates, too. Games had to actually be in their final state before they could be sold.
Not that they were a lot of the times…
Yea, people wanna act like games of the past didn’t have game breaking glitches and, since no updates, were stuck with working around them.
Missing No. anyone? PS2 Soul Calibur 3 glitch that wiped your entire Chronicles campaign (and sometimes even the ENTIRE PLAYER FILE) because of how the memory card wrote the data?
There are pros and cons, obviously. Getting a game that was extremely well tested and nearly bug free on day 1 was great. But, not all games were that well tested, and many had gameplay-breaking bugs that you just had to live with because there was no way to update them.
Nah, then you just plugged them into the “exploit the bugs hacking device” i.e the game genie, and enjoyed making things even more fucked up.
There was no Game Genie for the Atari.
This is the biggest lie g*mers tell themselves. Unpatched bugs and exploits were more common and were just called DLC expansion packs.
DLC expansion packs
You might not believe this, but there was a time before DLC expansion packs. Super Mario World, I love you.
Remind me what that one DLC for Lemmings was called?
Depends on whether standalone expansions are considered DLC. “Oh No, More Lemmings!”, and “Holiday Lemmings”. The Holiday packs are 91’, 92’, 93’, and 94’. I think a strategy guide had extra levels too. Also, the assorted ports of Lemmings sometimes had unique levels.
If you love Lemmings, I recommend the fan remake, NeoLemmix. It combines all the levels from every platform into a single game, plus with QOL improvements like rewinding by a step. There are also no duplicate levels for difficulty, so every level is unique. Some of the levels have bonus objectives you can go for, if achievements are your thing.
I always thought Lemmings would have been cool if they had released a good level editor and let people design their own. Might have turned into something like crossword puzzles where it just became a continuing thing with endless variety.
Alas, the IP is owned by a AAA company. Doomed to languish in the footnotes of history, all because it can’t make all the money. Given TLC, I think Lemmings could have been similar to Worms in longevity.
Lemmings is barely a $1.99 mobile game by today’s standards. It sold at release for 29.99 USD, which is 72 USD in today’s dollars.
Maybe pick one that makes a decent case for you.
Games were far better when they didnt update every fucking day. I hate it so much.
Oh, and I actually OWNED the disc or cart I bought (before online activation shit)
Thats why i play a lot more ps2 Dreamcast and Xbox now. Fuck (most) modern games.
Eh, it really depends on the game. Obviously no game should be dependent on the internet to be playayble, but I do actually like playing against (or with) other people. Mario Kart with NPCs gets boring after a while, and unfortunately bringing friends over to my house to play games wasn’t really an option, so online it was. Splatoon is another one that has always been a delight, and while I love story mode obviously the AI can’t fight like a human.
I don’t really play shooters and stuff though.
Also consoles had modem peripherals since at least the Famicom days, some of which did allow multiplayer. Namely, there was the Family Computer Network System, however apparently it was an information service with some downloadable content, rather than a multiplayer service.
Wikipedia says that both Satellaview for SNES and 64DD for N64 had online gaming, but idk how exactly it worked.
Gog tries to give you as much of this as possible
Including as close as you can get to TRUE OWNERSHIP.
Once it’s in your hard drive, and you’ve backed it up, it will NEVER brick itself on purpose. It never phones home. It never revokes your “license”. You can install it on any computer at anytime anywhere, even MULTIPLE computers, and it doesn’t ask you shit.
I noticed 20+ guys reminiscing on games they played as kids. Nostalgia starts soon nowadays.
'S’cause everything’s gone to shit, so dang fast.
Not just games, too. The consoles themselves. The PS3/Wii era of consoles just feel infinitely more respectful than the PS4 era. (No comment on Xbox, we’ve never had any Xboxen.) The PS5 is even worse.
(Computers, too. See Windows 7 vs. 10. And on the Apple side, the slow rise of Gatekeeper, but that was significantly more subtle.)
– Frost
No bullshit. You gamed, you died, you tried again.
Dark Souls baby
Developers didn’t really know what would work and what wouldn’t, so they fucked around until they found something. No endless clones of the same idea. Extremely weird gameplay, often utter bullshit, sometimes a gem. It was great.
No endless clones of the same idea.
:-/
In the 70s and 80s, video games were so simple and straightforward, usually due to limited computing power, that it was trivial to create clones of games for other systems. Many of the most popular games of the early years of gaming such as Pong, Frogger, Arkanoid, Centepede, etc. were cloned heavily or were clones themselves.
Case in point, six different Tetris knock offs released between 1989 and 1997.
Another notorious instance was The Simpsons: Road Rage, which was a simple reskin of the then-popular Crazy Taxi.
I’ll admit to having done a simple reskin myself, for a high school English project, that involved swapping out PacMan for a boat and the ghosts for angry natives. I christened it “Heart of Darkness: The Video Game” and got an easy A for my trouble.
easy A, huh
Sensible soccer is better than any modern football game. Fight me!
The books were often filled with cool art not found in the game, sometimes there were hints hidden in the margins, or some had a mini-walkthru of the first level or something in the back, along with lore, they added a lot to the game imo. It felt like a well put together package, not unlike album artwork, liner notes and whole albums which people are also now (re)discovering are pretty cool.
God on the PC end of things youd get like a literal book with some games. Keyboard overlays for controls, posters, all sorts of fun shit.
Some reissue of ‘Gran Turismo’ 1 or 2 for the PS1 had a hundred-page manual detailing how to drive a proper race line and how to set up the car for different behaviors.
Love the maps, I have an old photo of myself playing on the family 386sx with a Might and Magic Clouds of Xeen map in the background. I remember the Ultima games always came with a bunch of cool stuff too.
I loved the maps.
I’ve grown up in the land of pirate cartridges with no booklets, so never knew any lore about Mario games besides “the princess got kidnapped”. Didn’t discover that the enemies had names until I was an adult.
Oh boy, you didn’t even get the bad b&w photocopy manual? Those came with rentals a lot of times. There was a lot of pointless info too though, like grand descriptions of the starting equipment you ditch after the first half hour lol.
We had nothing outside the games back then, and no boxes for the carts either. But OTOH the pirate cartridges often had multiple games on them — up to like a dozen decent ones on a NES cart, or straight up a hundred variations of the same few base games, particularly old and smaller ones from the early 80s. I think the variations were made by modifying some variables before launching the base game: changing the speed, starting level or whatever.
I was occasionally reading magazines about games, and encountering names of enemy characters from a platformer that I’ve played a hundred times would make me go “what the hell are they talking about”. Apparently rich kids in the big city could afford genuine games with the manuals.
Game design is better today than it’s ever been. For most of us I think it’s just nostalgia for our childhoods and for living in simpler times that makes us think otherwise.
I mean have you ever gone back and played a classic game that you didn’t grow up with? It’s rough. I’ve plumbed the depths of the NES virtual console and found that all the best games just happen to be the ones I’ve already played. That’s probably not a coincidence.
Even when the game is genuinely great, there’s still a mountain of bullshit and bad game design to get through, which is just unnecessary today.
With that said, everyone in this comment section needs to check out UFO 50. It’s a collection of 50 “retro” games by a group of indie games designers, and it’s absolutely brilliant.
It’s a loving recreation of playing games how they used to be played, except it’s cleverly laced with subtle, modern design features that make the retro goodness so much better. It’s like combing through old ROMs trying to find a diamond in the rough, except there’s more diamond than rough.
Speaking of Easter eggs, UFO 50 also has a hidden meta-narrative buried deep in the collection, detailing the dark history of the fictional company that made them.
The biggest pain point of the oldest games is that they came out of the arcade era, so they were specifically designed to lack save features, and be so punishing that you would spend more of your quarters playing them.
I did a playthrough of both Castlevania 1 and Megaman 1. After a while I gave in and started using savestates, and suddenly both games became amazing. Jumping over Dracula’s fireballs is a lot more dramatic when you have to do it with pixel precision.
This discussion always makes me think of Super Meat Boy, which is a perfect case study for how punishing difficulty can be incorporated without poisoning the experience for the player. SMB is hard as fuck and demands impossible precision from the player, but there’s no punishment for failure. You die, you try again immediately. It makes the two second door animation in Mega Man feel like an eternity.
And when it came out, it felt strangely innovative. Like, it’s obvious in hindsight, but just reducing the punishment to 0 turns it from an exercise in frustration into a game that trains the player to perfection without holding their hand.
If I remember correctly, I think one of the Rayman games were one of the first to try a gameplay loop like that. They definitely tend to feel better, but I think it depends on the game too.
Like some of the Souls games can have fairly punishing boss battles, where losing comes with the penalty of a painfully of a relatively long and dangerous trek just to get your ass handed to you again. If they did that for every boss I would hate the games, but that they throw usually just one of those in there makes them just frustrating enough to be extra spicy.
I’ve actually begun a quest to go back and finish all the games I didn’t play / didn’t finish from the past. NES, SNES, N64, and PSX. To my surprise, I’m actually enjoying some of these games much more than I did as a kid.
The gameplay is quite simple but it’s really well executed. There are a lot of games that just try to do one or two interesting things and then explore how far they can go with that. Nowadays, games seem to take more of a “kitchen sink” approach which tends toward some features being much better developed than others, and first-order-optimal strategies abound.
Sure, there are also plenty of retro-inspired games (like UFO 50), but I view those as a return to the design principles of old, rather than a refutation of them.
That’s fair. There were good things about being able to design games at that scale. One of the reasons UFO 50 works so well is because the number of games means that each game could be its own discrete thing. They could include small, arcade-style games like Ninpek and Magic Garden, that focus on a core concept instead of trying to add value.
But I also think the refutation in UFO 50 is more like a silent correction.
Barbuta starts with an immediate moment of unfairness as a joke, and then it provides a game that’s much more fair than the games it’s inspired by. It simulates the jank but doesn’t expect you to put up with it for the whole game.
Ninpek is another example. Can you imagine getting through that game with just three lives? That’s how it would have been designed in the 1980s, and that’s the game they present to you at first. But as you get better at playing the game, it reveals that you’re actually going to get a lot more lives than that. In a brilliant bit of sleight of hand, those two things happen at the same time, making it feel like you’re just mastering a difficult game.
Porgy is the same way, but more directly. It kicks your ass in the first thirty seconds, then immediately backs off the difficulty. That first impression makes it feel like it’s more punishing than it actually is.
Most of the collection is like this to some extent, and I think that’s for the best.
Dunno if you’ve seen this, but you seem like a big fan: https://www.fangamer.com/collections/ufo-50/products/ufo-50-players-guide
I got a copy, it’s really cool. Pretty reminiscent of old video game guides, but set in an alternate universe where these games and consoles were real.
I did get it! Also most of the other UFO 50 merch on that site, like the t-shirt and the pins. Great t-shirt. Better fit than the Tunic one I got from there.
I was slightly disappointed that the guide didn’t reveal another layer of the meta-narrative like I’d hoped, but it’s still a neat object and very well made.
There definitely are seriously janky and just plain bad games for all systems in the past. The difference is that there is a much higher proportion of good games from that era due to the smaller number of games overall.
There were 675 games released for the NES in North America during its lifespan. If you take the top 100 games you’d find that most are good games worth revisiting and many are great games considered widely to be classics.
On the other hand, well over 10,000 games are released on Steam every year since 2021. How many of those have you even heard of, let alone could you say are worth playing?
Sure, it’s not fair at all to blame the developers of great games coming out today for all of the slop and endless clones they have nothing to do with. But discovery is a huge problem now and it’s only getting worse!
For context, the NES library was actively curated by Nintendo, that’s what their “seal of quality” was about. There were a few bootlegs, but unless you had a niche for that bootleg (see that Bible game) I suspect the complexity and cost of developing for the NES heavily discouraged bootlegs.
I think we gain more than we lose by the lower barrier to game development and publishing, quality indie games can get much more traction (unfortunately many do get buried in the slop) and games with niche marginalized audiences are more able to exist and find that audience now. YouTubers have been a big source of finding indie games for me, and sometimes recommendations from people on social media. I guess I have the opposite problem - I’ve got so much stuff on my wishlist and owned game backlog that I want to play that I’d probably have to spend the next decade of my life just playing games to get through them all.
None of what I’m saying should be taken as an argument that game developers should give up or something like that. The situation is much better now than it was. Heck, a lot of NES game developers had to design their sprites on graph paper and input them into the game’s ROM file by hand, by typing in the raw numbers in hexadecimal! Clearly we now have a lot better ways of doing graphics than that!
I just want to push back against the general notion that “old games are outdated/obsolete/etc” or that new games are always better than old games by virtue of having more features, flashier graphics, better sound etc. There’s tradeoffs with everything and I think the kitchen sink approach to game design isn’t obviously correct.
We went through the same historical trends with painting, music, and movies. Now if you look at more recent trends in classical music, there’s a lot of focus on minimalism, compared to the opulence of the baroque and classical periods.
see that Bible game
I had this game growing up, and it was actually pretty good.
The bad games aren’t pushing out the good games. More games means more good games.
Even if we’re judging proportionally, you can’t count games that no one is playing. If I give my toddler a harmonica, does that make music worse? Only if I force you to listen to it.
That top 100 list kind of proves my point, because a lot of those games are excruciating to play nowadays. I loved Final Fantasy 1 when that was the only RPG I owned, but it would be unplayable by today’s standards. Because today’s standards are much, much higher.
In terms of games that are worth revisiting because of their historical or artistic significance? There are plenty in that list. But in terms of games that would be good by today’s standards? I don’t think 1/3 of it makes the cut.
I disagree. I’d much rather play FF1 than play the latest FF game. Modern Final Fantasy games are way too easy for my taste. They’re more like movies with a load of very soft mechanics, with all the sharp edges sanded off.
That’s really common across the board. I know a lot of people love modern Soulslike games but I much prefer the fast, crunchy combat of a game like Zelda II over the smooth, floaty, anticipation-based controls of Dark Souls.
There’s a lot of other comparisons like this. The original Metroid is very rough, lonely, and lacks an automap which makes it easy to get lost. Later games in the series surround you with helpers that eliminate all sense of isolation and bombard you with hints and automaps that make it impossible to lose your way.
Lots of modern players would call these systems “objectively better” and I won’t contradict their preference, I only deny the objectivity of it. As I see it, many of these improvements are actually tradeoffs. Many modern players, for example, hate getting lost. Well I like getting lost and a lot of modern games simply won’t let me! I like getting stuck in games and having to do serious problem solving to figure it out. Many modern gamers get impatient and give up on games like that. They might even call it excruciating, as you do.
Anyway, none of this is intended to convince you to be a retro gamer like me. You love what you love and hate what you hate. I just hope it’s a little bit clearer why folks like me have all this nostalgia, as depicted in the comic.
Final Fantasy XVI was good though… Not even the same genre as FF1, really, so dunno if I’d compare them.
I’m sure it was, my comment was just stating my preference. That’s the main direction this whole thread seems to have taken: me defending the validity of preferences for retro gamers.
It seems a lot of people are puzzled by this and actually just believe that these old games are objectively worse. To me, that’s really sad, because it represents a failure to communicate and understand one another.
But that’s the thing, just because “the newest final fantasy” is bad, doesn’t mean that today’s games are bad, just final fantasy. Don’t compare final fantasy 1 with 14, compare it with idk, octopath traveller or similar.
Don’t compare old Metroid with new Metroid, compare it with hollow knight.
Etc etc
I agree with your critiques of modern games, especially the part about floaty anticipation-based gameplay.
But I gotta disagree about Final Fantasy 1 being harder. It’s not hard; it’s just tedious. There’s no beating it without grinding, and the grind is the same thing, over and over, with no variance. If tedium is your thing, great, but the biggest barrier to beating Final Fantasy 1 is boredom, and I don’t think that’s good game design in any decade.
So just to be clear, I’m not talking about difficulty in a fair game. Bubble Bobble is possibly my favorite NES game of all time, because even though it’s stupid hard, the controls are so tight that every death is your own fault.
I also have nostalgia for these old games. I’d just never try to argue that they were better from a design standpoint. The industry has come a long way. Standards are higher, and the artform has grown.
Believe it or not, some people like grinding! There’s an element to grinding-based RPGs that you don’t really see anywhere else: the ability to tune the game’s difficulty level on the fly, through your own gameplay. If you’re stuck on a section of the game, you can decide to grind a lot until it’s trivially easy to pass, or you can grind less and try to push your luck.
FF1 is really nice for this because you can’t just save your game anywhere, you need to stay at an Inn in town or spend a tent/cabin/house to save on the world map. You can’t save your game in dungeons at all. This means your expedition into a dungeon must be completed in one go.
Since grinding is the way you make your party stronger (and hence the dungeon easier), you can decide how much grinding you want to do before taking a shot at the dungeon. If you mess up and the party gets wiped, well that’s too bad! This really does give the game a push your luck mechanic and allows you to try to conquer the dungeon with a minimal amount of grinding.
Later games in general tend to go out of their way to avoid this at all costs, with the exception of Soulslike games that I mentioned earlier (as well as Roguelikes, which I happen to be a huge fan of), because game developers are often quite afraid of players losing progress (and players have become accustomed to this).
Metroid is also like this. You can spend a lot of time grinding your energy back to full or you can push your luck and try to explore without getting hit. It’s a challenge that later games in the series heavily mitigated by providing abundant recharging stations.
Graphics are better than ever, but design itself has been moving at a glacial pace for decades.
Yeah I don’t have any idea what you’re referring to. There are still a huge amount of new and innovative games every year. It’s possible you’re just not playing them.
UFO 50 gives me nostalgia for something that never really existed. It’s weird know that it’s 100% new, but feels like I was playing it 40 years ago.
That sounds great, gonna have to give this UFO 50 a spin.
There’s literally 50 games there; I’m sure you’ll find something that speaks to you!
Barbuta scratched an itch I hadn’t felt since I was a kid. Piecing it together in the dark was one of my best gaming moments last year. I love how almost everyone who beat it came to the same solution and got out a pen and paper to draw their own maps.
Definitely. Like I think a lot of people forget that the older generation of games, like the 8bit era especially, were arcade ports that were designed to eat quarters and not really modified much when moved to console. That was the main reason it was like, “here’s your three lives to get through the next 15 levels and when you’re out go fuck yourself start over loool”.
I was an 80s kid and have tons of nostalgia for the time and the games even but to put it simply, there were not many games back then that you were getting more than a couple hours out of unless you were getting your shit pushed in constantly due to the artificial difficulty designed to suck up those quarters at the arcade. Even games like the original Legend of Zelda, if you know what to do ahead of time youre only talking a few hours of actual content. For platformers it was far less…Ninja Gaiden, a brutally difficult game…turn on invincibility and you can speed run that shit in like what, 20 minutes?
And not to toot my own horn but there would be games I paid $50 for that Id have done in an afternoon and then what? Nothing, play again I guess. Which sometimes was worthwhile, other times not so much.
Even later the ethos was still there, just instead of the quarter stealing mechanic, it was the “dont let them finish it in a rental period” mechanic…they wanted people to buy, not rent.
But, I do definitely miss the simplicity. No fuckin achievement chasing bullshit, no fucking unlocks, no dlc…they couldnt as easily release 40% of a game and lock the remaining 60% behind season passes and shit.
And of course having the whole game be dependent on multi-player and an active community for it to worth a shit beyond the first 60 daya. How many full price AAA games out there that lasted a few mere months befoee the server was a ghost town and nothing to do in the single player game.
Cest la vie lol
Didn’t the Ultima series start in the 1980s? My friends and I spent ages on Ultima III!
