Ah yes, I remember bugs with no way of getting them fixed.
this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2024
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There were fewer game breaking bugs though, since the developers knew they couldn't be patched after release.
The game itself was smaller in virtually every way. Even if it took you 80 hours to beat, the data was nothing in comparison to modern games.
Sure, but what I meant is that good developers took a lot of care in ensuring the game was ready for release, and companies like Nintendo and Sega did a lot of checks to ensure there were no major issues (for example, they'd keep it running for a long time while monitoring memory usage to ensure there were no memory leaks).
These days, some games need a patch within the first week of release. Manufacturers have gotten lazier in terms of ensuring the game works properly, since they can just patch issues after release.
Some games back in the day needed a patch the first week of release and never got one. Famously, the Japanese version of Kirby super star had to be recalled because it was so buggy. Half the intended mechanics in ff6 either don't work properly or just flat out do nothing.
I really like old games, I have a bunch of old consoles that I play all the time, but this rose tinted view on things has got to go. Old games were buggy, too, they just did less and so had less to fail on.
And up until the ps2/3 era, qa was just the developers testing it themselves.
I'm with you. I love old games. Here's some (non-exhaustive) information on the NES version that I still play from time to time.
The first Final Fantasy had a bunch of bugs. Red mages were just as powerful as black and white because of an INT bug. You could walk through walls in certain places. The peninsula of power wasn't supposed to happen. Spells that were supposed to help physical attributes in battle just didn't. At least one spell meant to decrease enemy evasion increased it instead. Houses saved before giving you back spell slots. There was an invisible woman in the first castle. Running was supposed to be based on luck and level but was based on luck and the level of whoever was two slots below you. Status effects weren't properly protected against by a bunch of items.
A lot of this was fixed in re-releases.
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For PC atleast, you could buy a magazine that came with a floppy disk containing patches.
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Which was sometimes frustrating, but when they are funny and good bugs it's amazing they can't be patched out.
There's a reason so many speedruns on older consoles use the Japanese cartridges, because those versions came out first and have exploitable glitches which the western release later fixed.
Bugs at that time were almost never totally game-breaking either, fortunately. That could be a nightmare recall for the publisher, and so the final builds were tested more intensively than games now.
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Rose tinted glasses. Games were buggy as hell. Many times unbeatable in certain conditions.
They were way less complex though. Which does help with QA coverage and generally gives less chances for things to break. But yeah, I still agree, rose tinted glasses and all that
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The DOS version of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was missing a platform in the third zone, and literally couldn't be beaten.
Sometimes the ability to patch is good.
Ya but there's too much. Now we have games getting out half-finished because they know they can patch it later after the public pays full price too beta test it.
It's almost like there's good and bad parts.
But beforehand a bad game was bad forever. Now it can be fixed.
Cyberpunk was a buggy mess at launch, but they did eventually fix it and make a solid game.
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And once it's sufficiently patched being angry about spending three years with an unfinished game is considered toxic entitled gamer behavior and you're supposed to pretend like it didn't happen.
Remember having to stop mid install to put the next disc in?
Windows 95 had a version that came on 30 floppy disks.
NOT fun.
Shit I installed Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 with 10 DVDs and let me tell you.... that's something I don't want back.
Like if you want to provide a physical offline version give me a small USB drive or a Blu-ray but that one I know it's not common outside consoles and movies.
And you needed a Microsoft Account and activate the CD Key anyway....which actually didn't allow to install the game downloading it. Like ok I get it the DVDs was for people to be able to do an offline install, ok... But don't force me to use them if I have access to internet.... Which actually you needed to setup the account and activate the CD key online anyway, the DVD only helped reduce your bandwidth usage.
Who came up with this man??? Plus you need the first disk inserted to play like the old times... you have the damn CD key and Microsoft account to validate wtf... I swear... It was like travelling back in time but with extra hassles of today world on top.
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I prefer waking my console and pressing a button to play, no disc fumbling
Turn on PS2
Disc starts spinning
Red screen of death shows up telling me the disc is invalid
Take out disk and wipe it thoroughly
Pray
Repeat 1-5 times until it works
Yeah, good times...
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For real. I remember that despite our best efforts discs would get scratched occasionally, and try keeping those disks pristine with kids. That mechanical drive was also a common and expensive point of failure that's guaranteed to wear out eventually because of those moving parts.
It's not all sunshine and rainbows, but I think there's a tendency to glorify the past and hyperfocus on the disadvantages. We forget that there were parts of the past that really sucked.
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Me, an intellectual, modding a game for the next 36 hours straight...then quitting after 2 days
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In the early days, cartridges were kinda like swapping out the RAM/SSD each time, pre-loaded with a game. Wasteful and expensive, even back then, but it was the best way to do it for the time.
There was a short while there where DVDs and and CDs had a perfect balance between storage and read speed, where you could keep the game files on optical media while still accessing it fast enough to have reasonable load times. BluRay and hdDVD increased the capacity, but not the read speed enough to match.
We could go back to games coming on flash media, which switch does still do, but switch games don't have 3d models and textures at the fidelity levels of other modern platforms.
With current technology, delivering digital media on a storage medium that has the performance to actually play from it, is kinda like gift cards. Like yeah, it'd be nice, but I'd rather just have the NVME storage drive/money so I can use it for whatever I want.
Maybe there will be another ultra cheap read-only storage medium one day, but right now, it's not a thing.
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You also just have to cope with whatever broken glitches there are in the game and find a way around them because aint no patch no hotfix no nothing is coming to save you
It actually wasn't uncommon for post-launch patches to be applied to later printings of games. A lot of start screens will have the version number of the game on them somewhere, so that you can tell. This is something we forget about since digital copies of older games tend to default to being the latest printed version.
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Pros of disc games: ready to play and you own the game.
Cons: game breaking bugs exist and asking devs to send you game patches is awkward af.
Gamers in Japan were the real early access testers of yesteryear. Major bugs or glitches that were there were hopefully fixed by the time the game hit international release.
It's honestly weird to remember that international releases were delayed months or years just a couple decades ago. Could you imagine if it took a year for BotW to release in the West?
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Yeah, but when we did things like that we actually had to finish games before we sold them.
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All I remember is having to go to the store, walk around the store and hope they still have it, go to the counter and pay for it and then having to go all the way back home to play it.
Now you click a button, make yourself a sandwich and the game is ready to go.
I have to admit, half the reason I stopped pirating was that Steam made it so easy to just click and play.
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I mean you DID get updates, just hidden in different print runs/regional releases of games.
Its why speedrunners prefer a lot of japanese releases of earlier titles; Because back when Japan was the center of videogame culture, they'd get the first release of most games which often meant the buggiest version.
I sure loved having games release in several separate version with different bugs depending on which lot of discs/cartridge you got.
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Bro do you remember what load times were like back then?
My mind personally goes back to cartridges here. But yeah, load times on early disc games were atrocious.
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I love games that get updated and change as the years go by! I think it's one of the most incredible things I've seen in gaming
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Except when the game sucked, then it was a waste of time
Switch games still use physical cartriges (...SD cards) and it's pretty rad tbh.
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I miss being able to play a game without paging through 50 pages of legalese and having to accept their agreements.
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For consoles, yeah that was great. The problem was when you had to download a game on PC either from disc or maybe you used a service like shockwave to get your games. Then the installation felt like it took forever as a kid.
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