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But what game design features/hardware limitations are you glad are completely gone or almost gone now???......
The biggest thing for me is......
Locked Content tied to game progression......
This seemed to be the worst in racing games........ You buy a game with a cool Ferrari or Lamborghini on the cover....... And you get home and its all locked behind a crap progression system........ No you cant have fun with the game yet....... Not until you have played it the way we want you to......
The Colin McRae Rally games and well almost the entirety of the Codemasters Racing catalogue are really REALLY bad for this...... With almost nothing to do when you first fire up the games...... Everything even remotely cool is locked away....... And it feels like you have to play for an eternity to finally race on your favourite car or track......
Codemasters even went the extra mile by having a "Unique Bonus Code" tied to your save game..... So you would have to call the Codemasters helpline and buy the cheat codes cause only certain codes worked with certain "Unique Bonus Codes" so you and your mate couldnt just swap codes as you would each have difference "Unique Bonus Codes"......... Just to unlock all the cool stuff....... Instead of you know..... Letting us use the codes for free like everyone else was letting us do........ Scumbag Codemasters.........
Ill never forgive Codemasters for that......
While some games still do lock the content...... Im looking at you Gran Turismo and Forza........ Most only have content locked for career mode...... But you are free to race any car and track combo in the single race game mode....... Which is the best way of doing it........
Well thats my rant for the day........
What are some of the things you dont miss from classic games?????
!Bomberman password
!Mega Man 7 password
They made sense back when it was too pricey to include means to save a game to battery-backed RAM, a hard-drive, or flash-memory. Sometimes they were used for neat extras* or could be wrangled to create unintended effects, but these things hung around well into the era of the Game Boy Advance! By then, that was the only platform that passwords tended to appear on, and it got so bad that Nintendo actually mandated that all cartridges for the GBA's successor, the Nintendo DS, had to be manufactured with a small amount of flash-memory so that being able to save your game without passwords was forced to become the norm. A few retro-style games made for vintage hardware still use them for the same reasons that old games did, and some remakes (such as Wonder Boy: The Dragon's Trap maintain compatibility with vintage passwords, but that was more-or-less how they died out.
*The Bomberman password up top was given out on an official trading-card and takes the player to a challenge-stage that isn't used in the normal game (the game has 50 stages, but a number of unused ones exist - some more passwords of this sort were published in an official fan-book called Bomberman Maniax, as well), and the Mega Man 7 one below it is both the game's super-password that starts the player at the final stage fully powered-up (if you simply press Start) and also leads to a hidden Versus Mode (if you hold the L and R buttons whilst pressing Start).
!Bomberman challenge-stage
!Mega Man 7 Versus Mode
Last edited by Pengling on 28 Jul 2023 at 5:31 pm UTC
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This. We put up with such convoluted and unwieldy control schemes and thought they were perfectly fine.
I remember a ZX Spectrum game (Lords of Midnight I think) having commands tied to ABCD letters instead of (now obvious) first letters of their names (T for Talk, A for Attack, etc).
System Shock had an icon with the character at the top of the screen where you'd click to look up/down and lean and crouch. There were keyboard shortcuts for at least some of these, but just think how slow controlling the character was back then.
Unlocks can be fun, sometimes, if they are done right. The Lego games are mostly okay with progress unlocking more and more things unless it is something really grindy like in some of the newer open word games. I can see how they can be really bad in some racing games, though.
and I want to throw in slow walking in adventure games. Telltale games pre TWD are prone to this. I've re-played Tales of Monkey island last year. It's unbearable how horribly slow Guybrush is. Combined with the annoying controls clearly intended for consoles – the mouse is treated as a virtual gamepad – unfortunately they are bad with a real gamepad as well.
Oh yes, I hate those. Nothing redeeming about free look on a keyboard.
That's certainly something I don't miss.
Last edited by Klaas on 29 Jul 2023 at 6:38 am UTC
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I recently played through REmake4 recently, and I actually think the original game played much better despite having tank controls (though it's also because remake!Leon is as clunky to control as he was in REmake2, a game which had a much slower pace than REmake4 does).
I also played the PS2 versions of Silent Hill 2 and 3, both on the original hardware and emulated through PCSX2, and tank controls feel better when playing on a keyboard (with a controller, the camera-relative "2D" controls are better indeed).
I also experienced the same thing when I played a RE throwback game called Them and Us recently. When playing in fixed camera mode (the game also offers over-the-shoulder and FPS cameras), camera-relative controls (which the game calls "alternate controls") feel better on controller, tank controls feel better on keyboard.
As for the loading times which were masked by the various door/stair animations in classic RE games (though I think RE3 and REmake1 removed load screens on most, if not all, stairs), I like them because they provide some much-needed downtime (and because enemies, with very few exceptions like Nemesis in RE3 or that one ambush in RE2), can't cross load screens either).
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I also agree with Spider on how bad they can be if they're not done well, too, though.
But it's totally logical to combine a piece of dental-floss with a coathanger to get a super-strong all-purpose grappling-hook!
Anyone remember LensLok? Luckily I never owned any games that used it, but it was a legendarily famous nuisance that punished legitimate customers whilst doing nothing to stop piracy.
That was where I got my start! I can't really complain about modern loading-times, given this.
I watched an interesting video about this recently - it turns out that the CGA colour-scheme is more interesting than it looks when paired with NTSC TV-out!
Now is so easy to install and play games, no more changing on the middle of the game.
Edit: typo
Last edited by redman on 31 Jul 2023 at 2:26 pm UTC
Yeah thats another one....... The bullshit difficulty of some of those games was just ridicules......
They were also sentient...... No matter matter how long it was...... They always just loaded the game when mum yelled that dinner was ready...... I swear they knew......
Yeah not all unlocks are bad...... But it seemed to be more were bad than good back in the day...... Specifically with racing games......
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(Do checkout the rest of this channel, by the way; it's top-notch stuff by a jaw-droppingly talented comedian.)
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One that I think is very specific to old games is: lack of mouseover tooltips - or tooltips that showed on a fixed textbox somewhere in the screen (usually a sidebar), instead of under the mouse. Maybe for people that play console-friendly games this is not a big deal, but for strategy and management games tooltips are a crucial UI element. Many games are moving to nested tooltips as a much needed improvement, and it is great. Even for RPGs, tooltips can greatly improve the interface when you just hover the cursor over an ability to see what it does. So when old games required you to search the in-game encyclopedia, or "single click to select and see description, then another button to use", or showed tooltips in the "wrong" place, it was a major pain.
It's not necessarily a lack of skill that prompts that choice - everyone is new once, and not everyone has immense amounts of time to sink into mastering every bit of minutiae about a game, but also sometimes you just want to play through a single-player experience to relax!
Last edited by Pengling on 19 Aug 2023 at 11:08 am UTC
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It's a double edged sword though. As annoying as it was sometimes. Having as much control as you did with the hardware (without any APIs in the way) was a good learning experience.
I still have that Sound Blaster 16 SCSI. Such a great card. It was also the CD-ROM controller in its original PC, but in the current one I put it in it's used with a hard drive. Adaptec had 32-bit disk access with their SCSI controller in DOS!