Putting quarters in the machine :-)

Quoting: KlaasUnlocks can be fun, sometimes, if they are done right.

I can agree there - I find the cosmetics in the modern Bomberman games a lot of fun to unlock and use, personally.

I also agree with Spider on how bad they can be if they're not done well, too, though.

Quoting: slembckeTerrible puzzles: So many baffling adventure games in the 90's where you had to read the designer's mind.

But it's totally logical to combine a piece of dental-floss with a coathanger to get a super-strong all-purpose grappling-hook!

Quoting: slembckeAnti-copy schemes: DRM is annoying yes, but what if you had to use a decoder ring or type in stuff from the manual to start a game? Way worse. -_-

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.

Quoting: slembckeLoading games from cassette tapes: Oh my gosh this took so long. Fortunately, I mostly missed that generation.

That was where I got my start! I can't really complain about modern loading-times, given this.

Quoting: slembckeTerrible graphics: Low res with simple palettes is a great aesthetic! Unless your palette is black/white/cyan/magenta. Blegh!

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!

The thing I don't miss at all it's was first the multiple floppy disk (we had the monkey island locked with key) and the multiple CD!

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 July 2023 at 2:26 pm UTC

Quoting: GroganPutting quarters in the machine :-)

Yep....... Love emulating arcade machines....... I have an infinite supply on quarters now......

Quoting: slembckeExtreme difficulty + limited continues: Quite a few 80's/90's games I couldn't beat until save states.

Yeah thats another one....... The bullshit difficulty of some of those games was just ridicules......

Quoting: slembckeLoading games from cassette tapes: Oh my gosh this took so long. Fortunately, I mostly missed that generation.

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......

Quoting: PenglingI can agree there - I find the cosmetics in the modern Bomberman games a lot of fun to unlock and use, personally.

I also agree with Spider on how bad they can be if they're not done well, too, though.

Yeah not all unlocks are bad...... But it seemed to be more were bad than good back in the day...... Specifically with racing games......

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goovFvN1hns

(Do checkout the rest of this channel, by the way; it's top-notch stuff by a jaw-droppingly talented comedian.)

Quick Time Events, or whatever the hell they were called. They took all the fun from so many games for me.

It is a bit hard to find some that are exclusive to old games and not just bad practices still done to this day. Like, I want to say "limited save slots" - having to replay the entire game to get a different ending, or not being able to go back far enough to undo a mistake, or not being able to start a new game without losing everything you did, etc. But somehow that is still a thing on many games... same for "hotkeys you can't remap", "cutscenes you can't skip"...

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.

I actually loved locked content to game progression. It added replay value, it still exists btw in some games.

Quoting: natohWhile challenging games still exist, modern games often provide a range of difficulty settings and more generous save systems.

This reminds me of something else that I don't miss from the old days: Difficulty options being named (or renamed but only in some countries) to be condescending in a perpetually-failed attempt to sound "cool". Things like naming a lowered difficulty-level "Children" or "Wimps" and/or including a subtitle openly bashing the player for lacking skill, as well as sometimes ending the game after only a few stages and not allowing you to see the ending unless you play on the highest difficulty (which inevitably mistakes punishing difficulty misdesign timewasting for challenge; Tough-but-fair exists, but these particular games never seem to know that). And I know there are some games that still do this today, and it still comes across as edgelordy and arrogant as it always did.

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 August 2023 at 11:08 am UTC

Sound card setup in DOS games. I never had a problem as I was rocking a Sound Blaster 16 SCSI back in the day, but I've heard many others who had issues. Hearing Lara Croft in the Tomb Raider setup menu say "Right! Let's go adventuring!" was always a happy thing. lol

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!