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!
Games were definitely buggy and I honestly think people forget how much better the quality is nowadays.
I also think there is something to it just being the 90s or so and not having much choice. If you only have one game to play then of course you’re going to replay it to death. If I have a steam library of 1000 games then I’m much less likely to.
A lot of this is just nostalgia for the past and the environment as opposed to games being any better.
There’s also the SNL effect. Everyone remembers the great games like Mario. Nobody remembers World Games.
I’m unfamiliar with that game. Was World Games buggy or just bad? The quality the OP referred to was bugs, not gameplay.
Even the worst AAA game today has better game play than anything from 30 years ago. It’s the nature of extreme complexity that allowing players freedom makes complete debugging impossible.
Hehe. World Games was an Olympic event type of game for the NES and other systems back in the late 80’s.
It was actually a well reviewed and enjoyed game, so I’m not sure why he decided to use it as an example when there were so many other actually bad games back then. It also caused a “spoof” game to be made on the NES called “Caveman games”, which did a similar game style, but set in caveman times with caveman events. I preferred caveman games as a kid, and still do. Racing against a friend on who can rub sticks together and blow on the smoke to make fire first is still a blast. So is beating the other guy with a caveman club. Good times.
i remember when games were artificially hard so you had to keep renting it longer to beat it. and if you die you go all the way back to the start of the game. so much fun
I’m an oldschool gamer but unlike many of those of today, I don’t miss that part one bit. Infinite lives? Checkpoints? Autosaves? Yes please.
I have a feeling their comment was tongue in cheek. I absolutely agree too, for while I do think there is some merit in artificial difficulty and creativity within set restrictions, I also enjoy games much more when I emulate them and have save states.
I think a great example that bridges the gap between more modern-style hardware and daily living, and old difficult repeatable gameplay is the era of the Gameboy Color. So many of the games for these style of consoles were meant to be played in bursts (arcades, anyone?) due to the on-the-go nature, and since that fit so in line with the already existing mechanisms gaming had – artificial difficulties by design – there is a very streamlined progression from 1980’s games and early 2000’s games.
So, what changed? Well let me tell you, it wasn’t the Blackberry.
Honestly, the iPhone. As mobile game consoles like the Nintendo DS got better, games got more fully fledged like the home console games were. Developers were recreating game experiences like Spyro, putting in huge games in tiny mobile consoles (Toon Link, anyone?). Yes, the Nintendo DS still had its shovelware but the iPhone was the new bridge that gapped the old arcade style pay-to-play. Games with artificial difficulty now had micro-transactions allowing you to bypass the designed limitations. As mobile consoles got better games, mobile gaming got far, far worse, leading us to “”““random””“” RNG -gacha and lootboxes and all the great gambling starters.
That’s only further developed for offshoots of software. Just look at all the junk between the: FOSS stores, Apple Store, Play Store, Samsung Store, Meta-Quest Store, going even further some devices have their own separate store entirely. And now these stores ship updates, so you don’t even have to finish your game before selling it!
Ironically, Nintendo paved the way for a really great opportunity, then capitalists saw the opportunity to exploit the free market and now there is literal garbage everywhere.
Mobile gaming truly embraced the worst side of arcades. I remember way back when there were gamers protested so that the media and governments wouldn’t lump video games with gambling, and now the studios themselves put slot machines inside them.
The good thing was that games were complete and they didn‘t try to suck ever last penny out of you post-launch. Also, no updates meant they actually couldn‘t just ship them broken and fix later…
But it did mean they would ship them broken with no chance of fixing them, tbf.
That happened like, 6 times.
I can literally only think of a handful of games that had serious bugs.
There was that ninja turtles game for nes with the impossible jump, there was enter the matrix for PS2/xbox that was completely not done. There were a few games that were poorly conceived in the first place like ET for Atari…
But yeah, what else had serious bugs?
There was plenty of terrible, buggy games you just didn’t see because stores would drop them. PC had it far worse than console did back in the day. I think it’s also that games are just way fucking cheaper now, adjusted for inflation a SNES game was around 120 bucks and a PS2 game was around 75 bucks.
I just don’t see how games that don’t meet QA requirements and subsequently aren’t shelved are in any way comparable to every game on the market today…
I mean I never had to encounter those bugs, games that weren’t shelved didn’t exist in any meaningful way because nobody spent money on them. But
nearly everyprobably half of the games I buy and play today have serious bugs on day 1 (and many still have them on day 300). That feels like a different paradigm to me.
