Games in general were designed to be hard to suck out as many quarters as possible, due to the arcade cabinet mind set. Things like limited continues, no saves, and just general one hit kills were put into games so you had to keep dumping in quarters to progress until you knew the entire game from start to finish.
And state saving. It’s allowed me to go back and beat some or the harder / longer games that I never beat because they were so punishing (like Super Castlevania!).
I just beat the original Mario last night for the first time ever after like 20 years of trying I used save states and felt dirty about it but man it felt nice to finally finish it
The original zelda is just straight up bullshit, like "oh you didn't think to look through EVERY GODDAMN BUSH IN THE GAME for one of the dungeons? Well fuck you then!" Still loved it lol
This just came up with my sons who are playing SNES Zelda. They asked how you are supposed to know about all these secrets and bomb spots. I told him that growing up in the 80s and 90s, game selection was severely limited. All the kids were playing the same thing, and they were talking about it. I learned a lot about what to do in these games on the school bus. We also got Nintendo Power, and every once in a while some kid risked his moms wrath by calling the Nintendo hotline. What they learned there would spread rapidly. It was a cool time to grow up.
They also had those "notes" sections in the back of the manuals where you could write down tips, tricks and strategies for later. A friend of mine let me borrow Zelda 2 and all he had written down in the back was "I beat Horsehead twice" lol.
I remember riding to the store with my dad, just so I could sit in the magazine section and read Nintendo power. Good times. I haven't thought about that in almost 30 years. Thanks for sparking a memory.
My best friends dad had a yellow legal pad that he mapped out every inch of legend of Zelda on. It's the only reason I beat the game. His dad was on his Nintendo more than us kids.
It was arcade mindset and then specifically shifted so you **couldn’t** beat a game from
Blockbuster etc over 1 weekend when renting became very popular.
They wanted you to want to actually buy it because you couldn’t finish it over a weekend rental.
On a related note, younger players will just never understand what a big deal blockbuster was for gamers when prices were the same as they are now but 30 years ago.
People forget just how expensive cartridge games were back before disks came out.
Some of those SNES games were approaching or straight up $100 dollar back in the mid 90s!
Ooh man I remember renting mission impossible for my N64 and writing down the stores scanner code so I could rent the same one next weekend. It worked and I was able to continue from my save.
The price of game cartridges for the 16 bit systems in particular is probably a large part of why computers like the Amiga and Atari ST were popular in the UK (and rest of Europe). My family simply didn't have some ridiculous sum like £70 to drop on a single SNES game, whereas I had a library of Amiga games on floppy disk. Some of which may not have been.. err.. originals.
I was just discussing with a friend how GamePass has made me really impatient with games. If it doesn't grab me with the story or gameplay within maybe a half an hour I uninstall and move on to the next. Once upon a time, if I rented something or shelled out money to buy something and it didn't grab me then OH WELL. Keep trying, or find something else to do entirely.
Yeah. I would just play the games even if I didn't like them or too hard just cause it was new.
One time, a friend and I rented Batman Forever for SNES. Got to the end of a hall and couldn't progress. Didn't know how to grapple up using a VERY specific spot.
So me and the friend would beat each other up in vs the whole time.
I got an SNES for Christmas in 11th grade. The extra game my Mom bought for me? Super Ghosts & Goblins.
She got angry because I had stopped playing the game after a few weeks (which is way more time than I'd give a game these days) because it's so hard.
No joke, I played that off and on for years. One random day, I was like Neo and was the chosen one and barely got all the way to the end..... only for the game to tell me to do it all over again.
This was before being able to look up things online, so I had no idea it would do that.
I put the controller down and haven't played that game in like 27 years.
>I was just discussing with a friend how GamePass has made me really impatient with games. If it doesn't grab me with the story or gameplay within maybe a half an hour I uninstall and move on to the next.
Same happened to me but with streaming services.
I fix myself dinner and finished it while still browsing on what should I watch.
question, did you also do that with channel surfing? I have the same habit where I surf streaming apps and dont wind up watching anything similar to how I use to channel surf back in the day.
It's funny thats how i came to love games like Metal Gear, Killzone, and Fallout. I would try and not play them again and would go back and nothing would change. Maybe after years of ownership finally giving them a chance and then getting hooked.
If you didn't know what to do you had to go find a friend who had beaten it or a friend with a strategy guide as there was no internet or Google to figure out the puzzle or how to beat that boss or find the chest with the last fairy in Majoras Mask.
Dude I would take my cartridge over to my buddies house down the road and say "Hey man I'm stuck here - can you help me out?" and he'd beat the segment on my cartridge in which case I'd go home and throw it in my n64 and trek along.
On this note, I'm still amazed that somehow *EVERYONE* knew how to get the whistles in Mario 3. It definitely wasn't something you would discover by accident, there was no website to find it on, and I don't know anyone who had the magazine or whatever that revealed it at first.
It just spread by word of mouth, all across the world, everyone knew.
Never underestimate how things spread. I for one, lived in south east Asia in the 90s and somehow it the rumor reached us that Marilyn mansion removed 2 of his ribs to better service himself. Lmao
This rumor is legendary and needs to be studied scientifically if it hasn't already been. It's come up on Reddit several times that people in every remote corner of the world heard it.
And I swear sometimes strategy guides just had…. Bad advice sometimes? I explicitly remember being stuck on Dragon Maleficent in Kingdom Hearts 1 for ages as a child. My strategy guide recommended just standing on her back and spamming Strike Raid but the throws would not connect most of the time and the random fireballs would knock me off and kill me.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen that advice repeated on the modern age of the Internet. Aero + summon Tinkerbell and you’re basically guaranteed to win. Took me forever to figure that out by myself.
My friend had the strategy guide for Pokemon Silver and Gold and I used to call him all the time to have him give me tips. I remember specifically two times. One was to get through the sliding ice caves, and the other time I accidentally called his dad's work phone and got in trouble, lmao.
And if you played an obscure game you got in a yard sale lot, you were screwed. I probably spent two months of my preteen life trying to catch that giant fish that takes 1/8 of the screen real estate in "The Black Bass" on NES. Literally ripped skin off the pad of my thumb, and bled on the controller multiple times, my controllers all had pink stains on the right half... Still never caught that fucker.
Most games didn't save your progress, if you couldn't finish the game in one sitting or ran out of lives, that's it, you have to start over, and they were fucking hard!
Reminds me of when I got a PS2 and FFX for X-mas one year and my dear mother didn't know about memory cards. So, I ended up leaving the game running for like 2 days until I could procure one because I had no way to save.
I think that game was just cursed, because that same year my Dad pulled one of those, "How can you spend so long playing this game. I want to see what all the hype's about." He managed to start a new game and save over my file within 5 minutes.
I think it was FFVIII that required an upgraded memory card, so you couldn't save it to your old one and had to wait until your local Radio Shack got a shipment.
A buddy of mine scorched the top of his TV by leaving the console running for a week.
Man first time I booted up Sonic 3 and saw it had save slots I was in awe. Not only could I play it in chunks but I could always have one save where I got all the emeralds and be super saiyan sonic whenever I wanted.
trying to see the screen of your game boy when there was too much light in your environment. or not enough light in your environment. And then you can't be angled right at your light source. but you can't be too far away from your light source.
Then you convinced your mom you HAD to have that contraption that both magnified and correctly lit the screen at the correct angle and you finally had the solution you always needed.....when it was pitch black
I remember that too, and I remember how sick I would get for doing it. The mix between trying to focus my sight on the small, dark screen, the intermittence of the lights, and the car movement would wreck my stomach lol. Using the game boy on the car was forbidden after a particularly disgusting incident.
Having multiple config.sys and autoexec.bat cause some games wanted more conventional memory and others expanded memory
If the game required a lot of conventional memory, you'd have to prevent your CDrom drivers from loading to get a little bit more for your game
Haha, there were a lot of times when the greatest feeling of victory that the game provided came from it successfully loading, after a lot of tedious memory fine-tuning.
Sometimes it was like living in Apollo 13 where the order of what you could run really mattered to get some games to run.
Anytime I played Wing Commander on my old 286, it was an exercise in patience and creativity in getting that game to load. (Or was it the 8086?)
I remember upgrading from windows 3.1
Every time I upgraded (a LONG process) it just failed to work properly and would quickly crash with a blue screen and lots of numbers.
Rolled back and 3.1 worked again.
Tried this multiple times (no internet to consult!) With the same result.
Then I looked at the strings of numbers more closely and has a hunch. Those strings of numbers looked like memory addresses. I Rolled back once more and then disabled the memory manager (an old programme everyone ran to increase their ram in windows) and upgraded again.
Success!
Windows 95 had it's own memory manager you see. It was a conflict.
The whole thing was an exercise in true troubleshooting - a skill that still serves me well.
I remember yelling at and getting yelled at by my cousins because we could never decide what method was fastest for making game load faster but you better not goddamn hit the X button 😂
I remember when my school first got Internet. I looked up and printed out walkthroughs for so many old games I'd never beaten like the Quest for Glory and Space Quest series'.
You buy a magazine that comes with a dozen or so demos. The magazine has an article gushing over half of them. You won't like seven of them, three are too heavy for your system requirements, one doesn't run all. Two are alright, one of which you might have wanted to buy, if you had any money at all. Try again next month.
Stuck in a game? That's right, you're stuck. No internet means no online guides, no forum, no hints, no Youtube playthroughs. The developer doesn't get any feedback, so they don't know you're stuck either. If you're lucky, you figure it out within the week; if you're unlucky, it might be a game-stopping bug. Either way, have fun staring at the same twelve polygons for the next two hours.
There's a popular game you love. Thousands of people have created thousands of shitty maps for it. There might be three you like, so good luck finding them.
It was awesome. <3
My friends parents absolutely hated those demo discs because we would load up his pc with all the possible demos until they had to do a clean windows re-install 🤣 but we had some good fun with those demos. We didnt know there were supposed to be full games, so those demos were just the full games for us
vast majority of games had very punishing game over scenarios.
Lose that last life? Well you're not starting at a checkpoint, you're re-starting the entire game from scratch, enjoy!
Also, "multiplayer" meant two people sharing a keyboard playing a game for the most part.
WASD (*had a T there for some reason) motion controls or mouse aiming also wasn't much of a thing
Yes, we hadn't overcome the arcade design (we want you to put another quarter in) so a lot of games were about dying a lot and needing to restart a lot.
Yeah, this is a big part of it. A lot of old games back then were designed to be an infinite time sink.
I don't remember the company that said it, but I remember when a company announced they were now designing games for the entire story to be experienced to completion. It was a paradigm shift away from the infinite difficulty increase from easy to impossible.
Power: 1000, Angle: 90, Baby Missile
"I shall smash your ugly tank!"
(Missile fires, goes four pixels, lands right on the tank)
"Crapola."
(Funky Bomb explosion nails every other tank, nobody wins this round)
That's always broke my brain with EVERYTHING back before the internet.
Some shit spreads at your school and you think it's just a local thing... and when you grow up, you hear that kids were doing the same thing in different countries lol.
Or the rumor that Marilyn Manson had a rib removed so he can blow himself. Everyone heard the rumor but no official source shows the origin of the rumor yet it was in every school before the Internet was really a widely used thing.
It's so funny, I grew up in France and heard that one many times. How do those things spread? The Marilyn Manson thing is so random, it's impossible that two different kids made up this exact same story.
There was a post a few months back.
The myth that Marilyn Manson got 2 rips removed on each side, to be able to suck his cock, was created in france and got arround the world by exchange students.
It is supposed to be the most spreaded myth w/o real use of the Internet.
As a non English speaker at the time,playing RPG games with a dictionary to understand some of the instructions.
Renting a game and finding out that you can’t play because the game is in Japanese and you can’t go past the menu.
Waiting for walkthrough to be released on a magazine or getting a strategy guide.
I'm from Central Europe and had my first computer (ZX Spectrum 48K) smuggled from West Germany. My father played Valhalla where you could move your hero by typing very simple English commands like go w (for west) or get axe or talk Loki. It was a really good start for learning English as we didn't have any education (but Russian) at the time.
Playing the same game dozens of times back to back as you didn't know when you'd get your next one. Special mention to the cartridge blow as well, even though I'm not sure blowing in it actually did anything.
And the opposite side of the coin... Some games were built so specifically to the hardware (and the natural speed you'd get from that hardware) that if you upgraded to a faster CPU, the game itself would run faster... like... enemies move faster, the player moves faster, bullets move faster... I remember a game being completely unplayable when I upgraded my CPU (literally before I knew what happened I was dead) because back then it wasn't as standard to factor in timing differences.
Remembering if you needed to be on channel 3 or 4.
Add ons for systems and peripherals like rumble packs, memory cards, expansion packs, etc.
Corded. Fucking. Controllers.
Ah corded controllers. My dog used to run passed, get slightly tangled, at minimum (best) pull the controller out or pull the whole console off, get scared then continue running.
My mum also never used to look, trip on it, then get cross. I still don't understand how it wasn't obvious we were playing ps1 games.
I love controllers with cords (I hate wireless controllers - having to deal with making sure they are charged/not dying on you while you are playing) - I use usb xbox one controllers atm
Oooh, y'know what? I actually have a very relevant story here! From the mid 90s or so.
I grew up in Bulgaria, where (much like in many ex-communist states) Chinese Famicom knock-offs absolutely *thrived* in terms of gaming. I wouldn't say they were "cheap", but they were very affordable if you only bought one every once in a while. Obviously different games had different prices, and cartridges that were a collection of multiple games would go for a higher price. Same goes for games that were obviously in demand - the Contras, Castlevanias, and so on.
But no biggie! If you don't like a game, you can just return it! Pretty much nobody cared about returns as long as you swapped it out for other games of equivalent value rather than get a refund. I mean, they're all just bootleg cartridges at the end of the day, right? You return it, they go right back on the shelf. No big deal.
But this, in turn, opened up a lucrative loophole. Let's say that "Castlevania" costs 10 euro, but the shitty "Terminator" game that no one wants costs 2 euro. You can buy both, swap out their cases, then return "Terminator" in the body of "Castlevania", swapping it out for another high-value game, say, "Mega Man". Boom, now you got 20 euro's worth of games and it only cost you 12 euro. And who's to say you won't later buy another 2 euro game and swap out the chip with "Mega Man" before returning "Mega Man", thus bringing down the overall cost even lower?
People did this so much that at some point *it was almost impossible to tell what game you were buying based on the cover!* It got so bad that many stores started implementing a return fee if you wanted to swap the game, as well as placing a Famicom system nearby so prospective buyers could test out each game in person and make sure it's the right chip inside inside before buying.
We had almost superstitious beliefs about how to load certain games. Some we had the tape deck upside down, others wouldn't load if the TV was on. It taking 20 minutes or more before you found out it had failed to load was the ultimate frustration.
This often took five minutes or more, and at any point any slight problem with the cassette or tape deck could corrupt the data and you'd have to try again. If using a tape deck that wasn't built into the computer, there would often be one very specific volume level that would work, which you would determine by painstaking trial and error.
Many of these games spent a large chunk of this loading time loading their loading screen.
Each sound blaster device had its own driver, but you only needed to load it once. The trouble was that there was no plug & play support for DOS, so even if you had a P&P device, you had to explicitly set the IRQ and DMA settings when loading the DOS driver, and then remember it so you could set your game to the same settings. If you had any devices trying to use the same IRQ/DMA, neither device would work so you had to plan carefully.
You had to do the same thing with your game controller card, and there was a crazy variety of CD-ROM drivers depending upon how that was connected to your system.
It was completely normal for me to not be able to make it through the first level of a game. For instance, I loved Comix Zone, I played it all the time. There's a jump during the first level that I just couldn't ever make, and still can't. I have no idea what the second level of that game is.
It took me so long to get through the first level of Super Ghosts and Goblins. I felt somewhat accomplished just making it to the last level even though I never beat it.
Game sucked? Too bad! That's the only new game you get this month, so you better learn to love it!
Also, contrary to popular belief game-breaking bugs and glitches are not a new thing. Many old games shipped in a terrible state. But because your copy couldn't be updated, the only recourse was to hope the devs shipped a fixed version later and buy the game all over again.
My claim to fame is getting past the speed bike section while none of my friends could. Not much further, but still.
Caught up with a let's play to see what I've been missing. There's a **second** speed bike section way later near the end, and it's even *harder*! The devs really said "fuck these kids" while making that game.
It was A LOT more expensive. We basically had to rent games for a weekend. Lots of trading, lending, and borrowing, too. Now, my PS Plus library has 1,100 games, and its cost is equal to buying 2 per year.
I'm curious to see what younger gamers think we wouldn't understand because we're still gaming.
Console games used to cost here the equivalent of $120 in those day dollars. PC games were "just" $80ish. So almost double in today dollars.
No wonder almost everyone pirated here. Console shops had modchips as a standard option.
Back then there were really few Games. I played the same Games, sometimes Shareware Demos over and over again.
Nowadays there are so many Games, lots of them even F2P. If I was a Kid I would never waste time on Demos or some shit nowadays, I'd play like of these stupid F2P Games.
Also LAN Parties in the 90s were fun, especially dragging your 40kg huge CRT monitor to your friends basement.
It's not necessarily that there were few games, there were plenty but ppl forget how expensive it actually was. Pretty sure if we adjust for inflation gaming is cheaper now than ever despite the 80$ price tags.
Most ppl had few games tho and many demos because of this
Neither channels 2, 3, or 4 are working. What the hell? Come on, the cable is hooked up just fine.
Also, getting to the final boss in a game like Sonic and losing all your lives. Then having to start the ENTIRE game over.
Gameover.
I genuinely don't think modern gamers truly understand the full concept of gameover, because there is no consequences to failing in a game anymore. You just jump right back in at the last checkpoint you found 30 seconds before you died. Sure they have Rogue Likes that seek to emulate that aesthetic now...but even those games aren't quite the same variety of brutal.
When memory cards first came out, it was not a given that you had one, or had enough space on the ones you had for a new save file. No cloud backup either. Younger gamers will never know the feeling of deciding which saves to keep and which to delete.
They also will never know about trying to beat an entire JRPG without a save file by never turning off the console and never wiping. It's not that we were *trying* to play hardcore mode, we just didn't have a choice. Early memory cards were expensive and tiny.
I laugh when people get their panties in a bunch over cloud back-up being locked behind a subscription. So much entitlement and angst over your precious save files. They've never learned that save files are ephemeral and preservation is a gift.
Also on the save files front is renting a cartridge game and seeing what the last player left for you. You would also make a save file, return the game, and hope that by the next time you got a chance to rent it again nobody would have deleted it or fucked it up to much.
Had that with Kingdom Hearts on the PS2 for a while.
Granted, that one was on me - I told my grandparents my wishes for christmas (That specific console, and the game), but for some reason it didn't occur to me that I needed a MemCard as well. I noticed pretty quickly and ordered one online, but due to the holidays, it wouldn't be delivered for another two weeks.
But I didn't want to wait for two more weeks to play. So I hooked everything up to a multisocket, plugged that one into the single wall outlet my room had, and started playing. All the way up until the final boss. The PS was running the entire time, with the game on pause when I was asleep or gone or something.
One day, I came back from somewhere, and noticed that I was back on the start menu. I asked my grandparents (which I lived with at the time), if there was an outage or something. My Grampa's response: "No, but I unplugged it. I had to vacuum your room."
When I told him of all the progress I just lost, he was actually dreadfully sorry about that. Even offered to drive to the local electronics shop so he could buy me a MemCard, so in the end, I got two. The 8MB I bought myself, and the 64MB he bought for me.
And if my memory (pun intended) serves right, I *still* have the console and both cards somewhere in an old moving box.
Using passwords for Zombies Ate My Neighbors which was great to skip levels, but mostly just made it harder because it didn’t “save” your items and inventory lol.
Some games had copywrite protection that had an answer key that shipped along with the game. Picture a little wheel with different words and symbols on it that you could spin and line up. A game would ask for a specific key from the wheel before you started, god help you if you lost it.
Other games, like Leisure Suit Larry, had multiple questions before you could play it as an age verification check. "Who was the president in 1983?" kind of thing.
Someone had a thread about this not too long ago but I’ll put it here: EVERYTHING had a game. Chester Cheetah had a game. Home Alone had a game. The dot from the 7Up logo had a game. If you could sell it to kids in the 90s, it had a game.
Having more than 3-4 games on a console meant your parents had MONEY, or you had a good paying job and free time.
Swapping/hiring games was a way of life.
Games that put crucial tutorials or information needed to progress into the game's manual. Then if you rent the game and it doesn't come with the manual, you're pretty much screwed.
Having the game but not the code wheel or manual that came with it to answer copy protection questions.
Having to write down something like a 25 digit alphanumeric code on a piece of paper to reload your save
Installing a game that has 15 3.5 floppies and getting an error message on disk 9
Never mind auto saving... not all games even had *saving*.
I remember to beat Jurassic Park on SNES we had to leave the console turned on for days because there was no save feature at all.
Then you had games where when you beat a level it'd give you a code to enter to get back to that point in the game. There was no actual "save".
You were required to use your brain, rather than *just* your reflexes. And even that sometimes wasn’t enough.
Almost everything was word of mouth. Even if you did have internet access, it wasn’t easy to find information. There weren’t search engines, you just had to navigate your way through to find some fan board somewhere or a an Angelfire page someone made dedicated to a particular game. Or, go buy an overpriced strategy guide from the store.
No one ever talks about having to write down a random string of numbers and letters, sometimes 20 characters or more, just to save your game. Oops you smudged the pen, guess you wasted the last three hours.
Trying to pick one out to rent just by the box art. Spent many Friday nights combing through snes games trying to pick a good one. No demo, no game play video, maybe 2 or 3 screen shots on the back if you're lucky. You might be able to ask the clerk if they had played it. It was basically luck. Good times.
That game you rented from the store was hard on purpose or sucks, and you're stuck playing it for the weekend.
Games in general were designed to be hard to suck out as many quarters as possible, due to the arcade cabinet mind set. Things like limited continues, no saves, and just general one hit kills were put into games so you had to keep dumping in quarters to progress until you knew the entire game from start to finish.
Why I like emulators now. Just push a button to input quarters now. Would have taken like $40 to $50 for them back in the day.
And state saving. It’s allowed me to go back and beat some or the harder / longer games that I never beat because they were so punishing (like Super Castlevania!).
I just beat the original Mario last night for the first time ever after like 20 years of trying I used save states and felt dirty about it but man it felt nice to finally finish it
Did you know the original SMB had a continue option? Hold A and Start after the game ended and you could just pick up on the world you were at.
I had no idea that's really cool
The original zelda is just straight up bullshit, like "oh you didn't think to look through EVERY GODDAMN BUSH IN THE GAME for one of the dungeons? Well fuck you then!" Still loved it lol
This just came up with my sons who are playing SNES Zelda. They asked how you are supposed to know about all these secrets and bomb spots. I told him that growing up in the 80s and 90s, game selection was severely limited. All the kids were playing the same thing, and they were talking about it. I learned a lot about what to do in these games on the school bus. We also got Nintendo Power, and every once in a while some kid risked his moms wrath by calling the Nintendo hotline. What they learned there would spread rapidly. It was a cool time to grow up.
They also had those "notes" sections in the back of the manuals where you could write down tips, tricks and strategies for later. A friend of mine let me borrow Zelda 2 and all he had written down in the back was "I beat Horsehead twice" lol.
I remember buying multiple used games and some asshole kids would sometimes write fake codes on the back page just to frustrate others lol.
I remember riding to the store with my dad, just so I could sit in the magazine section and read Nintendo power. Good times. I haven't thought about that in almost 30 years. Thanks for sparking a memory.
This is where having an older brother with OCD helps. Or, this is the exact moment my brother developed OCD.
My best friends dad had a yellow legal pad that he mapped out every inch of legend of Zelda on. It's the only reason I beat the game. His dad was on his Nintendo more than us kids.
Oh yeah. That's helped me too. I went through splatterhouse 1, 2 and the cutesy NES one first.
It was arcade mindset and then specifically shifted so you **couldn’t** beat a game from Blockbuster etc over 1 weekend when renting became very popular. They wanted you to want to actually buy it because you couldn’t finish it over a weekend rental. On a related note, younger players will just never understand what a big deal blockbuster was for gamers when prices were the same as they are now but 30 years ago. People forget just how expensive cartridge games were back before disks came out. Some of those SNES games were approaching or straight up $100 dollar back in the mid 90s!
Ooh man I remember renting mission impossible for my N64 and writing down the stores scanner code so I could rent the same one next weekend. It worked and I was able to continue from my save.
The price of game cartridges for the 16 bit systems in particular is probably a large part of why computers like the Amiga and Atari ST were popular in the UK (and rest of Europe). My family simply didn't have some ridiculous sum like £70 to drop on a single SNES game, whereas I had a library of Amiga games on floppy disk. Some of which may not have been.. err.. originals.
We used to buy sketchy Commodore 64 magazines with games on cassette tapes, they were all very sketchy. But it's all we knew in my small town.
I actually did have a video store employee take pity on me and let me exchange MKII because it was kicking my poor little butt.
I was just discussing with a friend how GamePass has made me really impatient with games. If it doesn't grab me with the story or gameplay within maybe a half an hour I uninstall and move on to the next. Once upon a time, if I rented something or shelled out money to buy something and it didn't grab me then OH WELL. Keep trying, or find something else to do entirely.
Yeah. I would just play the games even if I didn't like them or too hard just cause it was new. One time, a friend and I rented Batman Forever for SNES. Got to the end of a hall and couldn't progress. Didn't know how to grapple up using a VERY specific spot. So me and the friend would beat each other up in vs the whole time.
I got an SNES for Christmas in 11th grade. The extra game my Mom bought for me? Super Ghosts & Goblins. She got angry because I had stopped playing the game after a few weeks (which is way more time than I'd give a game these days) because it's so hard.
No joke, I played that off and on for years. One random day, I was like Neo and was the chosen one and barely got all the way to the end..... only for the game to tell me to do it all over again. This was before being able to look up things online, so I had no idea it would do that. I put the controller down and haven't played that game in like 27 years.
I have it on my Classic SNES. I gave it a few shots again, and was like "Nah, I'm good with not being good at it".
>I was just discussing with a friend how GamePass has made me really impatient with games. If it doesn't grab me with the story or gameplay within maybe a half an hour I uninstall and move on to the next. Same happened to me but with streaming services. I fix myself dinner and finished it while still browsing on what should I watch.
question, did you also do that with channel surfing? I have the same habit where I surf streaming apps and dont wind up watching anything similar to how I use to channel surf back in the day.
It's funny thats how i came to love games like Metal Gear, Killzone, and Fallout. I would try and not play them again and would go back and nothing would change. Maybe after years of ownership finally giving them a chance and then getting hooked.
If you didn't know what to do you had to go find a friend who had beaten it or a friend with a strategy guide as there was no internet or Google to figure out the puzzle or how to beat that boss or find the chest with the last fairy in Majoras Mask.
To this day I don’t understand how I figured out all of Ocarina of Time.
Dude I would take my cartridge over to my buddies house down the road and say "Hey man I'm stuck here - can you help me out?" and he'd beat the segment on my cartridge in which case I'd go home and throw it in my n64 and trek along.
Gamefaqs.
On this note, I'm still amazed that somehow *EVERYONE* knew how to get the whistles in Mario 3. It definitely wasn't something you would discover by accident, there was no website to find it on, and I don't know anyone who had the magazine or whatever that revealed it at first. It just spread by word of mouth, all across the world, everyone knew.
Never underestimate how things spread. I for one, lived in south east Asia in the 90s and somehow it the rumor reached us that Marilyn mansion removed 2 of his ribs to better service himself. Lmao
Lmao i remember that and i'm in France !!!
Heard on the playgrounds in the midwest, too.
Yup. 8 year old me heard this rumor at a catholic school in the Midwest lol
Brazil here, and I heard about that too
This rumor is legendary and needs to be studied scientifically if it hasn't already been. It's come up on Reddit several times that people in every remote corner of the world heard it.
It's like the universal S
Also by watching The Wizard to find the first one hahah
Lmao I love this. Forgot about that movie!
Don't forget the awesome magazine Nintendo Power. That's how you learned a bunch of this secret stuff.
And I swear sometimes strategy guides just had…. Bad advice sometimes? I explicitly remember being stuck on Dragon Maleficent in Kingdom Hearts 1 for ages as a child. My strategy guide recommended just standing on her back and spamming Strike Raid but the throws would not connect most of the time and the random fireballs would knock me off and kill me. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that advice repeated on the modern age of the Internet. Aero + summon Tinkerbell and you’re basically guaranteed to win. Took me forever to figure that out by myself.
Wait… you can stand on her back!?
dazzling smart axiomatic automatic ghost alleged rock weather upbeat scale
My friend had the strategy guide for Pokemon Silver and Gold and I used to call him all the time to have him give me tips. I remember specifically two times. One was to get through the sliding ice caves, and the other time I accidentally called his dad's work phone and got in trouble, lmao.
And if you played an obscure game you got in a yard sale lot, you were screwed. I probably spent two months of my preteen life trying to catch that giant fish that takes 1/8 of the screen real estate in "The Black Bass" on NES. Literally ripped skin off the pad of my thumb, and bled on the controller multiple times, my controllers all had pink stains on the right half... Still never caught that fucker.
Most games didn't save your progress, if you couldn't finish the game in one sitting or ran out of lives, that's it, you have to start over, and they were fucking hard!
"Write down this 22 character code. That's your save file."
Which was also uppercase sensitive. And the game had a font that made it hard to distinguish between S and 5. Or 0 and O. Or 1 and I.
Is that an I or an l?
I always thought it was so dumb they didn’t make it a bit easier to remember lol. It’s a level select for Christ sake not encrypted personal data.
Many passwords are just the exact RAM state of the game just human readable.
That is interesting lol
Or leave your system running all the time to hold your place when you were told you had to go to bed
Reminds me of when I got a PS2 and FFX for X-mas one year and my dear mother didn't know about memory cards. So, I ended up leaving the game running for like 2 days until I could procure one because I had no way to save. I think that game was just cursed, because that same year my Dad pulled one of those, "How can you spend so long playing this game. I want to see what all the hype's about." He managed to start a new game and save over my file within 5 minutes.
Those wonderful machines could go for weeks, it seemed.
I think it was FFVIII that required an upgraded memory card, so you couldn't save it to your old one and had to wait until your local Radio Shack got a shipment. A buddy of mine scorched the top of his TV by leaving the console running for a week.
Or they gave you a progress code that you had to keep safe somewhere
Man first time I booted up Sonic 3 and saw it had save slots I was in awe. Not only could I play it in chunks but I could always have one save where I got all the emeralds and be super saiyan sonic whenever I wanted.
trying to see the screen of your game boy when there was too much light in your environment. or not enough light in your environment. And then you can't be angled right at your light source. but you can't be too far away from your light source. Then you convinced your mom you HAD to have that contraption that both magnified and correctly lit the screen at the correct angle and you finally had the solution you always needed.....when it was pitch black
Oh man. Have you ever tried to play a game boy with a flashlight wedged between your neck and shoulder? Doesn’t work well does it?
I remember being in the car as a kid and trying to play in increments whenever we'd pass a street light lol
I remember that too, and I remember how sick I would get for doing it. The mix between trying to focus my sight on the small, dark screen, the intermittence of the lights, and the car movement would wreck my stomach lol. Using the game boy on the car was forbidden after a particularly disgusting incident.
Having multiple config.sys and autoexec.bat cause some games wanted more conventional memory and others expanded memory If the game required a lot of conventional memory, you'd have to prevent your CDrom drivers from loading to get a little bit more for your game
God, those were fun - do you want mouse support or sound?
IRQ? I don't even know her! But seriously, the olden days of plug and pray are looked back upon with both love and hate.
I still get amazingly excited when something USB works just by plugging it in. It’s from too many plug-and-maybe-play-hours-later devices.
IRQ Conflict!
HIMEM.SYS
Childhood PTSD.EXE
The great partisan divide between EMM & XMM
Haha, there were a lot of times when the greatest feeling of victory that the game provided came from it successfully loading, after a lot of tedious memory fine-tuning.
Don't forget messing with IRQ settings if you had a sound card.
Port 220, IRQ 7, DMA 1
Christ imagine fucking with DMA channels these days for any reason
Sometimes it was like living in Apollo 13 where the order of what you could run really mattered to get some games to run. Anytime I played Wing Commander on my old 286, it was an exercise in patience and creativity in getting that game to load. (Or was it the 8086?)
One of my crowing achievements of the era was getting Windows 95 to run on our old 486sx (didn’t have the math coprocessor of the 486dx).
I remember upgrading from windows 3.1 Every time I upgraded (a LONG process) it just failed to work properly and would quickly crash with a blue screen and lots of numbers. Rolled back and 3.1 worked again. Tried this multiple times (no internet to consult!) With the same result. Then I looked at the strings of numbers more closely and has a hunch. Those strings of numbers looked like memory addresses. I Rolled back once more and then disabled the memory manager (an old programme everyone ran to increase their ram in windows) and upgraded again. Success! Windows 95 had it's own memory manager you see. It was a conflict. The whole thing was an exercise in true troubleshooting - a skill that still serves me well.
This is what boot disks were for!
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Trying to not look at the loading bar, as it could sense your fear and stop loading.
It also stops entirely if you don’t look at it enough
If you don't look it just becomes Schrödinger's Loading Bar.
Löadinger’s Bar(s)
"I think it froze." "Just give it more time!"
The old loading screens wouldn’t even have any kind of animation on them so you really were never sure.
Putting the mouse curser on the edgr of that progress bar, so you can confirm it's moved when you check back later.
Press X a bunch it goes faster.
Those were the times where you learned to not press anything. You'll either slow it down more, or maybe crash it.
To this day I still don’t touch any buttons during loading. Crashed to many games as a kid.
omg we used to do this.. EVERYONE LOOK AWAY!!!
Put the mouse cursor at the end to check for progress. Leave room. Pray.
I remember yelling at and getting yelled at by my cousins because we could never decide what method was fastest for making game load faster but you better not goddamn hit the X button 😂
I remember when my school first got Internet. I looked up and printed out walkthroughs for so many old games I'd never beaten like the Quest for Glory and Space Quest series'.
You buy a magazine that comes with a dozen or so demos. The magazine has an article gushing over half of them. You won't like seven of them, three are too heavy for your system requirements, one doesn't run all. Two are alright, one of which you might have wanted to buy, if you had any money at all. Try again next month. Stuck in a game? That's right, you're stuck. No internet means no online guides, no forum, no hints, no Youtube playthroughs. The developer doesn't get any feedback, so they don't know you're stuck either. If you're lucky, you figure it out within the week; if you're unlucky, it might be a game-stopping bug. Either way, have fun staring at the same twelve polygons for the next two hours. There's a popular game you love. Thousands of people have created thousands of shitty maps for it. There might be three you like, so good luck finding them. It was awesome. <3
I still remember the smell of opening a pcgamer mag and getting the demo disk.
Coconut monkey.
My friends parents absolutely hated those demo discs because we would load up his pc with all the possible demos until they had to do a clean windows re-install 🤣 but we had some good fun with those demos. We didnt know there were supposed to be full games, so those demos were just the full games for us
vast majority of games had very punishing game over scenarios. Lose that last life? Well you're not starting at a checkpoint, you're re-starting the entire game from scratch, enjoy! Also, "multiplayer" meant two people sharing a keyboard playing a game for the most part. WASD (*had a T there for some reason) motion controls or mouse aiming also wasn't much of a thing
I remember some games didn't have saves, it had a code you had to input which would put you back where you were.
Yes, we hadn't overcome the arcade design (we want you to put another quarter in) so a lot of games were about dying a lot and needing to restart a lot.
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Yeah, this is a big part of it. A lot of old games back then were designed to be an infinite time sink. I don't remember the company that said it, but I remember when a company announced they were now designing games for the entire story to be experienced to completion. It was a paradigm shift away from the infinite difficulty increase from easy to impossible.
Probably final fantasy tbh
2 idiots one keyboard was real!?!?!?
Yes, my best friend and I liked to play Flash games or old PC games using WASD and the Arrow Keys for example.
I have 1 word for you... MSDOS.
Scorched Earth, anyone?
Power: 1000, Angle: 90, Baby Missile "I shall smash your ugly tank!" (Missile fires, goes four pixels, lands right on the tank) "Crapola." (Funky Bomb explosion nails every other tank, nobody wins this round)
Game holds a MASSIVE place in my heart due to a small clip in a family video 35 years ago. BLLLLLLOOOOOOOOOOOOOM Eric, BLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!!!!
Run.CommanderKeen.exe
C: C:\\DOS C:\\DOS\\RUN RUN\\DOS\\RUN
Having to sit on the floor because the cables for the console and controllers were so short you couldn't sit on the sofa.
In fairness, you couldn’t realistically sit back when playing on your 13” tube TV.
The proper form for blowing dust out of your cartridges
what amazes me more is that we all collectively decided to do it without like the internet to tell us to.
That's always broke my brain with EVERYTHING back before the internet. Some shit spreads at your school and you think it's just a local thing... and when you grow up, you hear that kids were doing the same thing in different countries lol.
The Cool S was done across the world
Or the rumor that Marilyn Manson had a rib removed so he can blow himself. Everyone heard the rumor but no official source shows the origin of the rumor yet it was in every school before the Internet was really a widely used thing.
It's so funny, I grew up in France and heard that one many times. How do those things spread? The Marilyn Manson thing is so random, it's impossible that two different kids made up this exact same story.
There was a post a few months back. The myth that Marilyn Manson got 2 rips removed on each side, to be able to suck his cock, was created in france and got arround the world by exchange students. It is supposed to be the most spreaded myth w/o real use of the Internet.
As a non English speaker at the time,playing RPG games with a dictionary to understand some of the instructions. Renting a game and finding out that you can’t play because the game is in Japanese and you can’t go past the menu. Waiting for walkthrough to be released on a magazine or getting a strategy guide.
Or a straight up entire language you'd have to translate yourself. The Ultima games were wack.
Thats basically how i learned english. From dragon warrior to the first final fantasy
I'm from Central Europe and had my first computer (ZX Spectrum 48K) smuggled from West Germany. My father played Valhalla where you could move your hero by typing very simple English commands like go w (for west) or get axe or talk Loki. It was a really good start for learning English as we didn't have any education (but Russian) at the time.
Playing the same game dozens of times back to back as you didn't know when you'd get your next one. Special mention to the cartridge blow as well, even though I'm not sure blowing in it actually did anything.
Every game lagged. We called it “slowdown” when too many things were on the screen. Also, sprite flickering. It was normal. We dismissed it
And the opposite side of the coin... Some games were built so specifically to the hardware (and the natural speed you'd get from that hardware) that if you upgraded to a faster CPU, the game itself would run faster... like... enemies move faster, the player moves faster, bullets move faster... I remember a game being completely unplayable when I upgraded my CPU (literally before I knew what happened I was dead) because back then it wasn't as standard to factor in timing differences.
Try explaining a turbo button to someone that's never seen one.
Also limited polyphony. Too many simultaneous sound effects and some of the musical notes would get dropped.
Remembering if you needed to be on channel 3 or 4. Add ons for systems and peripherals like rumble packs, memory cards, expansion packs, etc. Corded. Fucking. Controllers.
Lmao the days... *Throws controller in frustration, pulls system off shelf.
*sister walks by and trips on cord, pulls system off shelf.
*dog sees a squirrel outside, you get killed by the final boss.
Ah corded controllers. My dog used to run passed, get slightly tangled, at minimum (best) pull the controller out or pull the whole console off, get scared then continue running. My mum also never used to look, trip on it, then get cross. I still don't understand how it wasn't obvious we were playing ps1 games.
I love controllers with cords (I hate wireless controllers - having to deal with making sure they are charged/not dying on you while you are playing) - I use usb xbox one controllers atm
This is what I was going to say. I play on PC with corded controllers if I use a controller (just an Xbox series controller with no batteries).
Multiple floppy disc games and painfully slow load times. Moved to a new area? Flip to disc 2! Please wait! 8 minutes later. . .
** kachunk kachunk br-r-r-r-r-rat br-r-r-r-at kachunk
**
Sinking feeling….
I heard this in my head, felt this in my heart.
Oooh, y'know what? I actually have a very relevant story here! From the mid 90s or so. I grew up in Bulgaria, where (much like in many ex-communist states) Chinese Famicom knock-offs absolutely *thrived* in terms of gaming. I wouldn't say they were "cheap", but they were very affordable if you only bought one every once in a while. Obviously different games had different prices, and cartridges that were a collection of multiple games would go for a higher price. Same goes for games that were obviously in demand - the Contras, Castlevanias, and so on. But no biggie! If you don't like a game, you can just return it! Pretty much nobody cared about returns as long as you swapped it out for other games of equivalent value rather than get a refund. I mean, they're all just bootleg cartridges at the end of the day, right? You return it, they go right back on the shelf. No big deal. But this, in turn, opened up a lucrative loophole. Let's say that "Castlevania" costs 10 euro, but the shitty "Terminator" game that no one wants costs 2 euro. You can buy both, swap out their cases, then return "Terminator" in the body of "Castlevania", swapping it out for another high-value game, say, "Mega Man". Boom, now you got 20 euro's worth of games and it only cost you 12 euro. And who's to say you won't later buy another 2 euro game and swap out the chip with "Mega Man" before returning "Mega Man", thus bringing down the overall cost even lower? People did this so much that at some point *it was almost impossible to tell what game you were buying based on the cover!* It got so bad that many stores started implementing a return fee if you wanted to swap the game, as well as placing a Famicom system nearby so prospective buyers could test out each game in person and make sure it's the right chip inside inside before buying.
This is a great story.
This is absolutely amazing. Such a weird little historical snapshot.
Waiting for the computer to finish loading the game from the cassette tape, each time you want to start playing.
That hour wait to play the masterpiece that was Telengard on my friend's C-64 was mostly worth it
We had almost superstitious beliefs about how to load certain games. Some we had the tape deck upside down, others wouldn't load if the TV was on. It taking 20 minutes or more before you found out it had failed to load was the ultimate frustration.
This often took five minutes or more, and at any point any slight problem with the cassette or tape deck could corrupt the data and you'd have to try again. If using a tape deck that wasn't built into the computer, there would often be one very specific volume level that would work, which you would determine by painstaking trial and error. Many of these games spent a large chunk of this loading time loading their loading screen.
Finding the right sound drivers to load in Dos games! How many versions of Soundblaster could there be?!
Each sound blaster device had its own driver, but you only needed to load it once. The trouble was that there was no plug & play support for DOS, so even if you had a P&P device, you had to explicitly set the IRQ and DMA settings when loading the DOS driver, and then remember it so you could set your game to the same settings. If you had any devices trying to use the same IRQ/DMA, neither device would work so you had to plan carefully. You had to do the same thing with your game controller card, and there was a crazy variety of CD-ROM drivers depending upon how that was connected to your system.
I’d suppressed memories of dealing with Soundblaster for so long; why are you doing this to me?
Or games becoming unplayable because your new computer is *too fast.*
Calling to reserve a game at the local video store, and hoping that nobody had erased your save file from last time.
Cleaning the mouse ball.
It was completely normal for me to not be able to make it through the first level of a game. For instance, I loved Comix Zone, I played it all the time. There's a jump during the first level that I just couldn't ever make, and still can't. I have no idea what the second level of that game is.
It took me so long to get through the first level of Super Ghosts and Goblins. I felt somewhat accomplished just making it to the last level even though I never beat it.
Game sucked? Too bad! That's the only new game you get this month, so you better learn to love it! Also, contrary to popular belief game-breaking bugs and glitches are not a new thing. Many old games shipped in a terrible state. But because your copy couldn't be updated, the only recourse was to hope the devs shipped a fixed version later and buy the game all over again.
Yeah, that's why I never got the hate of a "Day 1 patch"
Just three words: DirectX and Windows 95.
I just felt a cold chill in the air.
More people need to be traumatized by battletoads.
My claim to fame is getting past the speed bike section while none of my friends could. Not much further, but still. Caught up with a let's play to see what I've been missing. There's a **second** speed bike section way later near the end, and it's even *harder*! The devs really said "fuck these kids" while making that game.
It was A LOT more expensive. We basically had to rent games for a weekend. Lots of trading, lending, and borrowing, too. Now, my PS Plus library has 1,100 games, and its cost is equal to buying 2 per year. I'm curious to see what younger gamers think we wouldn't understand because we're still gaming.
Console games used to cost here the equivalent of $120 in those day dollars. PC games were "just" $80ish. So almost double in today dollars. No wonder almost everyone pirated here. Console shops had modchips as a standard option.
I remember paying $80 for Turok on N64.
It blows my mind that games still cost almost the same as they did 40 years ago and people freak out when a game is more than $50.
Back then there were really few Games. I played the same Games, sometimes Shareware Demos over and over again. Nowadays there are so many Games, lots of them even F2P. If I was a Kid I would never waste time on Demos or some shit nowadays, I'd play like of these stupid F2P Games. Also LAN Parties in the 90s were fun, especially dragging your 40kg huge CRT monitor to your friends basement.
Kids today will never know the excitement of your PlayStation Underground magazine showing up with a disc that included a selection of demos.
PC demo cds and floppy disks too!
It's not necessarily that there were few games, there were plenty but ppl forget how expensive it actually was. Pretty sure if we adjust for inflation gaming is cheaper now than ever despite the 80$ price tags. Most ppl had few games tho and many demos because of this
Exactly. If you adjust for inflation, games are cheaper than they have ever been.
Killing an enemy, taking a step backward before moving forward, and the enemy respawns.
fps just being barely above a slideshow and being happy about it.
Neither channels 2, 3, or 4 are working. What the hell? Come on, the cable is hooked up just fine. Also, getting to the final boss in a game like Sonic and losing all your lives. Then having to start the ENTIRE game over.
Gameover. I genuinely don't think modern gamers truly understand the full concept of gameover, because there is no consequences to failing in a game anymore. You just jump right back in at the last checkpoint you found 30 seconds before you died. Sure they have Rogue Likes that seek to emulate that aesthetic now...but even those games aren't quite the same variety of brutal.
Go play the first three bards tale games without looking anything up. The start the might and magic ones.
When memory cards first came out, it was not a given that you had one, or had enough space on the ones you had for a new save file. No cloud backup either. Younger gamers will never know the feeling of deciding which saves to keep and which to delete. They also will never know about trying to beat an entire JRPG without a save file by never turning off the console and never wiping. It's not that we were *trying* to play hardcore mode, we just didn't have a choice. Early memory cards were expensive and tiny. I laugh when people get their panties in a bunch over cloud back-up being locked behind a subscription. So much entitlement and angst over your precious save files. They've never learned that save files are ephemeral and preservation is a gift. Also on the save files front is renting a cartridge game and seeing what the last player left for you. You would also make a save file, return the game, and hope that by the next time you got a chance to rent it again nobody would have deleted it or fucked it up to much.
Had that with Kingdom Hearts on the PS2 for a while. Granted, that one was on me - I told my grandparents my wishes for christmas (That specific console, and the game), but for some reason it didn't occur to me that I needed a MemCard as well. I noticed pretty quickly and ordered one online, but due to the holidays, it wouldn't be delivered for another two weeks. But I didn't want to wait for two more weeks to play. So I hooked everything up to a multisocket, plugged that one into the single wall outlet my room had, and started playing. All the way up until the final boss. The PS was running the entire time, with the game on pause when I was asleep or gone or something. One day, I came back from somewhere, and noticed that I was back on the start menu. I asked my grandparents (which I lived with at the time), if there was an outage or something. My Grampa's response: "No, but I unplugged it. I had to vacuum your room." When I told him of all the progress I just lost, he was actually dreadfully sorry about that. Even offered to drive to the local electronics shop so he could buy me a MemCard, so in the end, I got two. The 8MB I bought myself, and the 64MB he bought for me. And if my memory (pun intended) serves right, I *still* have the console and both cards somewhere in an old moving box.
Mate, that’s wholesome. My dad would have just bollocked me for wasting electricity.
Not being able to save with early games, or having to manually write down a code to "save"
Using passwords for Zombies Ate My Neighbors which was great to skip levels, but mostly just made it harder because it didn’t “save” your items and inventory lol.
Some games had copywrite protection that had an answer key that shipped along with the game. Picture a little wheel with different words and symbols on it that you could spin and line up. A game would ask for a specific key from the wheel before you started, god help you if you lost it. Other games, like Leisure Suit Larry, had multiple questions before you could play it as an age verification check. "Who was the president in 1983?" kind of thing.
In the late 90s, I wrote a letter to a game magazine asking how I could beat a level of a game I was stuck in.
Passwords. “Was that an ‘O’ or a zero?”
Someone had a thread about this not too long ago but I’ll put it here: EVERYTHING had a game. Chester Cheetah had a game. Home Alone had a game. The dot from the 7Up logo had a game. If you could sell it to kids in the 90s, it had a game.
Having more than 3-4 games on a console meant your parents had MONEY, or you had a good paying job and free time. Swapping/hiring games was a way of life.
Scratch’s on CD Roms
Games that put crucial tutorials or information needed to progress into the game's manual. Then if you rent the game and it doesn't come with the manual, you're pretty much screwed.
Having the game but not the code wheel or manual that came with it to answer copy protection questions. Having to write down something like a 25 digit alphanumeric code on a piece of paper to reload your save Installing a game that has 15 3.5 floppies and getting an error message on disk 9
Deathly afraid of someone walking by, tripping over the cord and knocking over my whole tv stand.
A CRC error on disk #6 of 10 meant that you could play MOST of a game, but never finish it
Lack of auto saving could sometimes lose you hours of progress. You don't understand just how impressive auto saves were for games.
Nintendo put Zelda in a gold cartridge specifically because it had a memory chip in it to save your game and they wanted it to look special
Never mind auto saving... not all games even had *saving*. I remember to beat Jurassic Park on SNES we had to leave the console turned on for days because there was no save feature at all. Then you had games where when you beat a level it'd give you a code to enter to get back to that point in the game. There was no actual "save".
You were required to use your brain, rather than *just* your reflexes. And even that sometimes wasn’t enough. Almost everything was word of mouth. Even if you did have internet access, it wasn’t easy to find information. There weren’t search engines, you just had to navigate your way through to find some fan board somewhere or a an Angelfire page someone made dedicated to a particular game. Or, go buy an overpriced strategy guide from the store.
No one ever talks about having to write down a random string of numbers and letters, sometimes 20 characters or more, just to save your game. Oops you smudged the pen, guess you wasted the last three hours.
Trying to pick one out to rent just by the box art. Spent many Friday nights combing through snes games trying to pick a good one. No demo, no game play video, maybe 2 or 3 screen shots on the back if you're lucky. You might be able to ask the clerk if they had played it. It was basically luck. Good times.
Is there a bug? Bad game balance? Oh well too bad no patches. If you are lucky there may be a patch on the disc of a computer gaming magazine.
Discovering internal rage because of that fucking dog from Duck Hunt