Memes

There were fewer game breaking bugs though, since the developers knew they couldn't be patched after release.

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.

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

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.

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.

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...

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.

Interestingly, the performance aspect is one of the reasons some phone manufactures quote for removing the SD card slot. The gap between the performance of onboard storage and SD cards keeps growing, so people that add an SD card to their Android phone and store all their apps on it have a bad experience because the software isn't really designed with such slow storage in mind any more.

Maybe SD Express will help? There's still some issues with it and it's still expensive, but in theory it should be able to support 800+ MB/s read speeds. Not as fast as an NVMe drive of course, but faster than a SATA SSD.

Maybe the little storage cards from the Xbox Series X need to become a thing that's more widely used. I'd guess they're just M.2 2230 NVMe drives inside. Would be an interesting distribution mechanism for games (like a modern cartridge format) but they're just too expensive for that at the moment.

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 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.

I have to admit, half the reason I stopped pirating was that Steam made it so easy to just click and play.

My mind personally goes back to cartridges here. But yeah, load times on early disc games were atrocious.