What was something you REALLY didn't like about older consoles but no one seems to mind that much?

[FAST6191]

Why did we need memory packs on nintendo 64 when the cart saves out games in the first place? What kind of memory card is that good for.

Never took your perfect dark profile, bomberman costumes or such like to a friend's house?

 

[Tom Bombadildo]

Why did we need memory packs on nintendo 64 when the cart saves out games in the first place? What kind of memory card is that good for.

The controller paks were initially designed so you could transfer saves to another copy of the game. It was usually used with rental games that are super long, so you could keep your save between rental periods and not lose out on progress. I believe a couple games also don't have a memory chip on board. And I'm sure giving friends your save may be a reason as well...

EDIT: whew, d a lot ._.

 

[Sonic Angel Knight]

The controller paks were initially designed so you could transfer saves to another copy of the game. It was usually used with rental games that are super long, so you could keep your save between rental periods and not lose out on progress. I believe a couple games also don't have a memory chip on board. And I'm sure giving friends your save may be a reason as well...

EDIT: whew, d a lot ._.

I don't remember lot of games with such feature. Mario 64, mario kart, legend of Zelda, Donkey Kong 64, which was games I had.

Never took your perfect dark profile, bomberman costumes or such like to a friend's house?

Never had those games on my nintendo 64.

 

[simbin]

Loud fans.

PS2 Slim and Fat model, always seemed loud to me.

Seeking suitable replacement, like exist for Dreamcast and OG Xbox.

 

[AxlSt00pid]

Usb controllers work perfectly fine for ps2 games on PS3 here is a quick video of me using one to play Final Fantasy XII (sorry for the blurry video i smashed the camera on my phone lol)

Do you have it as an original disc, an ISO or as a PS2 Classic install?
Because I tried using my PS2 games (original disc and ISO) and USB controllers won't work at all on my 60gb, BC PS3 (again, only on PS2 games)

 

[AmandaRose]

Do you have it as an original disc, an ISO or as a PS2 Classic install?
Because I tried using my PS2 games (original disc and ISO) and they won't work at all on my 60gb, BC PS3

ISO as can be seen in the video mine is a phat 40gb non bc PS3.

 

[AxlSt00pid]

ISO as can be seen in the video mine is a phat 40gb non bc PS3.

Hmm, maybe something's wrong with my ps3 then (also sorry for off topic)

 

[Kioku]

I never encountered such game

Every Turok on the System. Doom 64 was kind of limited but also had a password system.

 

[FAST6191]

I don't remember lot of games with such feature. Mario 64, mario kart, legend of Zelda, Donkey Kong 64, which was games I had.


Never had those games on my nintendo 64.

I dare say you missed out then, though if you feel the need to go back get the XBLA remake of Perfect Dark. Sadly the N64 branch of bomberman seems to have died out so you are more or less left with those to try to do something with. Spin it another way, would you want to have to start a new character in something like battlefield or borderlands? Such things have a very long history in the likes of the PC but were also not unknown to consoles in that era.

As for controller pak options they tended to be buried in options menus (if you have ever seen reviews where people seem to spend far more time than you might think they should poking around options menus it tends to be a force of habit from coming up through all that), only given as a secondary option (as you say most had inbuilt memory they could use and most were happy enough with it), or have limited scope (Mario Kart 64 time trial ghosts were one of those if memory serves, though as there was very little to unlock and even a GP tended to only last 40 minutes at most then yeah) so you might have missed them.

 

[KiiWii]

Member when they said you could preconfigure your N64 pad (if you were a lefty) and take that config with you to play at mates house?

Fair play it was probably just said as a minor detail in a magazine from before the launch of the ULTRA 64, but my left handed mate brought it up and whinged his titties off about it everytime we played mario kart & goldeneye etc.

 

[astrangeone]

I grew up on portable consoles, so my complaints usually were:

- battery life (I played the shit out of my brick Game Boy), and standard batteries were expensive. Rechargeables were shitty. I eventually got a hold of some off-brand batteries called Mallory in Chinatown, and somehow they had better mAh than even Energizer. (Yes, I knew the Game Boy had the DC in wall wart, but I couldn't find it in my "big" town either, so don't give me that shit.)

- the choice of consoles. Either you had the terrible Game Gear (heavy, major battery hog), the Atari Lynx or the Game Boy line. I played a lot of Game Gear at the time, but honestly, my console of choice became the Game Boy thanks in part to Pokemon. I had a phat PSP as well, so yeah?

- disc based media gets on my nerves. Either the drive itself fails (happened with two PSPs I owned), OR the disc itself becomes damaged. I was a frequent customer of a local mom and pop gamestore that had a disc repair machine. I want to buy one for myself as well...

 

[Sonic Angel Knight]

I also hate how N64 had a directional pad, but hardly ever had games that used them. Sure I get that is a new 3D console with precise stick controls but that doesn't me to add a control pad and hardly any games that use them. We just got fresh off a SNES, let us ease our way into the new 3D world, like playstation did before making dualshock controller with analog.

 

[Deleted User]

Not being able to use a ps2 memory card for ps1 savedata when playing ps1 games on ps2

Yeah, I found this out the first time I got a PS1 game for my PS2. I'm sure there's some technical explanation for it, but it's annoying nonetheless.

I grew up on portable consoles, so my complaints usually were:
the choice of consoles. Either you had the terrible Game Gear (heavy, major battery hog), the Atari Lynx or the Game Boy line. I played a lot of Game Gear at the time, but honestly, my console of choice became the Game Boy thanks in part to Pokemon. I had a phat PSP as well, so yeah?

Yeah, I also hate how battery lives for handhelds seem to have gotten worse over the years instead of getting better. The GBA SP could handle around 10-15 hours of gameplay on a full charge, while a normal old 3DS lasts for only about 3 hours, with subsequent revisions being only marginally better. I guess that's the price to pay for greater CPU power.

Why bump a general discussion type thing after a few hours?
Anyway nothing really. Plenty of stuff I disliked at the time others also disliked. Most of my issues are with odd takes on history -- I still don't know where people got to thinking Sonic Adventure was good from. Several things have since aged very poorly and we have gained a small handful of new annoyances but for the question of the OP... nope, got nothing really.

IIRC, Sonic Adventure was actually pretty well-received when it first released. People were impressed by, funnily enough, the game's graphics. There were a few reviews that did call out the game for being nothing but graphics with a lack of deep gameplay to back it up, though.

As the game aged and technology got better, however, people began to realize how buggy and patched together it was, and the game got really polarizing from that point forward. Some like it and call it the best game in the series, while others have a very strong distaste for it and mark it as the beginning of Sonic's decline. There's no definite, concrete general opinion on the game (which can be seen as sort of an analogy for Sonic in general).

 

[GerbilSoft]

If you forgot to plug a controller into the n64 before turning it on, you had to turn it off to plug one in. But if it comes out during gameplay, you can just pop it back in fine!

Interestingly, this is a software issue, not a hardware issue. Nintendo probably recommended it, but I'm pretty sure there's some games that don't care. (Fun fact: N64 uses the same controller protocol as GameCube, though the only GCN title I know of that still supports N64 controllers [with a passive wire adapter] is the GameCube Service Disc.)

On that note: The GameCube's inability to boot from the expansion port. This is why Game Boy Player requires a startup disc, and if the startup disc is misplaced, the Game Boy Player is effectively a brick. (Not counting the homebrew Game Boy Interface program here.)

 

[APartOfMe]

laggy sound during gameplay. i can handle the game lagging to an extent, but if the sound lags, i can't stand it

 

[Veho]

"You had to buy an additional peripheral to let other 2 people play."
For all three games that supported it?

1: Developers don't make 4 player game modes because they require a peripheral and that would fragment the userbase.
2: People don't buy the peripheral because not a lot of game use it.
3: Repeat.

 

[Taleweaver]

The damn length of the controller's cables. Back when I was young and we had a SNES, two player games were always a fight on who got to get on the side couch (which was closer to the television). You could sit on the other couch, but just barely. Meaning: either hold your arms stretched in front of you or on the tip of the seat (or move the couch forward, which'd get us into trouble with the parents).


I'm honestly baffled that when nintendo made the mini versions of their consoles, they not only NOT went wireless, but made the stupid things even shorter than the original!

 

[The Real Jdbye]

I don't know if it counts as something no one seems to mind that much about, but I really hated the N64 expansion pak. I still remember getting Majoras Mask for christmas, getting home to plug it in, and being greeted with a "you need the expansion pak" screen. Weeks later I found it in a store, and I had to spend all my birthday+christmas money on it just to play Majoras Mask. Never did get another game that needed it.
I know that for many people it wasn't much of a problem, as it came free with Donkey Kong 64. But I didn't know that at the time, nor did I ever get DK64.

Also, it might seem weird, but I really hated that the N64 didn't come with a RF adapter. Many times did I come across a TV I couldn't plug my N64 into, and the RF adapters were expensive.
This might be largely my fault since I had long since lost the SCART adapter that came with the N64. A lot of TVs had SCART in but no composite in. I didn't know you could just walk into any electronics store and buy a SCART adapter. I thought it had to be made specifically for the N64.

Buying a memory card, I guess. For the longest time, I couldn't save my game at all on my PS2 because I didn't have a Memory Card. It took a while before my parents decided to buy me one.

Oh god, I remember playing through the first couple of hours of Final Fantasy 7 so many times, because dad hadn't bothered to get a PS1 memory card for his PS2.
And you know RPGs aren't exactly the type of game that are still fun to play when you can't save.

suits the title perfectly XD i never played a game more than 2 players, and i didn't mind at all only have 2 ports

my gbc led would really dim when the battery was running low
however i believe this only worked with non rechargeable batteries, devices usually have a hard time figuring out rechargeable batteries charge due to the way they work, interesting article here, can't say for sure if its totally accurate\correct cuz i ain't technician: https://michaelbluejay.com/batteries/rechargeable.html

btw to the topic
what i didn't enjoyed about old consoles, the fact you needed a separate link cable not supplied when you purchased the game boy :C
my parents where "video games are evil, you shouldn't play with theese machines" kind of parents, therefore, i only got the link cable plenty of years later, and so many ocasions i wish someone in the school had the cable

I did hate that as well. I did eventually get a GB/GBC link cable but at that point I wasn't really playing the GB(C) Pokemon games anymore and didn't really have any other games with multiplayer, at least not that other people owned, so it didn't matter, never got one for GBA though.
Good thing GBC had an IR transmitter, at least you could do some basic multiplayer stuff with that.

The dreamcast controller looks like a boat! There is a reason why it IS ONE IN SONIC RACING TRANSFORMED! Why the wire comes out the bottom and has to curve around to the top!

Why did we need memory packs on nintendo 64 when the cart saves out games in the first place? What kind of memory card is that good for.

Some games used it for extra features that you couldn't get otherwise. Like sharing data between different cartridges, or simply for extra data that wouldn't fit on the cartridge. Like the ghost saves in Mario Kart.
I did come across some games that needed the memory pak just to save at all. Snowboard Kids was one of them. That game also used rumble pak so you had to be swapping the paks constantly if you wanted rumble.
Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon was another. Both great games.
But I think they mainly omitted built in save support to save money, there's nothing really that complex about either of them that would require more save space than could be included on a cart. Snowboard Kids saves very little data since it's basically just unlocked/completed stages, characters, snowboards and some high scores. And money.
Mystical Ninja does save a lot more data, but still it's no more complex than a game like Zelda OoT/MM. It only needs to save completion of the various objectives, unlocked characters, and inventory contents/money.
On that topic, Rare's reasoning for why Stop 'n' Swop was dropped was because it would be near impossible to perform the cartridge swap trick. But didn't they ever think to store the S'n'S data on a memory pak? That would have solved the issue completely.

 

[Mikemk]

Games with less save files than you have siblings.

Buying a memory card, I guess. For the longest time, I couldn't save my game at all on my PS2 because I didn't have a Memory Card. It took a while before my parents decided to buy me one.

Also, memory cards dying or being corrupted.

 

[FAST6191]

IIRC, Sonic Adventure was actually pretty well-received when it first released. People were impressed by, funnily enough, the game's graphics. There were a few reviews that did call out the game for being nothing but graphics with a lack of deep gameplay to back it up, though.

As the game aged and technology got better, however, people began to realize how buggy and patched together it was, and the game got really polarizing from that point forward. Some like it and call it the best game in the series, while others have a very strong distaste for it and mark it as the beginning of Sonic's decline. There's no definite, concrete general opinion on the game (which can be seen as sort of an analogy for Sonic in general).

I am willing to concede that I might have found myself in an echo chamber but teletext games pages did not care for it, don't think I saw a paper article liking it, all the online sites I had at the time did not care for it and the playground also was like "this shit ain't Sonic". It was not quite what we would later see for 2006 but I can't get to well-received. In the time since I had equally not met anybody singing its praises. Then all of a sudden there were people claiming it was great and I found that massively jarring.

1: Developers don't make 4 player game modes because they require a peripheral and that would fragment the userbase.
2: People don't buy the peripheral because not a lot of game use it.
3: Repeat.

I can see that applying, and indeed would say the same myself, in the case of processing expansions (memory, CPU, extra CD drive and what have you) but for something you could almost enact in software as a throwaway mode I still struggle.

Granted for the PS1 then "lack of memory issues" comes up in every discussion I see on it so I guess that could factor into it.