What do we take granted in gaming or tech that we did never before?

[H1B1Esquire]

Do you know somewhere I can still get good 4 player local games?

1998. Still working on the time machine, though.

 

[The Real Jdbye]

People take it for granted that games should last for tens to hundreds of hours, have complex plot and advanced graphics.
Those are the main things that changed between back then and now.

And then people hate on anything 2D or retro looking as being lazy or trying to appeal to nostalgia. Pixelart can be visually appealing but some people don't seem to understand that.

 

[Deleted-355425]

HDMI

 

[VinsCool]

An internet connection.
A thing we never had in the pre 2000 era, but now is taken as granted, and sometimes required.

 

[Nerdtendo]

Wireless controllers. Agewise, I'm at sort of a midpoint between old a modern. My first console was GC and DS Lite. I can still remember getting cords tangled and yanked out when trying to play with my family. When I saw my friends Xbox 360 I was shocked.

 

[wormdood]

system home menus . . . back in the day those things were not things we had to power down the console in order to change the game

 

[Ryccardo]

How could you even sell a console without having a memory card?

Oh, my second PS1 game was Hot Wheels Turbo Racing. The first choice you had when loading it was, more or less:

LANGUAGE:
ENGLISH
FRANCAIS
DEUTSCH

Now, I didn't know any of the three (nor do menus in this game have distinguishable question and choices) but hey, pressing X made it go away, ayyyy!
Next up:

CHECKING FOR
MEMORY CARD(S)
DO NOT ADD OR REMOVE
A MEMORY CARD AT THIS POINT

VALID MEMORY CARD
NOT FOUND
RETRY
CONTINUE

Retry of course meaning "detect again" and Continue "skip", but the choice was not obvious (and not in the manual), my first achievement was getting the game to run

Luckily that game also had password saves, but "no option to type them in" and neither for memory card saves (many years later I figured you had to go to the menu item for setting players' names and press left or right on it, indeed it has tiny arrows to the side but that's all)

A week later I went with my dad to the supermarket to buy one. Hmmm, X-Technologies 8 Mega must be better than Sony Memory Card 1 Mega, right?
It was one of those 8-partition cards with a single digit display to indicate which one was active; too bad I didn't know how to change them either, just that they sometimes switched randomly...

(Around 2005, when two of those crapped out, we bought one of the last 3rd party 1Mb cards on the market and it's still kicking strong)


(Back on main topic)

Game boxes and manuals translated by the national distributors, especially the ones for third-world countries like the Portuguese-language ones, Scandinavian ones, or Italy - you should see the Game Boy Camera one, as Google probably does a better job nowadays!

Of course nowadays there rarely is a real manual anymore, probably having realized people at Gamefaqs will write a much more comprehensive one for free - while the official guides are more notable for artwork rather than correct facts (actually, are either of those still themselves popular? Last time I had to go there it hadn't been 4 years since Ceejus quit, and other merchandising more than replaced the book section at Gamestop - though I saw many guides for sale in the game section of Yodobashi Camera)

Do you know somewhere I can still get good 4 player local games?

Wii U eShop or "alternatives"?

I guess. I played 3-player MK8 only one day, on a TV too small to be enjoyable. Even in the last decade (featuring PS1/Wii/DS all-nighters interrupted only by breaks for dinner and insane firework experiments, or at the peak of the Wii backup loader scene, with me and my friends in our teens and more than happy to wake up in the summer at 8 AM to meet at my house and make chaos with WarioWare), I found local multiplayer to be a rare event.

Even at the age where you would never be questioned for playing GBA/DS in public, the format was "X sits in the front, everyone else looks from the shoulders" and no gearwanker existed to debate TN or IPS in the only scenario where it could have mattered

 

[Taleweaver]

Debatable.

Of course. Hence the "believe it or not". :-)

 

[FAST6191]

People take it for granted that games should last for tens to hundreds of hours, have complex plot and advanced graphics.
Those are the main things that changed between back then and now.

And then people hate on anything 2D or retro looking as being lazy or trying to appeal to nostalgia. Pixelart can be visually appealing but some people don't seem to understand that.

I have my problems with the immediate dismissal set but so much pixel art seems to be created by people that don't understand pixel art and just treat it as a scaled down version of regular 2d art. I might even go so far as to say it is something of a lost art.

ignore the "and advanced graphics" (though technically even then) and you just described the jump from the pre NES stuff to the NES. Equally if "should last" is able to include replayability then definitely for a lot of NES games.

HDMI

Did you have much trouble with video standard before?
Most things I met were RF or component/scart. All things available on most TVs I had, and if not that then the video player underneath it usually managed.

 

[Tom Bombadildo]

Going PC-wise here, automated driver installation. I've been messing around with a Toshiba Satellite 1625CDT (which is a 1999/2000 era laptop) for DOS/Win98 "original hardware" gaming, so I've been feeling the pain of finding drivers for things that you just don't have to find yourself these days. USB Mass Storage? Gotta download it. Wireless USB mouse/keyboard? Gotta find proper drivers for that USB dongle, or you're not gonna get stable usage. USB controller? Drivers. Various internet interfaces? This shit ain't auto-detected and downloaded anymore, you need them drivers.

Along with this, auto-detected settings for games. PC hardware wasn't as standardized as it is today, so back in these days you have to figure out game settings for yourself. You needed to know what sound device you had (and if it was some janky third party thing, if it were compatible with SoundBlaster or Adlib or Waveblaster or general MIDI) along with what IRQ you could use and your DMA channel, and graphical settings were usually along the lines of "low, medium, high" and you simply had to test each one to find your sweet spot. If you had a joystick, you had to go through similar pains for some games to make sure they worked properly. And if you didn't set it up properly, you'd have to exit the game and go through the setup again and try and get it right, or live without sound effects or music or proper controls. These days, at worst you're just going to have to change graphical settings, and most of the time (with more modern games anyways) they're already preset to what is perfect for your machine. Controls are no problem, since Xinput became the defacto standard and there are programs like DS4Windows/BetterDS3 for Sony controllers and x360ce if your controller of choice doesn't happen to already support Xinput anyways.

--------------------- MERGED ---------------------------

Did you have much trouble with video standard before?
Most things I met were RF or component/scart. All things available on most TVs I had, and if not that then the video player underneath it usually managed.

Generally speaking I think they were mainly referring to the way old consoles all used their own connectors on the console itself. Besides the NES, Nintendo basically kept the same "rectangle with a line on top" connector for their consoles from SNES->GC years, and Sony used their own proprietary AV thing on the PS1-PS3, Microsoft had the fatty one for the OG Xbox and 360. They never used just one standardized port on their consoles, whereas now everything just uses HDMI so you don't need to constantly swap video cables between consoles.

 

[330]

Most things I met were RF or component/scart. All things available on most TVs I had, and if not that then the video player underneath it usually managed.

I remember getting shocked from scart plugs when I was a kid. Never had an issue with hdmi/vga.

 

[FAST6191]

That makes sense. Around here many were less cables and more boxes you plugged a RF lead into and the leads treated much like controllers -- you aren't playing without one so keep it safe. Not to mention sega had bog standard RF and I was more of a sega boy.

 

[SuzieJoeBob]

How about the ability to save in games at all? Many adults I know remember when the original NES came out and their biggest upset was that there was no ability to save where they were without having to leave the console on 24/7.

 

[Tom Bombadildo]

How about the ability to save in games at all? Many adults I know remember when the original NES came out and their biggest upset was that there was no ability to save where they were without having to leave the console on 24/7.

It's already been mentioned, but I also feel like some people kinda forget that a lot of NES games had password systems in place instead of saves. Sure, there were a fair few games you actually had to leave on 24/7 to continue playing where you left off, but there were hundreds of games that just used a password after you beat each level if you wanted to continue later.

 

[gnmmarechal]

I remember getting shocked from scart plugs when I was a kid. Never had an issue with hdmi/vga.

I was shocked by an HDMI cable a while back. :'(

 

[Flame]

How about the ability to save in games at all? Many adults I know remember when the original NES came out and their biggest upset was that there was no ability to save where they were without having to leave the console on 24/7.

i remember as a kid many moons ago if i was home during the weekend, i would need to start Sonic on my Sega Mega drive from start every single time....... my friend brought SNES i brought Mega drive, to this day he still takes the piss out of me for this the bastard.


i mean Mega drive is a great console but it was no SNES!

 

[Deleted User]

Looking back, I think I'm still the most amazed by emulation. It just seems incredible to me that these systems and their games have transcended the physical realm (so to speak), and can be played on any sufficiently powerful computer. I use my cloud drive to sync my saves between my phone and my computer. The fact that I can transfer the save on my DS to my computer, to my phone, back to my computer, to another phone, then back to my computer and back into the original cartridge is still amazing to me. Stuff like save states and ROM hacks only make it even cooler.

I can't say I'm that big of a fan of the internet and gaming though. While an hour or two in TF2 or Rocket League can be pretty fun, more often than not, I find myself ignoring the online scoreboards and rankings and just playing single-player games. Even if I were to play multiplayer games, I feel like I would enjoy it more in person with the people I were to be playing with. I don't know, I have some rather solitary tendencies.

People take it for granted that games should last for tens to hundreds of hours, have complex plot and advanced graphics.
Those are the main things that changed between back then and now.

And then people hate on anything 2D or retro looking as being lazy or trying to appeal to nostalgia. Pixelart can be visually appealing but some people don't seem to understand that.

The problem is that most developers fail to have a general knowledge of the color or sprite limitations that old systems like the SNES and Sega Genesis used. An uncomfortable number of developers seem content to draw an 8x8 sprite then blow said sprite up to four times its normal size, even taking into account the supposed base resolution the game is supposed to be running at.

That being said, there are games out there that do pixel art right. Sonic Mania and Shovel Knight are two examples that come to my head. But, sadly, not all developers choose to devote this much attention to their graphics. This is forgivable (considering time restraints and other factors) if the gameplay makes up for it, but, sadly, a lot of games don't knock it out of the park there either.

i remember as a kid many moons ago if i was home during the weekend, i would need to start Sonic on my Sega Mega drive from start every single time....... my friend brought SNES i brought Mega drive, to this day he still takes the piss out of me for this the bastard.

I mean, there is Sonic 3's save function, but 1 and 2 didn't have that, so yeah. While the SNES was a great system, SNES elitists just annoy the shit out of me, especially considering I was more of a SEGA kid anyways. Don't dwell on it too much, your system had the better mascot platformer series, imo.

But, going back into what I was saying, the fact that, with save states, we can literally add save functionality to games that didn't have it is still amazing, in my eyes.

 

[Taleweaver]

-Game reviews. There used to be a time where all you had were biassed magazines (ahem...nintendo power) or the box itself to sell you on a game. Nowadays, you can quickly see more opinions from people with similar game tastes than you can throw a stick at.
-Games being patched and updated after release. Granted, I can only recall a few games with really game-breaking bugs, but if you had them they just stayed. Devs didn't always support their games after they were shipped. Go back long enough and they didn't even have the means to fix it in the first place.

 

[Deleted User]

Tilt sensors. Gyro sensors. Camera. Browser.
I dont like xb controllers more then mouse/keyboard so I dont really use them... I know many who wont put them on their lists.
Very, very short loading times. If you have the right equipement, sometimes you dont have the time to read the loading screen on some games. I used to go drink, eat and do stuff while my pc was starting. Nowdays I am angry if it doesnt work 5 seconds after I press the button.
For me- thinkpad's red knob thing on laptops

Plug n play
Online all in one stores on pc
Voice chat built into the game
Lets play on yt
Cross platform. Ah wait
Usb here, usb there, usb everywhere
(Almost) total lack of splitscreen
Indies being popular (debateable)
All consoles really being the same as each other and as the pc
Adults who play on their mobile dont get looks
Minecraft on a toaster or washing machine
Assuming discounts on a game a few months after release

(Thinking about other things...)

 

[ry755]

Pretty much everything. Because now-days if it doesn't run the latest Call of Duty or whatever at 60 fps then it's automatically regarded as trash. Personally I like the older tech better. I've got a small collection of old Macintoshes that I like to mess around with now and then.