What do you miss most about old school gaming?

Believing that if I blew on the cart enough times, the game would start working again.

Good platforming games and Turn Based RPG's with ACTUAL storyline. Oh and games having more than 8 hours of game play. They used to have 40+ on average.

split screen multiplayer with my family and having games that I could just play for months on end even if it was just a single player game (yes there are games that you can do that with now, but none of them have been able to keep me invested for more than a week besides Persona 4.)

@EvilNiGHTS said:

The magazines?

Totally. I miss CGW.

How about the smell of an Atari 2600 cartridge? Even better - the smell of a new, freshly opened Atari2600 cartridge.

What I miss the most is my old self - now I just got weak (in videogame playing terms). I always played games on the hardest difficulty (like the first God Of War on God mode) and I was happy when games were long. These days I find myself playing on normal most of the time and often I want a game to be shorter (which is a flaw of modern game design also - for example Syndicate, allready a short game, but there is just nothing to it, you shoot guys and story is super weak).

This also leads to better appriciation of indie or in general "smaller" games, Super Meat Boy, Bastion, Gemini Rue and so on.

And the worst thing is I am used to play games Vinny-style: explore a lot, spend time on side missions etc., often leading to me burning out and just not finishing a game at all (Skyrim - 80hrs of side quests and exploration, never seen the ending of the main quest).

@Captain_Felafel said:

The ability to just jump in and start playing. Perhaps nostalgia and age has caused me to forget, but modern games have so much more up front that you have to wade through before getting to the real 'meat' of the game. Whether it's an unnecessary tutorial segment for a game you thoroughly know how to play, or a major piece of story standing in the way of actually playing, I just feel like the time from menu screen to playing the game proper was a lot less than it is now.

I also really miss that most games were just gameplay. So many games today, for better or worse, feel the need to tell a story, and while that's fine, sometimes you just want to play a game, not watch/listen to one. It's becoming increasingly rarer to find a game that is 100% gameplay.

I TOTALLY agree.

The biggest problem I have with this is that it violates even the most basic rules of storytelling and presentation.

If you study theatre, they'll always tell you to start on a high note. Even if your line is a low note, you start it high and go low in order to command attention and pull people in. If you study writing, they always tell you to start at the most interesting moment. You have to command attention to explain to your reader why they should be wasting time reading your book. If you study oral communication, they alwasy tell you to start with something to command attention. A story or a joke. Something to command attention and pull people in.

Yet many modern videogames start with the most boring of tutorials and sometimes up to an hour of exposition before they even let you THINK about having any fun. It's RIDICULOUS to ask someone to sit for a whole movie's worth of time before you even START to entertain them.

I'll be honest and say I don't really miss anything about "classic" gaming. I'm not a very nostalgic person by nature, but I also see a trend in this thread of people saying that they hate games with excessive tutorials and miss the days of games just leaving you to figure out their systems. That never applied to me; I tended to find games very frustrating when I actually tried to beat them, so a lot of games I just got pleasure out of wandering around the game world aimlessly, interacting with everyone, or role-playing as an everyday person, or completing side-quests. I loved Ocarina of Time as a kid, but I never beat it honestly because I didn't like the dungeon puzzles so I used a guide; I liked Majora's Mask more partly because it gave you more to do outside of the dungeons.

Maybe this is indicative of the games I played as a kid - first console was the Sega Mega Drive, but my favourite console from my youth was the N64. Maybe missing out on most of the 8 and 16-bit eras explains why I don't feel the same way as many people in this thread. Or maybe it's just how I was as a child that dictated how I interacted with games. Anyway, I think tutorials are great for games, and I can't recall playing a game in recent memory that had an egregiously long tutorial section. I played my first 3 hours of XCOM: EU last night and thought the tutorials were an excellent introduction to the systems in play.

I feel like getting older doesn't diminish your ability to appreciate media - it heightens it. I can appreciate game design, narrative, systems, art etc. much more now I have an adult brain that isn't just focused on the graphics and the patterns and flashing lights - I do have Asperger's syndrome and ADHD, so maybe I shouldn't be surprised by this. Approaching things in a more "mature sense" - I guess you could say academic or analytic sense - doesn't mean that nothing is fun and everything is serious; if anything, it makes you appreciate the goofiness more. Most of the games I would consider to be among my all-time favourite are games that have come out in the last six years. Same goes with films; none of the films I loved as a kid mean as much to me as films I saw as a teenager or adult. Same with albums and books.

@Aetheldod said:

@Wesker411 said:

Game developers not worrying about pleasing the masses, *cough* RE6 *cough*.

I too miss having cheat codes. I still remember playing the original ps1 grand theft autos with all of he cheat codes on. Lately though my nostalgia for the genesis has grown. I feel like box art back then was a lot better or cheesier in a good way. As others have mentioned when the Internet was just starting it was great not knowing about games as much. Each time was sort of a gamble when you would go to rent one and them possibly buy it later.

@mordukai said:

With internet still on dialup

thats considered old school now? thats like playstation... old school i thought was like nes. jesus i must be getting old or something.

@tunaburn: Shit...now my Atari 2600 comment in this thread is making me feel super old.

Glad I held back and didn't spew my standard pinball arcade type of response.

I miss when games were released and what you bought is what the games always was. No patches or DLC. Those things can be good but I like the idea of a game never changing. You can be sure that when you go back to play Super Mario World or Sonic 2 they are as you remember them. By the time the games of this generation are considered classes going back to them will not be the same. Due to the online being down, not being able to buy DLC, etc.

I know it's not really old school, but I missed the golden days of xbox live on the original xbox and even the beginning of xbox live on the 360. I think the only game that can compare to the craziness of online battlefield 2 and halo 2 would be Halo 3 custom matches.

I also miss all the old school platformers that were on the PS1 like Spyro and Crash Bandicoot. Now it seems they're more marketed to little kids and thats no bueno....

I don't miss anything about gaming's past. It was a fine time, sure. Lots of awesome memories that I can relive whenever I want, without having to renounce to today's games. So, yeah.

Also, I'm surprised it took five pages to get someone complaining about Achievements and DLC. You know, those completely optional stuff you are totally free not to pursue if you don't want to.

Cheats, secrets, difficulty, and the mystery around games.

the fact that me and my friends would all be in the same place at the same time playing computer for hours on end and justifying the hole thing by saying we are socialising with each other none of this online bull we have today

I miss a game about kung-fu.
_______

red

The lack of community. Ahem.

Back in my innocent days when I was still a young girl in love with SNES JRPGs, I could freely enjoy games without all those internet reviews and forums tearing them apart. The ME3-ending and RE6 riots are ridiculous. I'm totally pro freedom of speech but those incidents were way overblown.

It always happens in threads like this, and sure enough, it's happening here too. What people miss about the past isn't really the actual elements of the past; it's the feeling of being in the past. It's the feeling you have when you're a kid and you don't understand the limits of the world yet, so the world seems limitless. It has nothing to do with how the world actually is, and is all in how you perceive it.

I don't miss anything about old school gaming. I miss things about being young, but I fully recognize that being older is amazing in so many ways that it easily outweighs the benefits of youth. Instead of having moments of wonder thrust upon me, I get to work for them and seek them out and create them for myself. Things are better today.

@kgb0515 said:

I remember reading in some magazine that there was a way to wall jump onto the top of the castle in Super Mario 64 before collecting enough stars to open the cannon outside. I tried to get up there for hours before I decided it was BS.

It's interesting that you use that example, because you can totally wall jump onto the top of the castle in Super Mario 64.

Also, @JazGalaxy, I'd be curious to hear what in your opinion is the "proper" way to play Earthworm Jim. I've played it, and it's nothing more than an average platform shooter with interesting art and a brashly sophomoric sense of humor.

Depth of mechanics and a healthy plurality of genres.

@Sooty: So how about just no online component? That's what I miss most.

ILOVEPINKACIDBOOTS

I miss the time to play them... Sigh.

Just getting the full game and not worrying about pre-order items, DLC etc.

I could do without pedantry or condescension in some of the more mainstream and modern stuff I've played. Not necessarily tutorials (which are practically necessary in games with a lot of systems and it sucks when older games don't explain anything), but the overwhelming feeling like I am being treated like a moron and have to be introduced to gameplay concepts at a lethargic pace. If you can't explain your gameplay systems to me in less than an hour then you're doing it wrong. Zelda is probably a good example of this, as each main console iteration has had a progressively longer introduction segment than its predecessor before you get to the actual game. Kokiri Forest in Ocarina of Time tells you most of the concepts of the game and then immediately puts you into a real dungeon. Not hard.

Though, if we want to start waxing all nostalgic, I could talk about how awesome split screen gaming was or how much I miss being mystified by video games before the internet ruined everything. But I'd probably be lying. The N64 isn't as good as I remember it, sadly.

@isomeri said:

Couch multiplayer.

Yes.

Skippable logos.

the Infinity Engine.

@M_Shini said:

ILOVEPINKACIDBOOTS

Alien Trilogy was a great game.

I miss games being massively replayable. I still go back and play older Final Fantasy games and I've probably beaten RE2 easily 50 times and 3 about 30-40. All trying to just shave a few minutes off my clear time or nowadays just to have a nostalgic afternoon. Same with MGS1.

15 years from now I'm not going to dust off a copy of Gears of War or something like that. Its unlikely if any console today will survive that long let alone whatever modern consoles are then will even be able to play older games since that is apparently a functionality of the devil. The speed run has all but disappeared. Either a games campaign is a one and done deal or it is so long that there is no point. Most games are such guided experiences now (not linear but paced) that it is actually nigh impossible to work against the flow of the gameplay. Scripted events are the soup du jour in every game now.