Ignoring the lack of updates if the game is buggy, games back then were also more focused on quality and make gamers replay the game with unlockable features based on skills, not money. I can’t count the number of times I played Metal Gear Solid games over and over to unlock new features playing the hardest difficulty and with handicap features, and also to find Easter eggs. Speaking of Easter eggs, you’d lose a number of hours exploring every nook and cranny finding them!
Games were definitely buggy and I honestly think people forget how much better the quality is nowadays.
I also think there is something to it just being the 90s or so and not having much choice. If you only have one game to play then of course you’re going to replay it to death. If I have a steam library of 1000 games then I’m much less likely to.
A lot of this is just nostalgia for the past and the environment as opposed to games being any better.
There’s also the SNL effect. Everyone remembers the great games like Mario. Nobody remembers World Games.
World Games was so good they made a spoof sequel of sorts called caveman games. A lot of people remember world games, it was a well received game. You had so many actually forgettable garbage games to choose from…
But if he had to go with a forgettable game he wouldn’t have remembered it.
I’m unfamiliar with that game. Was World Games buggy or just bad? The quality the OP referred to was bugs, not gameplay.
Even the worst AAA game today has better game play than anything from 30 years ago. It’s the nature of extreme complexity that allowing players freedom makes complete debugging impossible.
Hehe. World Games was an Olympic event type of game for the NES and other systems back in the late 80’s.
It was actually a well reviewed and enjoyed game, so I’m not sure why he decided to use it as an example when there were so many other actually bad games back then. It also caused a “spoof” game to be made on the NES called “Caveman games”, which did a similar game style, but set in caveman times with caveman events. I preferred caveman games as a kid, and still do. Racing against a friend on who can rub sticks together and blow on the smoke to make fire first is still a blast. So is beating the other guy with a caveman club. Good times.
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They weren’t as buggy. People making excuses classify exploits as bugs ignoring that modern games have more bugs and exploits.
I played Atari 2600 games like space invaders, adventure, and pitfall for thousands of hours without ever running into a bug. The only game with an exploit was Combat where you could put your tank muzzle into a corner and make it loop across the map. But both players could do it.
some games would be unplayable without hand-patching the code that you’d find in a magazine.
I don’t agree with that first point at all. Games were not all that buggy, It was orders of magnitude better than it is now.
I think it’s because people only remember the good games and not the stinkers.
I played a lot of shit games I can’t recall because I played for 30 minutes max. There was one game I never passed the first level as I couldn’t figure out what to do, I think something to do with jelly beans and a blob. How is that good gameplay lol?
But of course myself and others can tell you about the games we played for hours like Super Mario Bros which didn’t really have bugs and were good.
The difference is back in the day the great games were the highly advertised “big ones” and the “stinkers” usually fell flat. Now you have a mountain of AAA stinkers and have to go scavenging for indie gems.
Not sure that’s right - before the internet I had no clue what was supposedly good or not. I’d rent games from blockbuster and just try them one by one. Lots of shitty games and I had no idea that Mario or sonic or anything was meant to be good.
Now it’s a lot easier just based on metacritic or steam reviews to figure out if something is good or not.
Well yes, maybe going that far back it was kind of a shot in the dark, but the late ‘90 to early ‘10 period was a time where you had internet (or at least tv/magazines) to know which games were “popular”, most of those were actually well done, and you’d rarely have an AAA title launch as a bugridden mess.
Reviews are also a hit-or-miss because they’re highly subjective. The Steam review system sucks as well, being only positive/negative and with troll reviews always at the top.
A boy and his blob! That was a great game! But it did not hold your hand at all, you had to figure out what every different jerky bean did to your blob. It was a good enough game that there was a modern remake I think it’s on Nintendo virtual console.
But yeah, that was a legitimately hard game for a kid. And with nothing, it wasn’t buggy, the gameplay was just different from anything else people were familiar with and it didn’t explain itself.
Nah, in the 80s we had hundreds probably thousands of games for the commodore 64 and later the amiga 500, all of them pirated. The piracy scene was huge, and often the games were free as we just copied them from friends
I’ve grown up with a PS1 and a handful of pc games, and I don’t remember any of them being any more bugged than modern gaming. The only exception being Digimon World 1, a notoriously buggy game (but to be fair, half of those bugs were introduced by the inept translation’s team).
I know people nowadays know and use a bunch of glitches for speedruns and challenge runs (out-of-bounds glitches being the norm for such runs), but rarely, if ever, those glitches could be accessed by playing through the game normally, to the point that I don’t remember finding any game breaking bug in any of the games I played in my infancy (barring the aforementioned Digimon World).