I might have just turned to dust and blown away in the wind reading this!
Seriously though, it’s nice how just simple they are. Even times I’ve fired up my PS3 it’s got just a little bit of friction in ways you don’t expect there to be. The trade off for all that simplicity though is you get what’s on the disc/cartridge and that is it. No patches, no DLC or expansions, and you lose/break/give away that disc you’re out of luck. It’s weird even now feeling like those games could be “lesser versions” because they can’t be updated in any way, but as a kid at the time that wasn’t even an expectation.
Probably the hardest thing at this point is remembering you need that ADC to connect it to a modern TV!
Prior to dlc, games were released in what was considered a finished state though. Today games are released in effectively beta stages and some effectively alpha. They may claim to be finished but many are not.
Prior to dlc, games were released in what was considered a finished state though.
Not really. Games were updated back then, too, it just meant the physical copy someone bought later was more up-to-date than the physical copy someone got earlier. Usually it was just bugfixes but a more visible example that’s pretty well known is Ocarina of Time’s 1.2 release that censored blood by turning it green and removed an Islamic prayer sample from a piece of its background music.
And there were absolutely games came out with unforgivable major bugs back in the day, a top-of-my-head example is that Battletoads on the NES actually can’t be beaten in two player mode because after a while the controls will just stop responding. Admittedly it was less common then in major releases than it is today but that’s less because patches exist and more because new games are more complex than old games so there are more opportunities per game for something to go catastrophically wrong.
The ability to patch games that have already been released really is only a good thing.
But these “incomplete” releases are often still much more game than a finished ps2 game. And we don’t really know how finished the devs considered their games at the time. We know based on found content that many of our “finished” classics had cut and canceled content that could have been completed and released/activated on the funds from initial sales if patching had been a technological possibility. They have bugs and glitches that are just part of the game because they couldn’t be fixed after release. There are old games that are or can be legitimately impossible to complete on certain platforms because they have a glitch or potential hard lock if you make certain choices. And once printed they were permanently broken games. Games have been coming out incomplete for a long time. At least now they can be fixed.
I think it’s intent. Many games are apparently rushed to release while knowingly unfinished as a money grab, and uses the paying customer base as beta testers. My opinion is that I don’t like that trend and loved popping in that Nintendo cartridge knowing I had a complete game.
I play MMORPG s and have for more than 20 years. I’m not stuck in the past or anything, but I do believe what I’m saying and I do not like the trend.
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I might have just turned to dust and blown away in the wind reading this!
Seriously though, it’s nice how just simple they are. Even times I’ve fired up my PS3 it’s got just a little bit of friction in ways you don’t expect there to be. The trade off for all that simplicity though is you get what’s on the disc/cartridge and that is it. No patches, no DLC or expansions, and you lose/break/give away that disc you’re out of luck. It’s weird even now feeling like those games could be “lesser versions” because they can’t be updated in any way, but as a kid at the time that wasn’t even an expectation.
Probably the hardest thing at this point is remembering you need that ADC to connect it to a modern TV!
Prior to dlc, games were released in what was considered a finished state though. Today games are released in effectively beta stages and some effectively alpha. They may claim to be finished but many are not.
Not really. Games were updated back then, too, it just meant the physical copy someone bought later was more up-to-date than the physical copy someone got earlier. Usually it was just bugfixes but a more visible example that’s pretty well known is Ocarina of Time’s 1.2 release that censored blood by turning it green and removed an Islamic prayer sample from a piece of its background music.
And there were absolutely games came out with unforgivable major bugs back in the day, a top-of-my-head example is that Battletoads on the NES actually can’t be beaten in two player mode because after a while the controls will just stop responding. Admittedly it was less common then in major releases than it is today but that’s less because patches exist and more because new games are more complex than old games so there are more opportunities per game for something to go catastrophically wrong.
The ability to patch games that have already been released really is only a good thing.
But these “incomplete” releases are often still much more game than a finished ps2 game. And we don’t really know how finished the devs considered their games at the time. We know based on found content that many of our “finished” classics had cut and canceled content that could have been completed and released/activated on the funds from initial sales if patching had been a technological possibility. They have bugs and glitches that are just part of the game because they couldn’t be fixed after release. There are old games that are or can be legitimately impossible to complete on certain platforms because they have a glitch or potential hard lock if you make certain choices. And once printed they were permanently broken games. Games have been coming out incomplete for a long time. At least now they can be fixed.
I think it’s intent. Many games are apparently rushed to release while knowingly unfinished as a money grab, and uses the paying customer base as beta testers. My opinion is that I don’t like that trend and loved popping in that Nintendo cartridge knowing I had a complete game.
I play MMORPG s and have for more than 20 years. I’m not stuck in the past or anything, but I do believe what I’m saying and I do not like the trend.