I just got an Apple TV and I’ve been struggling through the setup. Connecting all the accounts, logging into everything and updating everything. I would think by now there would be some way to link accounts and have things manage themselves better.
Every now and then I remember how simple things felt back then. The internet was new and exciting, we didn’t even have cell phones yet. Technology was built with innovation. In some ways we’ve fallen a long way from those days.
It depends on the apps. Stuff that takes a username and password isn’t really bad on the Apple TV if you have passwords saved.
The thing that gets me is fucking half assed QR codes. A QR code is a quick, easy solution when everyone has their phone. But there’s absolutely zero reason to use a QR code on the TV, then to still make me manually enter your pairing code. Just making the link complete is so much less than trivial that not including it is very obviously intentionally annoying.
The PS1 even boots straight into the game, the PS2 boots into a small menu. I feel like there was a way to have it skip the menu though but I don’t remember. …But hey, you’ve got one in front of you lol.
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.
Hrrrgghhh routers! The last two I’ve dealt with were a Netgear and an ASUS and… well, at least the ASUS got out of my way relatively quickly? SSH’d in and crammed it full of OpenWRT 😅Did the same to the Netgear but that one fought so hard to force me into using some admin-through-their-website kind of horsecrap that I hate. All’ the docs I wanted/needed were lies, BS, broken links, contradictory… it was a proper mess. I don’t want a singing, dancing bird-robot tweeting all night (to some corp’s servers), just gimme a damn router that’s mine!
… I may be a little bit old-headed about some tech things <.< I guess things are moving on to “your own hardware as a service” now :-\
For me it was the Xfinity router. I knew I shouldn’t have bought one and should have gone for a third party one, but I did it anyway because it was cheaper when I was setting up my Internet plan.
Stupid thing forces you to download an app to get it to work and sign in. Apparently if you buy any other third party combination modem and router, you just log into a default web page and sign in with default credentials. But no, for the Xfinity one you need to connect on the app and let it search over 5G for the thing, which took ages. There were multiple times where I set it down to load, came back, and the app said it failed to find it. When the router was sitting within inches of my phone
So this is what being old feels like. I don’t like it. But seriously that’s the benefit of stuff not automatically having to connect to the internet and download a bunch of updates, you just plug it in and you’re good to go. I mean stuff like updates and patches are extremely convenient, but it is nice to just put a disc in a console and have it work without having to sit through a download. PS2 is a great console and one of the last where you could just plug and play without having to deal with online accounts, updating apps, and all the stuff that goes along with modern consoles.
I’m about as old as OP, but every time I remember that my generation grew up on mostly 360/PS3 it reminds me that I was weird, my dad got an Original Xbox when it came out, which was the year I was born, and even though we had a Wii, I think we actually played games on OG Xbox more (we relied on the Wii to access the internet through neighbors’ unprotected Wi-Fi for a while though.)
They actually didn’t come with memory cards. Sony back then was just as money hungry as they are now. You had to buy them separately. They were around $20 or $25 for a Sony branded one, but you could get 3rd party ones for cheaper.
I believe the consoles came with 2 memory cards back when they were released in 2000.
Oh no, they did not my friend. I’m just a bit older than you so I remember when my family got our PS2. They were an optional accessory. Yes, it was optional to be able to save your game.
Edit: Also, my older brother and I (faithful younger sibling backup) convinced our father to get one soon after launch, as it was the cheapest DVD player available when it released, at least here in Australia.
Yeah, I figured OP meant they didn’t play them yet because they didn’t want to get invested and not be able to save. Not because they wouldn’t actually work.
Edit: I did not see their comment below until I after I posted this.
I remember when I first got mine, I played like 8 hours of MGS2 before I realized I forgot to buy memory cards. So I had to leave the system running overnight until I could go out and get 1.
I have been using computers and tech since I was super little, and I’ve actually noticed a trend toward simplification over time. I remember just to play dos games with sound you had to configure the sound card every time to use the correct channels and IRQ and what not… Now a days, everything is a simple button press to install and get going or plug n play.
The main difference between the setup of a PS2 and a PS5 is the internet stuff; the PS5 has more things to configure, but it’s not particularly difficult to do (updates are time consuming tho). But if you had the modem/tried to play online with the PS2, the internet setup is more complicated than the PS5’s since it requires manually forwarding ports on your router.
I mean you’re probably older than me but I’d say the process is more streamlined, it just takes way longer since it seems like there’s just so much to do. I doubt you had to make an IBM account to use your DOS computer, right?
The big thing I’ve run into is regular use vs occasional use. I only use my PS4 as a Blu-ray player these days, and each time I turn it on, it has to figure out if it shut down correctly last time(of course not). Then, after a memory check, it boots. I sign in, and then it yells at me that it has a mess of OS updates to install, which I don’t want to wait for because I just want to watch this damn movie. Plus, my controller barely holds a charge anymore, and if I don’t use the right USB controller plugged into the PS4, the controller doesn’t pair and control the damn thing. If I were using the PS4 every day like I did back in 2016, a lot of these problems wouldn’t be there, but because I boot it once every 3 months, it’s a hassle.
I would love to be able to just slide in a disk and watch in the rare cases I’ve decided to. As it is, I’m about to buy a dedicated Blu-ray player instead of using the hardware I already have.
If you’re genuinely not using it as a gaming machine, you could take it offline for use as a blu-ray player. That would at least let you skip the OS updates. And mine only complains about the shutdown if it comes unplugged or we lose power while it’s on or in rest mode. It never complains if I fully shut it down from the menu.
Yeah. I booted up my PS4 for the first time in months a few days ago, to play a free game. I had to sit through fifteen minutes of software updates for both the OS, and for God of War that just happened to be in the drive that I’ve completed and didn’t want to play.
We have this cool thing in English called words. Instead of wanting to say things, they could have literally expressed those ideas using words and removed all ambiguity.
And sure, I also lied about that, because that makes sense. It’s a thing I just had to lie about.
Can you explain what takes so long then when setting up your devices, because I really don’t get it.
Playstation 5 setup should be a single login, then download and install firmware updates and before playing a game install another update. Everything else should be optional.
And two days to set up a router is not normal and something only very few people would have to deal with. For the most part it should either be connecting the router and it setting up automatically or connecting it and putting in your login data.
In general I would argue that it has become a whole lot easier to set up tech nowadays. The only thing that is more annoying today than in the past are mandatory accounts for tech that doesn’t need them so they can gather/steal your data. That shit sucks.
Playstation 5 setup should be a single login, then download and install firmware updates and before playing a game install another update.
These are the extra steps, and depending on the size of the updates, internet speed, and server (over)load they can take a very long time. PS2 was as simple as put disk in machine and play game, no updates required or even possible.
This of course meant that some times games shipped with show stopper bugs that got missed or ignored with no way to fix it. This was also abused, shipping with known issues so they could be on shelves for Xmas with the assumption that they would be fixed before the game was in the hands of customers.
Not everybody has good internet. I’m done explaining this. I’ve explained it in multiple comments now so if you don’t get it then that’s a you problem.
Welcome to retro gaming! The PS2 is really the first console with much of a setup at all, depending on if your TV supports progressive scan with component cables. There is an options menu where you can set that stuff up. Most games don’t use progressive scan, but the ones that do look nice and sharp, especially on a high definition CRT TV. If you have some DVDs, the PS2 is actually an excellent DVD player, too! It’s easy and does what it’s supposed to do. I really love PS2. There’s a reason it’s the best-selling game console ever. It’s really just that good.
WRT how small it is, this video comparing the OG and Slim PS2 could be of interest to you, just so you can see how Sony was able to make it that much smaller back then.
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I’m 32 and this thread has started to make me crumble into dust.
Lol glad you had a good experience with the PS2 OP.
The boot sound of the ps2 activates me like a sleeper agent.
For me that’s the two intro screens for ps1. I can still hear it.
That and the sound when the PlayStation 2 font comes up.
I miss my PS4 because you could install a PS2 theme that came with the sounds
Sucks you can’t change it on PS5 yet.
I just got an Apple TV and I’ve been struggling through the setup. Connecting all the accounts, logging into everything and updating everything. I would think by now there would be some way to link accounts and have things manage themselves better.
Every now and then I remember how simple things felt back then. The internet was new and exciting, we didn’t even have cell phones yet. Technology was built with innovation. In some ways we’ve fallen a long way from those days.
It depends on the apps. Stuff that takes a username and password isn’t really bad on the Apple TV if you have passwords saved.
The thing that gets me is fucking half assed QR codes. A QR code is a quick, easy solution when everyone has their phone. But there’s absolutely zero reason to use a QR code on the TV, then to still make me manually enter your pairing code. Just making the link complete is so much less than trivial that not including it is very obviously intentionally annoying.
“There’s no step 3.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSNqTgd9SXU
The PS1 even boots straight into the game, the PS2 boots into a small menu. I feel like there was a way to have it skip the menu though but I don’t remember. …But hey, you’ve got one in front of you lol.
deleted by creator
Alright maybe my memory is just off. Or… maybe I’m from a parallel reality that was slightly different.
usually my ps2 would just boot into the game if the disc was in the slot already, otherwise it would go to the menu
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.
Hrrrgghhh routers! The last two I’ve dealt with were a Netgear and an ASUS and… well, at least the ASUS got out of my way relatively quickly? SSH’d in and crammed it full of OpenWRT 😅Did the same to the Netgear but that one fought so hard to force me into using some admin-through-their-website kind of horsecrap that I hate. All’ the docs I wanted/needed were lies, BS, broken links, contradictory… it was a proper mess. I don’t want a singing, dancing bird-robot tweeting all night (to some corp’s servers), just gimme a damn router that’s mine!
… I may be a little bit old-headed about some tech things <.< I guess things are moving on to “your own hardware as a service” now :-\
For me it was the Xfinity router. I knew I shouldn’t have bought one and should have gone for a third party one, but I did it anyway because it was cheaper when I was setting up my Internet plan.
Stupid thing forces you to download an app to get it to work and sign in. Apparently if you buy any other third party combination modem and router, you just log into a default web page and sign in with default credentials. But no, for the Xfinity one you need to connect on the app and let it search over 5G for the thing, which took ages. There were multiple times where I set it down to load, came back, and the app said it failed to find it. When the router was sitting within inches of my phone
I can feel the back pain kicking in reading this.
I glance down at the PS2 in my entertainment center I bought new… damn I feel old.
Yyyyyup
Was about to say the NES just plugged in and goes! And then realized that if I wrote that, people would read it.
You’re forgetting the important NES setup step of having to blow on the cartridge to get the damn thing to read.
I recoiled when I read, “my dad actually owned a PS2 when I was born.” Oh time, you cruel beast.
Me too man. Shit.
So this is what being old feels like. I don’t like it. But seriously that’s the benefit of stuff not automatically having to connect to the internet and download a bunch of updates, you just plug it in and you’re good to go. I mean stuff like updates and patches are extremely convenient, but it is nice to just put a disc in a console and have it work without having to sit through a download. PS2 is a great console and one of the last where you could just plug and play without having to deal with online accounts, updating apps, and all the stuff that goes along with modern consoles.
I’m about as old as OP, but every time I remember that my generation grew up on mostly 360/PS3 it reminds me that I was weird, my dad got an Original Xbox when it came out, which was the year I was born, and even though we had a Wii, I think we actually played games on OG Xbox more (we relied on the Wii to access the internet through neighbors’ unprotected Wi-Fi for a while though.)
That’s an interesting take on “works” for a game console. Being able to play games seems like a pretty important piece.
deleted by creator
They actually didn’t come with memory cards. Sony back then was just as money hungry as they are now. You had to buy them separately. They were around $20 or $25 for a Sony branded one, but you could get 3rd party ones for cheaper.
oh ok my bad
Oh no, they did not my friend. I’m just a bit older than you so I remember when my family got our PS2. They were an optional accessory. Yes, it was optional to be able to save your game.
Edit: Also, my older brother and I (faithful younger sibling backup) convinced our father to get one soon after launch, as it was the cheapest DVD player available when it released, at least here in Australia.
You could still play most (if not all) ps2 games without a memory card. You can’t save your game obviously, but nothing stopping you from playing.
Yeah, I figured OP meant they didn’t play them yet because they didn’t want to get invested and not be able to save. Not because they wouldn’t actually work.
Edit: I did not see their comment below until I after I posted this.
I remember when I first got mine, I played like 8 hours of MGS2 before I realized I forgot to buy memory cards. So I had to leave the system running overnight until I could go out and get 1.
I have been using computers and tech since I was super little, and I’ve actually noticed a trend toward simplification over time. I remember just to play dos games with sound you had to configure the sound card every time to use the correct channels and IRQ and what not… Now a days, everything is a simple button press to install and get going or plug n play.
The main difference between the setup of a PS2 and a PS5 is the internet stuff; the PS5 has more things to configure, but it’s not particularly difficult to do (updates are time consuming tho). But if you had the modem/tried to play online with the PS2, the internet setup is more complicated than the PS5’s since it requires manually forwarding ports on your router.
I mean you’re probably older than me but I’d say the process is more streamlined, it just takes way longer since it seems like there’s just so much to do. I doubt you had to make an IBM account to use your DOS computer, right?
Just the thought of that made me vomit a little. lol
The big thing I’ve run into is regular use vs occasional use. I only use my PS4 as a Blu-ray player these days, and each time I turn it on, it has to figure out if it shut down correctly last time(of course not). Then, after a memory check, it boots. I sign in, and then it yells at me that it has a mess of OS updates to install, which I don’t want to wait for because I just want to watch this damn movie. Plus, my controller barely holds a charge anymore, and if I don’t use the right USB controller plugged into the PS4, the controller doesn’t pair and control the damn thing. If I were using the PS4 every day like I did back in 2016, a lot of these problems wouldn’t be there, but because I boot it once every 3 months, it’s a hassle.
I would love to be able to just slide in a disk and watch in the rare cases I’ve decided to. As it is, I’m about to buy a dedicated Blu-ray player instead of using the hardware I already have.
If you’re genuinely not using it as a gaming machine, you could take it offline for use as a blu-ray player. That would at least let you skip the OS updates. And mine only complains about the shutdown if it comes unplugged or we lose power while it’s on or in rest mode. It never complains if I fully shut it down from the menu.
Yeah. I booted up my PS4 for the first time in months a few days ago, to play a free game. I had to sit through fifteen minutes of software updates for both the OS, and for God of War that just happened to be in the drive that I’ve completed and didn’t want to play.
this is just… not true or at the least extremely hyperbolic
Yeah I really lied about how I had to plug in 4 things and buy a memory card to be able to play my PS2.
They probably wanted to say that it shouldn’t take an entire day to set up a new console today, unless your internet is extremely slow.
We have this cool thing in English called words. Instead of wanting to say things, they could have literally expressed those ideas using words and removed all ambiguity.
And sure, I also lied about that, because that makes sense. It’s a thing I just had to lie about.
Can you explain what takes so long then when setting up your devices, because I really don’t get it.
Playstation 5 setup should be a single login, then download and install firmware updates and before playing a game install another update. Everything else should be optional.
And two days to set up a router is not normal and something only very few people would have to deal with. For the most part it should either be connecting the router and it setting up automatically or connecting it and putting in your login data.
In general I would argue that it has become a whole lot easier to set up tech nowadays. The only thing that is more annoying today than in the past are mandatory accounts for tech that doesn’t need them so they can gather/steal your data. That shit sucks.
These are the extra steps, and depending on the size of the updates, internet speed, and server (over)load they can take a very long time. PS2 was as simple as put disk in machine and play game, no updates required or even possible.
This of course meant that some times games shipped with show stopper bugs that got missed or ignored with no way to fix it. This was also abused, shipping with known issues so they could be on shelves for Xmas with the assumption that they would be fixed before the game was in the hands of customers.
Not everybody has good internet. I’m done explaining this. I’ve explained it in multiple comments now so if you don’t get it then that’s a you problem.
This would be the strangest thing to lie about of all things. I dunno what clout is gained by saying it took 2 days to set up a router lol
Yeah I really lied about how I had to plug in 4 things and buy a memory card to be able to play my PS2.
It took me 5 minutes to set up my PS5.
I’m so very proud of you.
Welcome to retro gaming! The PS2 is really the first console with much of a setup at all, depending on if your TV supports progressive scan with component cables. There is an options menu where you can set that stuff up. Most games don’t use progressive scan, but the ones that do look nice and sharp, especially on a high definition CRT TV. If you have some DVDs, the PS2 is actually an excellent DVD player, too! It’s easy and does what it’s supposed to do. I really love PS2. There’s a reason it’s the best-selling game console ever. It’s really just that good.
WRT how small it is, this video comparing the OG and Slim PS2 could be of interest to you, just so you can see how Sony was able to make it that much smaller back then.