Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2022-05-12, 17:46:
I miss the simplicity of gaming in the mid to late 90s. You would go to a physical store, buy a game CD, put it on your PC (or PlayStation) and it would just work. No mandatory firmware updates, no enormous day 1 patches to download, no hiding half of the game's content behind season passes and no "always online" DRM for single-player games
The rapid hardware advancements were another cool thing during that time. A lot could change in just a few years. In particular, upgrading from something like a Pentium 133 + S3 Trio64 to a Pentium 3 Coppermine + TNT2 felt like a quantum leap.
It was a quantum leap.
Now a 10 year old system is still fairly respectable but back then 10 years was the difference between a real computer and basically a glorified calculator. People really didn't think it would ever be worth anything again.
I think the rapid hardware advancements is one of the reasons we used to have such a great time getting parts for retro hardware.
It's actually around the start or the first 5 years or so of when internet was becoming mainstream (and when things like ISDN were actually acceptable standards), when I started collecting parts which were cheap as heck, all the physical PC shops that don't exist anymore.
That's actually something that I miss. And that if we bought something, we would actually own it.
TheMobRules wrote on 2022-05-12, 17:49:After thinking a lot about it, what I miss the most is the pre-Internet days. Or I should say the pre-"massive Internet adoption […]
Show full quote
After thinking a lot about it, what I miss the most is the pre-Internet days. Or I should say the pre-"massive Internet adoption" days, I'm fine when it was non-essential for life. What I really miss is how slow some things used to be... when a movie, game or album came out, there was enough time to absorb it, enjoy it to the fullest (or be thoroughly disappointed by it). Nowadays these things are no longer an "event", it's just about the hype about what's coming next, and as soon as it's there you pretty much have to move on to the next big thing at breakneck speed.
With a game, for example, the hidden secrets and that sort of stuff took time to be unraveled, sometimes you would find it on a magazine or a friend who stumbled into it. All that is gone now, when a game comes out it gets fully datamined in less than 24hs and in the same period of time you already have thousands of 100% playthroughs. And the key here is that unless you cut yourself off the Internet for a while, you can't avoid it.
It also has affected my work as a software developer. New versions of libraries and frameworks are released almost daily, many times breaking compatibility with the previous versions and threatening to end support unless you update. All of this without providing any real added value. It's 2022 and we're still finding new and innovative ways to render an accordion in HTML, while using extremely complex algorithms behind the scenes to determine which annoying adds we're going to show to the hapless users. Or crypto mining, another example of heaps of processing power absurdly wasted on inane things.
I would pay good money to get back to those saturday mornings when my friends and I would go to the (not entirely legal) games store with a box of floppies to get the "latest" stuff, fooling around waiting for the game to install. Even if it was a disappointment, we would go back to Wolf3D/Doom (or downloading 640x480 pics of Pam Anderson at 2KB/s) and have a lot of fun.
I can really relate to this.
My primary school period was basically computer free. I knew only 1 or 2 people who had a PC back then. I even remember when someone got their first color card (basically a display adapter that could show more than just the amber color) and I didn't even know anyone that had a real sound card.
Playing with friends I'd have to call them with a phone that was corded to the wall, so you'd have to share and couldn't really have private conversations. And phones were prohibitively expensive, it went by the minute. These days I can VoiP for hours a day and it doesn't matter.
Even during middle school I could get by without a computer fairly easily but more and more people were beginning to get a PC and some even had internet (but very few had broadband).
At some point I finally did get my first PC. We didn't have internet so I'd bring a bunch of handmedown-diskettes and use their internet. But of course we'd have to ask first and then we had only very limited amount of time to downloaddownloaddownload like no tomorrow and cut the connection! and then I'd carefully copy everything to disk. Twice for most things and three times for stuff I really didn't want to get corrupted. 🤣.
Mobile phones were still not a thing back then. Some had these pagers though but it was mostly just a gimmick.
I still went to a library if I wanted information and I read books! Tons and tons of books! Now I only need to click meh keyboard and there it is! In between all the junk. But it's all from my own home instead of having to plan a half days trip to spend an afternoon over there.
I'm thankful that we did have internet when I started collecting hardware as it was a great help in self-teaching how to build computers and learning what was what.
I mean when I was dumpsterdiving I barely knew what I was doing, so I picked apart the computers that I found and only when I got back home could I actually look up what it was that I brought home with me.
I really dislike the online-all-the-time stuff and the you-don't-really-own-anything-anymore-but-you-basically-rent-it-after-having-paid-full-price-for-it stuff.
Gaming overall has filled up with the dumb pay2win 'games' that are barely worth being called real games. They are more like elaborate 3D advertisements for their online shop and they spend more time monetizing their product instead of trying to deliver a good product. And some of these companies use real psychology to make their games as addicting as possible. Some of these games just want to turn their 'players' into binary junkies with the company being the only dealer on the block.
I definitely prefer the more old-fashioned games where it was less about grinding ranks and hoping for a good lootbox drop and more about getting the most amount of frags or beating the ai on your favorite map in the most efficient way you can think of. Or just about beating a game. Modern games basically don't even have an end, they just keep on and on and just continue to add stuff just so they can sell you more. Ow and of course the stuff you bought last year? yeah that's all obsolete now. Powercreep is a thing now and we're supposed to believe it's an ordinary fact of life which of course it isn't xD.
There's still some good games out there, but one needs to dig deep and far to find the real gems. Just like in the early days actually.
One thing I also like about older games is that these are easier to mod. Modern games need entire teams before you can produce any meaningful mods unless you make really small mods. Or if you are really exceptionally talented which I am not.