• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

Name something nostalgic you miss in the gaming industry..

Eimran

Eimran

Member
Name something from "the good 'ol days" you really miss and don't see anymore in the current industry.

For example i really loved the typical game stores with big Nintendo/Sega/Playstation-signs. The colorful cardboard pictures of Lara Croft, Sonic, Mario and of course the awesome demo pods.

DE5nmpd.jpg


Another thing I miss are demo discs. I Remember playing the SSX tricky demo for hours on my Playstation 2.

One last thing is the game manuals. Some of them were 20 pages thick and filled with awesome content. Today the best you can get is a lousy one-page advertisment for a season pass.

What are things you miss and love to see again GAF?
 
Last edited:
cireza

cireza

Member
The 16 bits era. With very different consoles. Games on cartridge with no loading, no install, no update. Multi-plaftorm games that would actually all be different, developed by different developers, with the competition that it brings.

The beginning of the CD format in 16 bits expansions and the Saturn, with all the creativity that it brought on the Saturn. Redbook Audio in the Mega-CD and some Saturn games.

Games that would blow your mind with how they used the hardware.

Variety in games.

CRT TVs with their clean picture, absence of motion blur, pretty scanlines through SCART RGB.

The responsiveness of the inputs on these TVs.

The nice packaging of the games, with great covers and manuals.

A time where any kind of game could be possible and would actually be one of the prettiest games on the market upon release.
 
Last edited:
EverythingsOverrated

EverythingsOverrated

Member
For me the mystique of games is something that we'll never see again.

Back in the day (pre 2000ish) there was this sense of discovery in practically every game you would play because at the very most you had seen screenshots and read about it in a games mag. Sometimes you would have a friend that would talk about a game they had and you would try to reconstruct what the game was from their description. It was great.

To add to that there was this whole thing where people would spread rumors about secrets in certain games. Some would end up being true, but most were bullshit.

No one outside the industry really understood games development either. Most companies were pretty secretive and that would create an atmosphere for rumors to grow into crazy shit.

There also were a lot of relevant fan sites with super passionate staff. A few still kick around today but they mostly were all dead by 2005
 
Type_Raver

Type_Raver

Member
Take your pick, but the first thing that came to mind is Synthesized music.
With so much focus on orchestral and real sampled music, I miss the gritty lower sample based music.

Fully loaded boxed copies of games, with colour instruction manuals, posters and random extras.
Big box editions of PC games too.
 
Last edited:
Aion002

Aion002

Member
Not having season pass, day one dlc and microtransactions everywhere.


Remember when you could buy a Final Fantasy without having to buy some food or any other random products to get the whole game content?

S-E is garbage, even summons now are locked behind pre ordering the game, disgusting.... While Sega wants to sell a New Game + as dlc...

I've bought all Yakuza games, but I think that 7 will be the first one that I will skip it...
 
Last edited:
Drell

Drell

Member
Arcades being really ahead of their times in terms of graphics AND gameplay.

Back in the day, when you put the monney your dad or mom gave you in the arcade cabinet, you were sure it was going to be some futuristic experience with graphics ahead of any consumer PC at the time and also moving seats, cockpits recreations and some other crazy gameplay devices.
Nowaday, you can have the best graphics on your PC at a somewhat resonnable price, but I don't get as much fun as back the. Sure VR is cool and promising. But having it at home is not the same magic as spending some hours at an arcade.
 
Xdrive05

Xdrive05

Member
I’m with you, OP, on all three points.

I’ll also add 2nd hand / flea market game culture. The internet has killed this where I live (Indiana, USA). As late as 2005 or so, you could go into any indoor flea market in my area and there were no fewer than three booths specializing in games. Here's the fun part. The owners would pour their creativity into their enterprise; lots of custom graphics thrown up all around the booth (some of it charmingly bad too!), lots of promo stuff like homemade demo stations on 13" CRT television, weekly specials, things like that. you used to be able to find fun, rare games from Japan, or niche gaming peripherals, things like that. Sometimes they were run by some old dude who clearly wasn't a fan of games at first, but then saw the opportunity to make bank on this new big thing, and then he became a fan whilst trying to learn why people buy games. I saw that a lot around here. To a lesser extent I would even include chain shops in strip malls specializing in 2nd hand games, like Disc Replay here in Indiana, which stayed relevant as long as disk based games were still the main modality of gaming.

Basically Ebay destroyed this culture. Flea market shop runners can't compete with the open market of the whole globe. Anyway, I'll remember these places fondly.
 
RSB

RSB

Banned
Classic Resident Evil (fixed camera angles, tank controls, etc)

Classic Halo (no spartan abilities, no ADS, no sprint, etc)

AAA games that are actually unique, and don't feel bloated, focus tested and homogenized into oblivion.

Gravity Rush 2 online servers (fuck you Sony)
 
Birdo

Birdo

Banned
Just the simplicity of the industry in general.

Back then, you'd get your cartridge and just play it. No account sign-ups, no DRM, no updates, no patches, no install, no articles about the framerate or resulution, no articles about trans characters.

You just picked a game with cool box art, took it home and played the shit out of it....... Man, I miss the 80's.
 
T

Thavash

Member
- Manuals with detailed pics, stories, and posters creating the lore of the game
- crazy PC game boxes ; Japanese box art
- Game mags. I have almost 100 that I bought from 94-99, British and American, it immersed you into the game world of the time, the single format mags defended their console to the end and really was an experience. EGM 93-95 was something else , I still have that December 94 “super thick” issue physical copy
- Console Wars , yes it’s a good thing, yes exclusives are good , and that passion it creates enhances the game experience
- Actual difference in game feel between systems, in graphics control and music due to different system architectures
- Saturday afternoon games - where you and a friend just pick up and play and finish in a full afternoon. No story crap or guides needed
- Game music being so good it’s a genre on its own, lifting otherwise bland levels and gameplay....
 
thismeinteil

thismeinteil

Member
I miss the local movie/game rental stores. Had two local places we rented from. The closest was smaller and only had NES games, with black and white reprints of the manual, but I loved going in there. Looking through the small selection of NES games, and movies, is missed.

I also miss a demo kiosk in every department store. Before we got our SNES, we'd go to Sam's Club or JC Penney and while our parents shopped we'd try out Super Mario World and Sonic. JC Penney even had a fancy one that played several games. And Sam's had a PC setup with a few demos. First time I played 7th Guest and some Mickey Mouse point and click game I can't recall the name of.

And the last thing I miss is cheat codes, as well as the devices that enabled them. I usually didn't use the ones that actually allowed you to cheat, but I loved the ones that altered the game. Like moon jumping in Mario. Or big head mode in many games. Or making your character tiny/big. Sadly, with trophies a thing, it seems devs don't take the extra effort to disable them if you are using a code. The only recent games I have seen that still use them is GTA and Saints Row.
 
Last edited:
kraspkibble

kraspkibble

Permabanned.
old physical PC games boxes. i loved these boxes and it felt really special and exciting. i'm 100% digital on PC and would never go back to installing games off discs but i do miss those boxes. i wish games still had them instead of just a cheap little plastic dvd case. by all means just stick a download code inside for me to use but it'd be cool if it was filled with goodies like a manual, map, stickers, etc.

h9fu6w6mcek01.jpg
 
Last edited:
diffusionx

diffusionx

Gold Member
So there is a ton of stuff, I hate the video game business these days, virtually everything about it, but the stuff that is nostalgic in general:

Big PC game boxes - they were an environmental nightmare but they were like record sleeves where they had tons of room for great art, weird box construction (Unreal 1 or the Baldur's Gate sleeve that scratched the discs), flaps with more info, and off-the-wall shit like Falcon 4.0's binder. In other words, SOUL. Even the smaller boxes they moved to in the early 2000s were cool and look great.

Demo discs - PC Gamer, OPM, PlayStation Underground - great way to try new games and learn about upcoming stuff.

Manuals in general - Everyone mentioned this, but the thing nobody talks about is that it has affected game design. Now stuff like idiotic tutorials and control explanations have to be in-game. I loaded up Motorstorm Pacific Rift recently for example and it threw me into the action in a way no current gen game does. When I was confused about something I just looked in the book.

Server browsers - with server browsers you can play the game you want to play. Want to spend 100 hours in a row playing nothing but de_dust? Go crazy. Hop in a game and everyone is calling each other racial slurs? Just leave if it bothers you. Etc. Nowadays we all have to complain to the devs if the matchmaking isn't doing what we want (whether it is playlists, "toxicity", etc.) and hope they get around to it. Server browsers are just a better way to play, but it cedes control to players and we can't have that. .

Also, for a long time, my PC game library and my console library were totally different, great games in their own right, but distinct. I know why everything is multiplatform these days, and it makes sense because the consoles are PCs basically, but I do miss the days when I would go to the different platforms for unique experiences you couldn't get on the other.
 
Last edited:
Jeeves

Jeeves

Member
The lack of datamining.

If you wanted to know what was in a game you played it when it came out and found what the game had to offer yourself. There was virtually no chance of knowing about the secret true final boss before the game even released.

This made rumors way more fun too. For all we knew, you just might be able to catch Mew if you nudged that pickup truck just right.


Oh! And do any of you remember unlockables?
 
Fbh

Fbh

Member
I miss the time when we didn't know everything about a game day 1.
There was more of a mystery, you'd trade tips, information and secrets you had found with friends. Games had this unknown factor to them were you never really knew if there was something new to discover. Now we have a wiki with everything you can do and find as soon as the game is out, and the entire thing has been data mined to ensure there's absolutely nothing we might have missed.
I guess you can ignore that and just go in blind, which is generally what I do, but it's still not the same.




Also Squaresoft
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

Phil Spencer on what the hell is happening in the games industry and why exclusives have become a risky business
Business Game Dev 3 4 5 6 7
301
19K
ProtoByte replied
Game over? Industry suffers slowdown after decades-long winning streak — Financial Times
Business Analysis 2 3 4 5
209
14K
JohnnyTropics replied
GAF, would you help me redesigning my gaming habits?
Opinion
18
743
Jaybe replied
Tomb Raider I-III Remastered | Review Thread
Analysis Review
17
3K
winjer replied
Lara Croft Crowned Most Iconic Video Games Character of All Time, According to BAFTA Poll
2 3 4 5
208
8K
ResurrectedContrarian replied
Top Bottom