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[batman2million]

Lack of accountability. Developers have a lot of eyes on them now and it seems are subjected to any scrutiny.

Which is good cause we get better games. Back in the day, it never mattered to me who's making what game.

 

[Mlatador]

Only passwords.

 

[gooface]

Having to use Boot Disks to play games.

Having to enter a password located on a manual for a game for saving or starting a game

Having to set the sound settings (IRQ address for example) for the game you were going to play

Having to calibrate joysticks for every game

Not being able to play a game without the disk inserted (PC gaming)

StarForce DRM

SecuROM DRM (especially having to activate games online)

 

[Dsyndrome]

Passwords in manuals not included with the game if bought used.

Unbeatable situations in adventure games.

Dying batteries in video game carts.

 

[Social]

Funny how we hate on passwords, then on its replacement: memory cards, in a few years we'll be glad to have gotten rid of local saves in favor of cloud saves I guess?

 

[gigantor21]

- Game saves before harddrives and cloud storage became standard issue on consoles.
- Barring some exceptions, 3D games before about 1998 did not age well at all. I remember constantly running into terrible controls (especially before analog sticks), shit loading times, even worse framerates than last gen, and graphics that have aged horribly. I often tend to avoid PS1/N64 games for that reason, while replaying SNES/Genesis and Dreamcast/GC/PS2 stuff.
- It was hard getting up-to-date information about games before the Internet was a thing, particularly from other players directly. I loved buying EGM and Gamepro as a kid, but getting info online is MUCH more convenient.
- Installing PC games off of multiple floppy disks. To this day, I still have a copy of SFII from when I was in kindergarten that I can't install because one of the disks was missing. Bless optical media.

 

[hohoXD123]

Putting the disc/cartridge in and praying that it works this time. At least now we don't have that problem, EA aside.

 

[Chrono Helix]

Kinda minor, but with fast menus and voice work I'm glad to say goodbye to the nightmare of....

Slow text scrolling.

l i t t l e m o n e y

 

[Sir Ilpalazzo]

Yes. Trying to get past the same unfairly hard spots over and over again isn't the same as getting to play new sections. Many of the old C64/Amiga games can be completed in about a half an hour by experienced players.

No, it's not the same, but learning how to overcome something is still a new experience. When you beat something difficult in an arcade-length game, you're looking at it differently than you did when you first got to it. Difficulty is a totally valid way to lengthen a game (provided the game is good, obviously); the argument that it's just "padding" is bizarre.

 

[Konomori]

Having no easy way to Patch a Game in case of Bugs. ( Damn PAL Digimon World)

 

[Shpeshal Nick]

I'm 39, and I hated the obnoxiously extreme difficulty level in games even back in the 80's, let alone now. I didn't find it enjoyably challenging to being unable to finish the game I had bought.

I'm 34 and I'm with you.

I didn't pay an absurdly expensive amount of money (even by today's standards) to not be able to beat a game I own. Or to be pissed off to the point of wanting to throw it away.

I'm glad I have the ability to take my rose coloured glasses off. Yes, I have great memories of lap axing many of those older games as a kid, because you know, we were kids. We didn't know any better. But good lord gaming is sooooooooooooooo infinitely better now than it was back then. In just about every possible way.

 

[mcz117chief]

extreme dificulty to hide the fact that the game is very short

 

[TC McQueen]

Passwords, the lack of tutorials, unclear directions/objectives, bullshit difficulty, and the lack of navigation aids.

 

[NipplesAndToes23]

Memory cards. Fuck them.

Memory cards did have some benefit though. If you went to someone else's house who had the same game as you and wanted to continue your playthrough there you could do it with your memory card, also now with game tournaments, it would make things a lot easier when you could just take someone's memory card with all the unlocked content and copy them to other memory cards.

 

[silva1991]

leveling up in jrpgs

 

[Melchiah]

No, it's not the same, but learning how to overcome something is still a new experience. When you beat something difficult in an arcade-length game, you're looking at it differently than you did when you first got to it. Difficulty is a totally valid way to lengthen a game (provided the game is good, obviously); the argument that it's just "padding" is bizarre.

Well, some amount of challenge is always welcome, but it's just aggravating if you get stuck in a certain spot for days, let alone indefinitely. I personally find no enjoyment in repeating the same section multiple times to get to experience the game through. I'd rather play a more forgiving game, that actually has a lengthy and varied campaign, than something that's deliberately made harder to keep you inserting more coins. It's the equivalent of today's microtransactions on mobile games. I only managed to complete the arcade games of old at home, when I used cheats.

I'm 34 and I'm with you.

I didn't pay an absurdly expensive amount of money (even by today's standards) to not be able to beat a game I own. Or to be pissed off to the point of wanting to throw it away.

I'm glad I have the ability to take my rose coloured glasses off. Yes, I have great memories of lap axing many of those older games as a kid, because you know, we were kids. We didn't know any better. But good lord gaming is sooooooooooooooo infinitely better now than it was back then. In just about every possible way.

I couldn't agree more with you. The games of today are so much more fun and interesting to play than those of the 80's and early 90's. If the games had stayed the same since the Amiga days, I would have never returned to the hobby after half a decade's hiatus.

 

[NeoSkyte]

The password system, long loading times and wired controllers.

 

[djtiesto]

I'll echo that I hate passwords, especially ones where the characters look very similar to one another (zero and O, lowercase L and capital I) - when I play old games with a password, I take a picture on my cellphone to prevent transcription errors (oh how much progress I lost because I incorrectly transcribed a password) - but sometimes even this throws me off... just recently Faxanadu gave me trouble because I thought a digit was a "9" when it was really a lowercase "g".

Also don't like the lack of save functionality in long-ass games, or limited continues in long-ass games *cough*Blaster Master, Ninja Gaiden 3 US*cough*.