Ignoring the lack of updates if the game is buggy, games back then were also more focused on quality and make gamers replay the game with unlockable features based on skills, not money. I can't count the number of times I played Metal Gear Solid games over and over to unlock new features playing the hardest difficulty and with handicap features, and also to find Easter eggs. Speaking of Easter eggs, you'd lose a number of hours exploring every nook and cranny finding them!
Games were definitely buggy and I honestly think people forget how much better the quality is nowadays.
I also think there is something to it just being the 90s or so and not having much choice. If you only have one game to play then of course you're going to replay it to death. If I have a steam library of 1000 games then I'm much less likely to.
A lot of this is just nostalgia for the past and the environment as opposed to games being any better.
There's also the SNL effect. Everyone remembers the great games like Mario. Nobody remembers World Games.
World Games was so good they made a spoof sequel of sorts called caveman games. A lot of people remember world games, it was a well received game. You had so many actually forgettable garbage games to choose from....
But if he had to go with a forgettable game he wouldn't have remembered it.
But he says it wasn't very fun and it was forgotten.
He obviously didn't forget it, and most people found it to be fun.
I have never heard anyone talk about that game, ever. But I remembered hating it as a kid. But social media wasn't a thing back then. So I don't know if it was talked about elsewhere.
If that was a well received game, I guess it speaks volumes about the rest of the NES library.
It's because it wasn't really a young kids game. It was aimed at a bit older of a crowd. They made a later version of it called caveman games that was geared more towards kids and it was a lot of fun, with mostly the same game mechanics.
I'm unfamiliar with that game. Was World Games buggy or just bad? The quality the OP referred to was bugs, not gameplay.
Even the worst AAA game today has better game play than anything from 30 years ago. It's the nature of extreme complexity that allowing players freedom makes complete debugging impossible.
Hehe. World Games was an Olympic event type of game for the NES and other systems back in the late 80's.
It was actually a well reviewed and enjoyed game, so I'm not sure why he decided to use it as an example when there were so many other actually bad games back then. It also caused a "spoof" game to be made on the NES called "Caveman games", which did a similar game style, but set in caveman times with caveman events. I preferred caveman games as a kid, and still do. Racing against a friend on who can rub sticks together and blow on the smoke to make fire first is still a blast. So is beating the other guy with a caveman club. Good times.
~~Actually, OP very explicitly said to ignore bugs and was only talking about gameplay. Which is why they talk about extreme replayability being the requirement on old games.~~
I just realized you were talking about who i responded to, not OP. But still, they weren't only talking about bugginess.
The basic mechanics of a game (eg. Mario) better be fun, and those first couple of levels better be fun, because that's what you'll be doing a lot. It's similar to how the swinging in Spider-Man better be fun because you'll be doing it a lot. But the it also has more complex fighting, side content, and a story. You can mess up a lot more while there's still enough to keep it entertaining.
But people don't remember the majority of games that were not very good. World Games was just a game that came to mind on the NES as being not very fun, but more importantly forgotten.
They weren't as buggy. People making excuses classify exploits as bugs ignoring that modern games have more bugs and exploits.
I played Atari 2600 games like space invaders, adventure, and pitfall for thousands of hours without ever running into a bug. The only game with an exploit was Combat where you could put your tank muzzle into a corner and make it loop across the map. But both players could do it.
https://www.mariowiki.com/List_of_Super_Mario_Bros._3_glitches
some games would be unplayable without hand-patching the code that you'd find in a magazine.
Nah, in the 80s we had hundreds probably thousands of games for the commodore 64 and later the amiga 500, all of them pirated. The piracy scene was huge, and often the games were free as we just copied them from friends
I've grown up with a PS1 and a handful of pc games, and I don't remember any of them being any more bugged than modern gaming. The only exception being Digimon World 1, a notoriously buggy game (but to be fair, half of those bugs were introduced by the inept translation's team).
I know people nowadays know and use a bunch of glitches for speedruns and challenge runs (out-of-bounds glitches being the norm for such runs), but rarely, if ever, those glitches could be accessed by playing through the game normally, to the point that I don't remember finding any game breaking bug in any of the games I played in my infancy (barring the aforementioned Digimon World).
Yeah quality has improved massively, maybe not the initial release but 90% of games i recently played were regarded as buggy messes on release. After years of updates they mostly work.
I have 1000 games, but I still replay a bunch of them over and over, just at a less rapid pace.
I don't agree with that first point at all. Games were not all that buggy, It was orders of magnitude better than it is now.
I think it's because people only remember the good games and not the stinkers.
I played a lot of shit games I can't recall because I played for 30 minutes max. There was one game I never passed the first level as I couldn't figure out what to do, I think something to do with jelly beans and a blob. How is that good gameplay lol?
But of course myself and others can tell you about the games we played for hours like Super Mario Bros which didn't really have bugs and were good.
The difference is back in the day the great games were the highly advertised “big ones” and the “stinkers” usually fell flat. Now you have a mountain of AAA stinkers and have to go scavenging for indie gems.
Not sure that's right - before the internet I had no clue what was supposedly good or not. I'd rent games from blockbuster and just try them one by one. Lots of shitty games and I had no idea that Mario or sonic or anything was meant to be good.
Now it's a lot easier just based on metacritic or steam reviews to figure out if something is good or not.
Well yes, maybe going that far back it was kind of a shot in the dark, but the late ‘90 to early ‘10 period was a time where you had internet (or at least tv/magazines) to know which games were “popular”, most of those were actually well done, and you’d rarely have an AAA title launch as a bugridden mess.
Reviews are also a hit-or-miss because they’re highly subjective. The Steam review system sucks as well, being only positive/negative and with troll reviews always at the top.
A boy and his blob! That was a great game! But it did not hold your hand at all, you had to figure out what every different jerky bean did to your blob. It was a good enough game that there was a modern remake I think it's on Nintendo virtual console.
But yeah, that was a legitimately hard game for a kid. And with nothing, it wasn't buggy, the gameplay was just different from anything else people were familiar with and it didn't explain itself.
A couple years back I found my old Gameboy advanced. I tried to play Kirby on it and I was taken back by how much it sucked. The screen was way smaller than I remember it being and there was no backlight which meant I had to play the game in a well lit room. I don't think I could ever go back to those days.
Absolutely. I enjoyed and played a lot out of King of Dragon Pass back in the day. Yesterday I sat down to finally play its spiritual successor Six Ages: Ride Like the Wind. From what I remember from KoDP it plays exactly the same (at least during the first hour). Yet I couldn't force myself to keep playing it. Same way nowadays I can't seem to get hooked with genres I used to play a ton as a kid: RTS games like Age of Empires II and Warcraft 3, life sims like The Sims, point & click graphic adventures like Monkey Island, traditional roguelikes, city builders, etc. Other genres I try to get back into and I do manage to play a ton of hours of but I'm never able to finish like when I was young (e.g. JRPGs)
When I try to play many of those games I tend to feel kinda impatient and wanting to use my limited time to play something else that I feel I might enjoy better. A good modern 4X game with lots of mod support like Stellaris or Civ6 instead of RTS games which have always felt a bit clunky to me. Short narrative games like Citizen Sleeper or Roadwarden instead of longer ones I'm not able to finish. Any addictive modern roguelite, especially if it features mechanics I particularly like (like deckbuilding and turn-based combat). If I ever feel interested to play a life sim or a city builder nowadays it has to feature more RPG elements and/or iterative elements and/or deckbuilding and a very compelling setting to me. And so on.
It feels like many of the newer genres (or the updated versions of old genres) are just more polished and fine-tuned than genres that used to be popular in the 90s and the 2000s. They just feel better to play. And to be fair in some cases they might be engineered to be more addicting, too. Like, I did finish Thimbleweed Park some years ago but I feel like nowadays no one is going to play witty point & click graphic adventure games with obscure puzzles if they can play a nice-looking adventure game filled with gacha waifus.
I mean technical wise, games are better now and could easily be patched, but I think that's why games had better gameplay in the past to make up for the lack of gamer accessibility to patching.
You're saying that because games couldn't be patched, they had better gameplay? That makes no sense at all.
Lots of games had crap gameplay. There are more junk vintage games than good ones. The gameplay was simple because it had to be. The consoles didn't have the power to do more. Chips were expensive. So they had to invent simple gameplay that could fit in 4k of ROM. If dirt simple gameplay is your thing, great. The Atari joystick had one stinking button for crying out loud.
You think Space Invaders has better gameplay than Sky Force Reloaded? Or Strider has better gameplay than Hollow Knight? You're insane.
E.T. for the 2600 had gameplay so bad it crashed the entire video game industry.
Double Dragon on NES had a jump that was impossible to make forcing the company to make a new cart and give refunds.
Anyone who has iterated though a full romset will agree with this.
Just like movies, music, books, etc. the classics are fondly remembered gems and the rest are easily forgotten.
I didn't know this. This is obviously why I never finished that game and certainly not because I suck at it.
I might be misremembering what game it was. I was just a kid when I learned about it. I can't seem to find anything about it other than an impossible jump in the PC port of TMNT.
It's a nostalgia thing - I don't remember the games where I got stuck on the first level and could never finish the game (which happened). Or were just boring so I quit after a half hour.
I do remember donkey Kong country, super Mario bros, sonic Etc. Which all worked well and were fun.