Things you miss from a bygone era of gaming

[Steven]

Sports games indeed. With baseball season kicking off, I've been wanting to play a good baseball game. The newer ones are so over complicated and focused on hyper realism, it's such a drag to play them.


I recommend highly the first Ken Griffey game on SNES. I have seriously played 6 or 7 full 162-game seasons with that game since 1994... and never got sick of it once. Games are a brisk 15-18 minutes, and it's just the right mix of arcade action with enough simulation to feel like a near-perfect marriage.

BTW great post. Pretty much agreed with all you wrote!

[Panzerfuzion]

I know it's not completely dead, but I miss the wait and suspense of a good game coming out. There were no trailers for games or anything too often back in the day. Occasionally there'd be a sneak peak in a magazine, or an exclusive, but there wasn't the constant press and coverage that is around today.

I agree with this.

[Nature Boy]

I won't say I miss anything in terms of "I wish they still did it this way" kind of thing, because I don't miss anything in that context, but I have fond memories of different things I did back then that I miss seeing now.

The first was going to Radio Shack, and typing that good old two line basic program onto their Trash80s:
10 PRINT "Radio Shack SUCKS!"
20 GOTO 10

And then of course running like hell out of the store as an employee shook his fist at you. :)

I also miss the video game competitions they had at malls and the CNE. I remember playing Enduro Racer for a tee shirt or something in the King Centre in downtown Kitchener as a kid. And I remember my dad playing Pac-Man at the CNE and winning 5 times in a row, getting a tee shirt and some friz-bees, and getting invited back to the CNE for a game against the other winners.

The CNE was cool back then too for the Atari stuff they had on sale that we didn't yet have in Kitchener. That was the only way I had to know what was coming in the beginning, at least from what I remember.

I have seen those PlayStation 'booths' at the ACC for example, where they have a bunch of PS3s setup and you can play whatever game they have on display, but I get the impression my kids won't feel the same way about those that I do about the Enduro Racer competition at the King Centre. Don't get me wrong though: I don't think that's a bad thing, I just think it's a thing.

[Clownzilla]

I miss the virtual reality arcades of the early 90's. Sure, they were VERY expensive but I remember playing the game with the steps and pterodactyls and thinking that "this is the future of gaming" and the excitement of what I thought I would see next. Unfortunately, I'm in my stated future and VR is all but dead:(

[Edmond Dantes]

I miss arcades in general. I just recently read that there was some flight sim game by Sega (I think it was an Afterburner spinoff) that you sat in and it would actually rotate with you in it. You really felt like you were flying the plane.

I never got to experience that :puppydogeyes::(

[rmaerz]

I miss the classic arcade of the late 70s early 80s...jam packed on a weekend night with a large selection of videos, pins and projector games.

I miss having to drive only 15 minutes to the mall arcade. Now I have to drive at least an hour to the closest classic arcade.

I miss playing Daytona USA at the boardwalk arcade.

I miss Electronic Games magazine. Reading reviews of newly released games and news of upcoming games.

I miss playing Death Race at the local pizza shop.

[WCP]

The weirdest thing, is that 20 years from now, people are going to be looking back to the idea of buying horse armor digitally for MS Space bucks, and they are going to get nostalgic for all the bullshit that we're putting up with in modern gaming now. Kid's in Jr. High and High School right now, when they are 38 years old, they are going to remember the good ole days of the Xbox 360. Back when it was so simple to just get some horse armor for 5 bucks.

[Tron 2.0]

I miss the sega channel ;)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMRLZcBiN-k

Beside the 80's arcade like this.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWevidSFyjY

[Manga4life]

I miss a lot of stuff from the classic days of gaming, but here is a general list in NO particular order....

1. Amazing music.
2. Simple and colorful graphics.
3. Simple gameplay but yet still insanely fun games.
4. Box art and fun gaming manuals.
5. Video game magazines.
6. The feeling that video games were fun and gave you a sense of wonder and excitement.

I could go on and on. I enjoy my XBox360, don't get me wrong, but I'll never have that feeling that I had back in the late 80's and through the late 90's when it comes to video games ever again.

[SOL BADGUY]

I wish graphics werent so "real life" looking nowadays, I play games to escepae reality, I dont want to look at a digital world that looks like the real one, and thus has real physics in it, or normal looking people in it too.

[Lerxstnj]

Great and interesting topic!
I agree with most of the comments, but here is one I have not seen mentioned yet - Xbox Live on the original Xbox.
I got my Xbox kinda late in the life of it and did not get to experience it very long.
If anyone played Driv3r and uploaded and watched other player's hilarious in-game videos, you know how great that was!!
That game just isn't the same any more without that feature.

[Haoie]

Every single arcade [all 2 of them] have closed in my city within the last few years.

Of course for most places this happened a lot earlier, but still! I miss my coinops!

[sloan]

Every single arcade [all 2 of them] have closed in my city within the last few years.

Of course for most places this happened a lot earlier, but still! I miss my coinops!

I miss the arcades too. A sure sign of the apocalypse.

[XYXZYZ]

I miss "pop a cartridge into a console, power on, title screen, press start, READY GO!".

Because now we have "power on, wait for console logo, load some menu screen, see some ads, load a disc, confirm I'm sure I want to load the disc, see a logo screen, see a logo screen, see a logo screen, see a logo screen, skip the first intro movie, skip the second intro movie, title screen, press start, confirm that I want to start, check for save data, confirm to load save data, confirm that I still want save data to the hard drive, skip instruction screen, some sort of select screen, select character or whatever, confirm that selection, sit through unskippable intro movie, skip through additional text, READY GO!"

[o.pwuaioc]

[boring shit]READY GO!"

More like "[boring shit]READY, WALKTHROUGH!"

[Akov456]

I miss "pop a cartridge into a console, power on, title screen, press start, READY GO!".

Because now we have "power on, wait for console logo, load some menu screen, see some ads, load a disc, confirm I'm sure I want to load the disc, see a logo screen, see a logo screen, see a logo screen, see a logo screen, skip the first intro movie, skip the second intro movie, title screen, press start, confirm that I want to start, check for save data, confirm to load save data, confirm that I still want save data to the hard drive, skip instruction screen, some sort of select screen, select character or whatever, confirm that selection, sit through unskippable intro movie, skip through additional text, READY GO!"

My thoughts exactly. It was just so easy to pick up and play.

[sloan]

"power on, wait for console logo, load some menu screen, see some ads, load a disc, confirm I'm sure I want to load the disc, see a logo screen, see a logo screen, see a logo screen, see a logo screen, skip the first intro movie, skip the second intro movie, title screen, press start, confirm that I want to start, check for save data, confirm to load save data, confirm that I still want save data to the hard drive, skip instruction screen, some sort of select screen, select character or whatever, confirm that selection, sit through unskippable intro movie, skip through additional text, READY GO!"

I am very glad to have never adopted this generation's systems, and this validates why.

[wiggyx]

Don't forget "this games needs an update before we'll allow you play it, and it'll only take about 15 minutes to do so (if you're lucky). Go make a sandwich while I download and dick around with this annoying-ass shit."

[ProjectCamaro]

Don't forget "this games needs an update before we'll allow you play it, and it'll only take about 15 minutes to do so (if you're lucky)."

Haha, that's the point I was going to add.

[Tanooki]

I don't have time to see if this stuff was brought up already but I got ideas.

1) Booting up a game and it going right to the title instantly or within 3-5seconds. Over time you got like 15-60+sec worth of developer splash and copyright garbage everywhere. Beyond that into discs, annoying ass load times off every menu.

2) Earlier eras (pre-CD) were more honest with the imagery supplied on the back of the box and less prone to downright lying on the back to entrap buyers. Square was a nice violator of this as were others when PS1 hit using cleaned up FMV samples as 'in game footage' so some sucker somewhere probably thought the FMV was gamplay, then found the mincraft looking blockhead people and went were like what the hell is this?

3) You buy a game, it works, and it is finished. Now you buy a game, pay full price for it too, and welcome to being a beta testing guinea pig. Also welcome to getting 'most' of the game to find the rest is hiding on the disc to pay more for, or will be delivered shortly after the so called full game goes on sale.

I miss those things the most and that's not even going into print stuff in media, packaging, and the rest like how we're now being screwed out of manuals and in some cases physical copies of games yet still paying the same high price.

[Manga4life]

I miss the fun of the advertising back in the day. I miss seeing ad's for classic video games in magazines and on TV and being excited for Christmas for when I would get a new game, it was just magical and I don't feel that way about video games anymore. Like at all.

I loved how everyone was talking about certain games and how one game could rule my school for months on end. It seems like a game comes out these days and is literally played for about a week or two and then nobody cares anymore, back in the day a game would come out and people would be playing it for months and months on end and would still talking about it as if they had just purchased it. It also seems like today's games don't hold replay value despite all the crap they pour into them with modes, hidden extras, expansions, ect ect. Back in the day you would play a game like Super Mario Bros. 3 over and over despite being able to beat it in like 2 hours or so, A BIG part of that was because it was just plain fun and we didn't need the gimmicks of today to enjoy our games.

There was a mystique about video games back then.....

[Immutable]

I miss the tagline said on TV - "Now you're playing with power!!" :)

[Manga4life]

I miss the tagline said on TV - "Now you're playing with power!!" :)

That was a great promotional piece for the NES during it's glory years, they used it a lot in print and during television commercials. Some of those print ad's and TV spots were some of the best video game advertisements in the history of video games and have left me with quite a few classic memories.

I miss that stuff.