What do u HATE in older times? Any incline of nowadays?

Last decade is considered as the age of decline and it's beyond arguing so harder thing to do will be to point out these areas where gaming improved.

I really hated this late '90 scorn for 2D graphics / gameplay, almost every game that used it was considered as 2nd class products, so many franchises were butchered by awful 3D sequels that corrupted their essence and such a shame PC devs being in avantgarde here. Fortunately, now 2D is back in action and people seem to realize that this is not a symptom of backwardness but just a matter of choice.

And because of that all I'm seeing S.Saturn as my personal winner of 5th gen console war just for better 2D hardware / software support, way ahead of PSX and crushing N64 (which almost lacked two dimensional stuff).

Indie scene growing strong is also a nice tendency, they're present in main gaiming media, reach quite solid sale numbers. They do a goob job in popularizing 2D as well.

Digital distribution, Kickstarter, Steam Greenlight and anything else that helps to create, promote and sell stuff in ways unavailable in the past.

 

To be honest, there is really not much I can think about that could be seen as an improvement compared to the late 90's. I once hated early 3D graphics, but somehow I have developed a fondness for them over time.

Sure you have digital distribution, the indie scene, kickstarter etc., but we wouldn't need those in the first place if there were still excellent mainstream games being made like back in the good old days. I fear that low-budget projects will never be quite capable of filling the void which the demise of big budget non-retarded games has left behind.

 

No need to mess with autoexec.bat and config.sys anymore.

 

Obviously everything is better, because now you have everything you had then, and much more.

 

interfaces.
even if now they're growing again worse and worse, early interfaces were a kick in the nuts. only vert few old games are still playable because of this to me, and it's a shame because many old time games would be awesome, much better than today's popamoles, if only they had decent controls.

 

Yeah, but that's just because you need to be connected to the internet at all times just to play a single player game instead.

 

The prices.

20, 15 years ago, here where I live, games were sold for the price of a monthly rent. And without internet, pirating was hard work. Oftentimes a floppy disk was damaged. Sometimes the crack was borked and you could get stuck after putting dozens of hours in (Lands of Lore anybody?). No support, no patches, no manuals. Couldn't speak English, couldn't understand jack. Hardware was shit, MSDOS was shit, early Windows was shit, pixelhunting was shit, SoundBlaster was expensive and PC speaker was shit and I still have no clue what the fuck is the difference betwen expanded and extended memory and why neither was ever sufficient.

It was glorious.

 

Doing head-fit on c64 tape-deck.
Memory management.
Cleaning ball mice.

Focus on graphical improvements and other forms of insubstantial bling resulting in often excellent but dated on arrival games bombing.

Also planar shockwaves everyfuckingwhere in early accelerated games later on.

Oh, FMV games were shit, but:
1. I never really played them.
2. We're suffering from pretty much the same, only in-engine these days, with QTEs and depry cutscenes everywhere.

 

Graphics race has finally come to a halt. I mean all these new games barely look better than Crysis which came out in 2007. This is a good thing. "our game has better graphics that predecessors" was an important marketing tool which made people(and developers) ignore actual quality of the game.

 

Cumbersome interfaces, but that already inclined in the early 90s.

 

This too.
Lack of custom key bindings in particular.

 

I was happy when we moved on from 320x240 res.

 

-Awkward control schemes, interfaces, clunky, unresponsive character movement etc. This is one thing modern games do right. I wish I could play a game like Bioforge with the controls of Dead Space.
-All the technical stuff like installing a game from 8 disks or 5 cds, games that require the disc to be played, memory management in dos etc.
-Shitty music/sound quality, though music was still better than the watered down "elevator music" in modern games.
-Hardware becoming obsolite much faster than it does now.

 

# Early 3d graphics were a horrible, but necessary step. It had to evolve somehow. But yeah, the biggest problem was when 3D was needlessly forced upon 2D franchises (King's Quest 8, Simon The Sorcerer 3D, Earthworm Jim 3D, Monkey Island 4, etc.) A few games actually benefitted from the transition, like Duke Nukem 3D and GTA3.

# Interfaces. Oh god, how I do NOT miss most interfaces today. Blackthorne is a very recent example of a game I played with a horrible interface. We were seeing clunky interfaces as late as 2001 (Gothic), and I think that improved interfaces is the biggest incline of the post-2000 gaming era.

# Manual management of system resources. Inserting a new hard disk into a computer in 1992 was a pain and a half. Once you had DOS (or its equivalent, anyone remember DR DOS?) installed, then you had to re-write the AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS files to manage your memory, install the necessary drivers and set the keyboard language, etc. In the last years you installed third-party software like QEMM386 to do it for you. In some cases the "basic" configuration wasn't needed, so boot disks had to be used (Murder!, Ultima 7) to play the games. And that's BEFORE you factor in how to properly set up the game and one's sound card so that they would recognize one another. Once Windows 95/98 was the de facto standard, the same applied to the early 3d graphics cards.

# CD-ROM drives. The problem with these was that they became too fast, too quickly. Some games were programmed for 2X or 4X drives, which spun the disc constantly, meaning no spin-up times were ever needed. Modern-day CD-ROM drives are at least 50X with spin-down and spin-up times based on disc activity.

 

It should've evolved somewhere else than on Gabriel Knight 3 then.

 

I really think the problem with UIs is only a problem in retrospect.
Because I don't remember thinking "man, I wish this game had better controls" when playing stuff on my Spectrum clone. You didn't know better, unless you ended up playing a game that came with better controls than usual. And even then, there was no whining of "waaah, can't play these other games anymore now".
Truth is, we have been popamolized. Whining that you can't play a game because of the UI is the essence of popamole.

 

having good taste is now?

 

I don't like you, please refrain from quoting and/or brofisting me in the future. Thank you.

 

No prob

 

Another thing I'm definitely not missing is CD-ROM drives that when spinning sounded like a plane taking off.

 

1. How games were expensive and many were hard/impossible to get in potato. And pirating was both expensive and unreliable.
2. Difficult to patch games due to lack of internets.

I also think that actual early 3d was pretty nice, it's the period that most dumbfucks younger gamers refer to as early 3d (late nineties) that indeed sucked with its blurry "accelerated" textures.

 

The way we wait for the CD Drive to work its clunky ass is too bothersome. You just have to make cd image in HDD because you just cant bear hearing it groan. PC gaming take a jump in speed/quality once virtual drive (and cd imaging) apps start working reliably.

EDIT: And fuck nostalgia! Anyone remember copy shits from one machine to another and have to make a second backup just to be sure? Floppy disks suck like nobody business.

EDIT: And bloater-than-kwan Norton AV was the best of all antivirus application. My precious rams!