Memes

Rose tinted glasses. Games were buggy as hell. Many times unbeatable in certain conditions.

The DOS version of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was missing a platform in the third zone, and literally couldn't be beaten.

Sometimes the ability to patch is good.

Remember having to stop mid install to put the next disc in?

I prefer waking my console and pressing a button to play, no disc fumbling

Me, an intellectual, modding a game for the next 36 hours straight...then quitting after 2 days

In the early days, cartridges were kinda like swapping out the RAM/SSD each time, pre-loaded with a game. Wasteful and expensive, even back then, but it was the best way to do it for the time.

There was a short while there where DVDs and and CDs had a perfect balance between storage and read speed, where you could keep the game files on optical media while still accessing it fast enough to have reasonable load times. BluRay and hdDVD increased the capacity, but not the read speed enough to match.

We could go back to games coming on flash media, which switch does still do, but switch games don't have 3d models and textures at the fidelity levels of other modern platforms.

With current technology, delivering digital media on a storage medium that has the performance to actually play from it, is kinda like gift cards. Like yeah, it'd be nice, but I'd rather just have the NVME storage drive/money so I can use it for whatever I want.

Maybe there will be another ultra cheap read-only storage medium one day, but right now, it's not a thing.

Pros of disc games: ready to play and you own the game.

Cons: game breaking bugs exist and asking devs to send you game patches is awkward af.

You also just have to cope with whatever broken glitches there are in the game and find a way around them because aint no patch no hotfix no nothing is coming to save you

Yeah, but when we did things like that we actually had to finish games before we sold them.

All I remember is having to go to the store, walk around the store and hope they still have it, go to the counter and pay for it and then having to go all the way back home to play it.

Now you click a button, make yourself a sandwich and the game is ready to go.

I mean you DID get updates, just hidden in different print runs/regional releases of games.

Its why speedrunners prefer a lot of japanese releases of earlier titles; Because back when Japan was the center of videogame culture, they'd get the first release of most games which often meant the buggiest version.

I sure loved having games release in several separate version with different bugs depending on which lot of discs/cartridge you got.

Bro do you remember what load times were like back then?

Well yes, of course Pepperridge Farm remembers this.

I love games that get updated and change as the years go by! I think it's one of the most incredible things I've seen in gaming

Except when the game sucked, then it was a waste of time

Switch games still use physical cartriges (...SD cards) and it's pretty rad tbh.

I miss being able to play a game without paging through 50 pages of legalese and having to accept their agreements.