Things we DON'T miss from old games

[aozgolo]

I don't miss those crappy save systems that relied on passwords you had to input in order to skip to the part of the game you last got to. They were fucking annoying.

Only slightly less annoying were the ridiculous save requirements for NES Battery Paks (Hold Reset as you turn the power Off) and no save and continue option.

-Expansion packs (this is what we had to rely on before DLC).

While I enjoy the mini-content availability that DLC offers, I think the way Oblivion handled it was best (Horse Armor not withstanding). Where you had several self contained quests and additions to the game through DLC, and one massive quest chain and new areas to explore released as a full Expansion, the terms are really interchangeable but I don't think they've gone away, the DLC term has just swallowed Expansion Packs (Dragonborn for Skyrim for example is every bit what you would expect an expansion pack to be).

On that note however, I don't miss the expansion packs that added entirely separate campaigns. I want to expand my basic experience in the game I'm already playing not play a bonus or side chapter. I don't want to choose my campaign, I want the new content right in the game from the start.

As for the real things I don't miss? Well...

-FMV Cutscenes, primarily I'm speaking about any cutscene in a game that doesn't fit the game's graphical style, that is like live action or just noticeably better 3D rendering than what the game produces. The dissonance of it still makes me cringe when I play older games.

-Games with a 3D worldspace sans thumbsticks. Remember the old 3D action adventure games on the PS1 that you had to rotate the camera with the shoulder buttons because they didn't have dual-shock thumbsticks yet? Yeah I hated that!

-In-game Loading bars. The "Cell Loading" thing in Morrowind drove me NUTS, and so many older games were like this where you are either plagued by frequent loading screens or loading bars because the game couldn't background load anything.

-Disc swapping. Not a big deal for some games like Final Fantasy VII, but try playing the old Baldur's Gate... it had 5 discs and certain areas were only on certain discs, causing you to sometimes have to switch out a disc 4 or 5 times in one playthrough.

-Limited Save Slots. Whether it be a 15 memory card slot limit or a three save battery backup limit, these limited save slots were terrible if you ever had more than one person wanting to play the same game. It still shows up sometimes, I had to buy Dragon Quest IX twice so both me and my G/F could have our own playthroughs.

-Highscore based game objectives. When I think classic or retro games my Nostalgia doesn't go back to the Atari, a lot of those classic games had no win scenario, there was no real plot, it was keep going until you die and beat your high score. I hated those games so much, for me there needs to be a definite final goal to reach and hopefully a story to tell.

-Text Parsers, any fan of old adventure games will know these.

-Water is a wall. Most noticeable in old school RPGs but lots of games made water either an instant death pitfall or just an impassable object you couldn't swim in.

-Tag Team Co-Op, similar to my disdain for Highscore based game objectives, I dislike games like the original Super Mario Bros. or Donkey Kong Country where the co-op was taking turns each level or each lost life, it wasn't true co-op, it was just another form of "beat the highscore" with a friend.

-Invisible Enemies. A plague in old-school RPGs was the invisible random encounter that took you to a separate battle screen (which I also hated)

-Your entire keyboard is hotkeyed to something. This is arguably why I still dislike most MMOs, I don't want to memorize what 50 freaking buttons do, either give me an easy option to access everything or limit all my actions to the left half of the keyboard only and don't force my hand to travel any. Finger gymnastics suck.

-Game Overs. I like a good challenge, and I like a bit of a penalty for failing, but completely making you start from absolutely na-da zilch just made me go play something else, not try again.

-Action elements in menu driven RPGs. I love turn-based RPGs, and was never a fan of the whole active time battle system, the time bar was more of a gimmick for difficulty instead of programming enemy encounters to have ACTUAL difficulty. I also hated the "press the button now for a more powerful attack" systems like in Super Mario RPG even though I loved that game. The worst things though is when a completely out of place action mini-game is thrown into the story of an RPG (Looking at you Final Fantasy 7 Motorcycle Chase).


I bet I could go on but I'll give this thread room to breathe.

 

[Nadia Castle]

Pages and pages of static images when you boot the game up. It's a small thing, but when I played 'Bully' on the PS2 yesterday it's surprising how much legal information the game used to throw at you before you got into it.

Also abilities that get used once then thrown away. Like being instructed to crouch to sneak then the game never having a single stealth level again. Most modern games have enough polish to throw out things like that all together before it ships.

 

[Varrdy]

Easy: boot disks and everything else that came with trying to get most high-end games to run on PC back in the DOS era. I mean can anyone today conceive of a world where you'd need to reboot your machine every time you wanted to play a game?

What's funny too is that most of those games could run in a browser window these days

I had to bugger about in my old PC's config.sys file to shunt a load of processes up into higher memory, thus freeing up the fabled and precious "EMS Memory" that only a few games - the ones I wanted to the play the most, natch - needed in order to run! For some reason it didn't like boot discs so this was the only way...

 

[kommando367]

Fixed camera angles like in DMC1 and Onimusha. I've gone through way too many doors and loading screens 3x just because I took one step back.

Also, the lack of checkpoints 'nuff said.

 

[Teoes]

I think for me it's mostly games coming on multiple cassettes/floppy disks. They were always so obtuse for young stupid me - sitting down to play a game often resulted in half the time being taken up trying and failing to actually get the game to work before frustration and impatience set in.

See when my NES came along? Cartridge-based gaming was a revelation. Hallelujah.

 

[Doom972]

Having to restart the whole game after a certain amount of tries. I don't see any good reason for this to exist.
Not to be confused with permadeath in roguelikes, which is fine.

I think it depends on the game, i like games where you aren't trying to complete it but just trying to see how far you can get and how many points you can get. There's something cool about playing a game for ages and suddenly reaching a level you never saw before. It's just a different way to play a game and it obviously require that the game is fun to play from the get go.

Another thing i don't miss is FMV games with horrible mini games and QTE "Gameplay". Those games has got to be some of the worst ever made. And games as horrible as Ubik for the ps1 is also a rarity, games so poorly designed that you can barely control them and so slow loading that it would take extreme patience to wrap your head around the game. This one also ties in with the fixed camera angles as you most often die horribly becaus you can't see what the hell is going on.

Not only fun, but different. No matter how fun a game is, having to go through the exact same levels multiple times without getting to finish it gets old fast.

On roguelikes, levels are randomized, so it's fine since every playthrough is a new randomized experience. That's why I said that permadeaths in roguelikes are fine.

 

[Denamic]

Keyboard turning and other weird-ass control schemes. Some old games have a severe lack of strafing. And some games have important action mapped on the other side of the fucking keyboard. Fuck than shit.

-Disc swapping. Not a big deal for some games like Final Fantasy VII, but try playing the old Baldur's Gate... it had 5 discs and certain areas were only on certain discs, causing you to sometimes have to switch out a disc 4 or 5 times in one playthrough.

You could just unload the data from the discs into the install folder and edit the config file to read from there instead of the discs. That way you'll never have to deal with swapping at all.

 

[MrBaskerville]

Another thing i don't miss is FMV games with horrible mini games and QTE "Gameplay". Those games has got to be some of the worst ever made. And games as horrible as Ubik for the ps1 is also a rarity, games so poorly designed that you can barely control them and so slow loading that it would take extreme patience to wrap your head around the game. This one also ties in with the fixed camera angles as you most often die horribly becaus you can't see what the hell is going on.

Not only fun, but different. No matter how fun a game is, having to go through the exact same levels multiple times without getting to finish it gets old fast.
[/quote]
I think it depends on the game, if it´s too easy, then it does get a bit tedious. I think it´s like playing a fighting game or a racing game, you try to master each level which imo is the fun part of playing these games. You play a fighting game to learn each character and in a racing game the fun lies in learning all the curves in each track. I´ve been playing a lot of Castlevania for Nes recently and i think it´s fun to start over and over, because each time i have to concentrate and use all my skill to accomplish anyhing and the better you get, the less you die and therefore you don´t have to start over as often. I think it´s just a matter of balance, and taste obviously^^.

 

[moosemaimer]

My occasional desire to restart Fallout is immediately shut down when I start clicking around outside of the vault and remember that the gameplay itself is slower than cold molasses, and the inventory is just a single vertical column that only displays 5 items at a time.

I tried playing Fallout for the first time last year and I couldn't make myself keep going. It may have fantastic mechanics, writing, etc. but that interface is awful. I've been gaming since 1984, I played the earlier generations when they were current, and now I can't go back to them because they're so damn clunky. It's like trying to convince someone to drive a car that needs to be hand-cranked, because it was just so great at the time.

-In RTS games, putting limits on the number of units you could select at once. Also, not being able to queue units at a production facility.

I remember driving my parents crazy with Command & Conquer. UNITREADYBUILDINGUNITREADYBUILDINGUNITREADYBUILDING

 

[aozgolo]

Keyboard turning and other weird-ass control schemes. Some old games have a severe lack of strafing. And some games have important action mapped on the other side of the fucking keyboard. Fuck than shit.

-Disc swapping. Not a big deal for some games like Final Fantasy VII, but try playing the old Baldur's Gate... it had 5 discs and certain areas were only on certain discs, causing you to sometimes have to switch out a disc 4 or 5 times in one playthrough.

You could just unload the data from the discs into the install folder and edit the config file to read from there instead of the discs. That way you'll never have to deal with swapping at all.

I'm aware of that, of course back in the day I had Win98 on a 3.7GB HDD, unloading all the data wasn't feasible, and for multi-disc console games, full installs aren't even an option.

 

[Denamic]

I'm aware of that, of course back in the day I had Win98 on a 3.7GB HDD, unloading all the data wasn't feasible, and for multi-disc console games, full installs aren't even an option.

I had a 500MB HDD back then. It was amazing. I think it still works, but I've no motherboards compatible with it any more.

 

[shrekfan246]

Health packs-

I'm not very good at shooters. I tend to tunnel-vision and periodically stop moving while firing, and I'm terrible at leading targets even when the character is standing still, so I actually prefer games like Deus Ex: Human Revolution or Mass Effect, which have slower, generally cover-based shooting and health bars that either regenerate over time, can be healed at will by inventory items, or both. Scrounging for health and armor packs is one of the biggest things I hate about old-school shooters.

Thing is, most competitive medpack layouts are along contested paths, it's not traditional cover but it is the predecessor of regenerating health but unlike regen health where you aare encoruaged to play defenseively, you are encouraged to keep on the offensive to pick up the +5 bonus as a reward for gracefully avoid getting killed and 25 for quick detours from the main health paths with the tricky to get ones being the big reward.

I fail to see how that changes the fact that because of my relatively poor in-game dexterity, having use-on-pickup health packs in a game frequently eventually puts me in the position of having 15 health, 0 armor, and about fifty enemies between me and the next health pickup.

I understand how the design works. But I still generally don't like it, because it actively impedes on my ability to play a game. When there are items or abilities the player can use at will to restore health in addition to pickups, the problem is alleviated slightly, but you'll still never see me whinging about the implementation of regenerating health in shooters.

Could you elaborate some? I don't know what you mean.

Well judging by the other thread - and to be fair that's not exactly all people ever doing the talking - I get the impression that people think that DK3D type shooter design is inherently superior to any other.

Much as there is much to be praised to that kind of design (open levels filled with content, enemy variety, weapon variety, just variety really); all the bugbears seem to come down on two-weapon limits and regenerating health/shield. You get the impression that people seem to think that their shouldn't be room for both schools of design.

For context, I enjoyed Duke Nukem 3D, Blood, Serious Sam et al, but it can be done wrong. Painkiller bored me immensely, my favourite shooters are the Brothers in Arms series and the Bioshock series (loved Infinite).

I just don't subscribe to the idea that certain mechanics are inherently superior to others, rather than simply being design choices.

wait, you liked infinite as a shooter? you would honestly be the first one i heard say that, generally people seem to dislike the shooting, especially because it interrupts the rather excellent story.

You must not have been looking very hard.

Allow me to be the second person you've seen say that they loved Bioshock Infinite's gameplay. So much so that I played through twice, first on the Normal difficulty and then a second time on 1999 Mode.

 

[teebeeohh]

wait, you liked infinite as a shooter? you would honestly be the first one i heard say that, generally people seem to dislike the shooting, especially because it interrupts the rather excellent story.

You must not have been looking very hard.

Allow me to be the second person you've seen say that they loved Bioshock Infinite's gameplay. So much so that I played through twice, first on the Normal difficulty and then a second time on 1999 Mode.

but why?
what elements does the gameplay have that other games haven't done better? and what about all the stuff that was done better in the original bioshock that they just removed for no reason?

and didn't it bother you that scavenging for resources and murdering everybody you meet make no sense if the game world is in ruins and/or overrun by zombie monsters? or that the tonics don't make a lot of sense except that it's what people expected from a Bioshock game.

i get that the gameplay is enjoyable, i liked about the first half before it got tedious but i if you say you loved the gameplay i guess it must have had something special.

 

[shrekfan246]

wait, you liked infinite as a shooter? you would honestly be the first one i heard say that, generally people seem to dislike the shooting, especially because it interrupts the rather excellent story.

You must not have been looking very hard.

Allow me to be the second person you've seen say that they loved Bioshock Infinite's gameplay. So much so that I played through twice, first on the Normal difficulty and then a second time on 1999 Mode.

but why?
what elements does the gameplay have that other games haven't done better? and what about all the stuff that was done better in the original bioshock that they just removed for no reason?

Well, on the PC at least, the sound assets for the guns were absolutely phenomenal, making even the pathetic little starting pistols feel like they had a hell of an impact to them. Compare to the first Bioshock or many other pseudo-realistic shooters, where the guns feel like they might as well be shooting wads of paper. I also loved the skyhook, and the larger areas that had you jumping to and from the skylines to various different sections of the arena for better vantage points or to escape Handymen.

Really, apart from level design, I can't think of a single technical aspect of Infinite that was worse than Bioshock. The first Bioshock has the worst gameplay in the franchise so far.

and didn't it bother you that scavenging for resources and murdering everybody you meet make no sense if the game world is in ruins and/or overrun by zombie monsters? or that the tonics don't make a lot of sense except that it's what people expected from a Bioshock game.

Nope.

I could leave it at that, but this is The Escapist, where apparently "ludonarrative dissonance" and the actual creator's vision for canon are cause for outrage among the consumers, so I'll attempt to clarify.

It's a game. Not only is it a game, it's a game that takes place in a city floating in the sky. I can suspend my disbelief about the introduction of tonics to said city when there was no reason for them to exist, or for running around collecting money and bits and bobs for health or ammo. Especially since they're usually the player's choice. And you don't murder everyone you meet, which in my mind was a marked improvement over the first Bioshock. I absolutely adored the juxtaposition between shoot-fests and suddenly being in a crowded market and arcade next to a pleasant beach. Or the bar where you can go downstairs to play the guitar while Elizabeth sings, where the people only become aggressive if you've been aggressive first, or 'trespass' on their little sections for the sake of item collection.

i get that the gameplay is enjoyable, i liked about the first half before it got tedious but i if you say you loved the gameplay i guess it must have had something special.

It had a freedom of movement that I don't generally find from "bunny-hopping" games or "brown is so real" games, combined with a regenerating shield that was a buffer between the need to gather health packs and a weapon and ammo limitation that often meant needing to race around the arenas in the middle of a firefight to find another weapon with ammo so you didn't die (or racing to a vendor if you had enough money). Mix in the gun + tonic dual-wield from Bioshock 2 for smoother combat with some truly wonderful tonics like Bucking Bronco, and yeah, to me it did feel like something fairly special.

I'll freely acknowledge that other people may not share the same opinions or have even gotten the same impression of the game as I did, but the Bioshock series has always felt like a great compromise between "old-school" and "new-school" shooter designs to me, and as such I enjoy it far more than the likes of Doom, Serious Sam, Quake, or Wolfenstein and the likes of Call of Duty, Killzone, Gears of War, or Crysis.

 

[kasperbbs]

Pretty much everything.. I like my games pretty, with a good story and good voice acting. What i DON'T miss the most is repeating the game over and over again because i happened to die a couple of times because of bad game desing, lack of skill and luck.

 

[Lightknight]

Clunky controls, really bad graphics for games that were otherwise excellent, reading pages of dialogue that is now voice acted... etc.

I recently played the original 007 on my N64. It was... awful. You can't go back on some titles. Just too many advances have been made since.

 

[Atmos Duality]

Unskippable cutscenes. JRPG's are pretty guilty of this IMO. An example being Chrono Cross. There's a couple of instances in the game where there is a lot of story and exposition before you actually face the boss. And if you screw up on the boss, you need to reload your last save and go through the entire thing over again before you can try again.

*ahem*...
'Miguel'

Most people who beat Chrono Cross will involuntarily twitch after reading that name for the very reason you stated.

For those who haven't suffered through Miguel: That guy had a DUMP TRUCK of exposition right before the fight with him.
Worse, he is easily one of the hardest fights in the entire game if not -THE- hardest (since he's a cheating dick). Unlike most of the other would-be tough fights in the game, you can't trivialize it with counter-tech abuses, cheesy equips and proper trap element abuse.

Ironically, Chrono Cross had the best feature in general for a long game:
THE GLORIOUS FAST-FORWARD BUTTON
It literally sped up EVERYTHING to x3 speed when held down. Combat, cutscenes, travel...

The drawback? Only available in New Game+.

 

[Pink Gregory]

-Games that had ridiculously bad graphics,that made you say,holy mother of Cthulu,that used to be hight tech.
Remember San Andreas?

I've been playing San Andreas recently. Lordy. Much as the design is scintillating and the sun glare that actually hurts your eyes if you look directly at it is a nice touch, the character models...

Well, not so much the character models, but the animations. Half of the gun battles are literally guys standing casually with an arm outstretched with a gun in it.

It's a petty complaint, but it's there.

 

[Raggedstar]

I was waiting for a thread like this.

Unskippable Cutscenes: Total agreement and one of those things that keep old JRPGs (well, ANY game if I'm honest) replayable for me.

Lives/Continues: Again, I agree. I love platformers, but I HATE it when they include lives and continues. It's a vestigial feature from arcade games that needed to cap a player's playtime so they can toss in more quarters. It makes no sense to keep it in Mario or Sonic, and it's ESPECIALLY worse when you consider some of these games (such as Mario Galaxy) go as far as to kick you out of a game at a game over. That's pretty much the game telling you "fuck off" as opposed to even a harder platformer like Super Meat Boy where they quickly get you back in to try again. Last game I played with lives (non-Mario/Sonic) was Sly Cooper, and it didn't take them too long to kick out the lives system.

FPS Platforming: Haven't played many of them, but I hated the platforming in Half Life.

Passwords: Yyyyyep, glad we ditched those. I guess it was only a matter of time.

Lack of Autosaving/Checkpoints: When I have to quit, I need to quit NOW. Not to mention I hate dying (or in a blackout) and being placed to my last checkpoint about 30 minutes back.

Obtuse Controls: Just a general misplacement of controls (like using Select as a jump). I guess mostly a feature of old BAD games, but didn't Oddworld: Munch's Oddysee have the attack button by clicking the analog stick?

The Awkward Transition to 3D: Some really good games out there, but man did it have an ugly time. Mostly technology concerns I guess.

 

[scorptatious]

*ahem*...
'Miguel'

Him and Dario. I was oddly enough, able to beat Miguel on my first try, but that was mostly because I remember the tactic HCBailly used to beat him.

Dario on the other hand... UGH.

Kingdom Hearts 1 also had an issue with this. Particularly when you face Riku for the last time. Thankfully though, the Final Mix version gave you the option to skip cutscenes, so that's no longer an issue for me.