(Obligatory “I wish we still got pack-in material in the new games” “Oh, I wish we still got - you know - packaging these days”)
unlocks doors
Was the door locked with a red, blue, or yellow key?
I love this sort of thing! I experienced the reverse lately; I downloaded Diablo 4, closed the blinds, and got drawn into the intro cinematic. Genuinely awesome, moody, atmospheric. I was IN, so ready to play some dark and brooding spooky shit! The cinematic ends…
DLC! BUY OUR COSMETICS! HERE’S A BAJILLION DIABLO CREDIT$$! totally killed the mood. Turns out the game is always-online, even when playing solo, and I was experiencing laggy movement so I just uninstalled. Left a huge bad taste in my mouth.
First diablo game I played was 3 years ago, and I thought it was fine. Booted it up for a couple hours then never again
Currently playing through diablo 2, and holy moly is it good
Turns out the game is always-online
Just like the game before it. Which also had tacky micro-transactions.
I’ll let you guess what Diablo 5 will be like.
Wait, was it? :o I played that for a few hours and don’t remember experiencing any lag! It was a few years ago mind 😂
It’s because the games were made with passion; the creators wanted to share their story and gameplay vision with people who will appreciate it and their hard work.
Unfortunately nowadays you really have to comb through the muck to find this kind of thing, because the world is flooded with games that were made not with passion and creativity in mind, but only greed and manipulation, and greed, and deceptive marketing, and also more greed. They don’t care if you like it, they don’t have pride in their work, they don’t give a damn about a single thing other than more and more revenue.
So I think this kind of thing does still exist, in small independent developers who make something special and creative. And I love finding those things. But the swill you have to wade through to find them… ick. I mean… the Apple App Store? One gambling app after another? The games with so many forms of currency, micro-transactions, and outright deceptive promo content… tell me, please, when did Apple become bottom-feeders?!
Makes me appreciate the old days of gaming sooo much more.
That’s survivorship bias tainting your nostalgia. We collectively remember the passion poured into games like this but forget all of the the movie tie in games, cereal box games, unplayable tier of poorly made games, and games that were so mediocre to not even fall into the previous categories. Some of them get remembered but often more because of how exceptionally bad they were, such as E.T., Superman 64, Pepsiman, Phillips CDi LoZ, etc.
It’s easy to remember years like 1998 for games like LoZ OoT, Half Life, Spyro, StarCraft, Final Fantasy 7, Goldeneye 007, and DDR. It’s harder to remember the other 158 major titles released that year. While I don’t doubt there were at least some passionate people on the team of most if not every one of those titles, I’d sooner believe many of those titles were just being pushed out the door closer to release than they were passionate works from a team of faithful devs able to fully realize their vision.
I will agree that I think there’s a larger volume of no-passion games today that companies are just churning out to try to make a quick buck, but I think that’s more because it’s easier to do today than it was back in the day. I don’t think it’s because the devs of days past were more passionate about their titles. I will also agree that because of the aforementioned churned out titles that it can be harder to find titles made by truly passionate teams.
Source for my number of games released in 1998, by my own count as I didn’t see one listed: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1998_in_video_games
Well I was thinking of more like late 80s early to mid 90s. Games were written by actual writers like Roberta Williams, Jane Jensen, Sid Meir, Raymond Feist, and people like them. I’m thinking of titles by Sierra, Apogee, Activision, Brøderbund, Sir-tech, 3DO, Infocom… you get my meaning, I trust.
If you’re gonna suggest that games like Myst, Zork, all the Quest series by Sierra, the Might & Magics and Wizardry titles - if you think those were made with the kinds of greed that we have today where it’s cheaply made junk with every deceptive money-making practice imaginable… then you may just be younger and not aware of what it was like. Those titles made money, yeah, but they put their heart and soul into the quality of the product and never expected money in the billions. And they got paid ONCE for the game from each customer. And many games gave people years worth of play. Today games popup in your face telling enticing the player to spend money, and they give the player enough progress to think they know what they need to do in order to advance, only to introduce newer currency and demand money for it. Etc etc. there are dozens of tactics to scam people out of continual payments. I don’t play any of the garbage they make today. And I feel so sorry for young people now that they don’t even know what it’s like to get immersed in a game’s creative narrative for months and they already paid for all of it one time.
It’s not a fallacy, I know there were also loser titles back then, and of course. Not everything is a hit. But games like the Krondor series which were written by an actual award winning author (Raymond E. Feist)? Find me anything like that today amongst the sea of sewage. Sorry to be so negative because I know there’s some really great stuff. It’s just afloat in a vast sea of garbage and hard to find. The app shops bury them because they’re not as profitable. Greed has become all-consuming and insatiable. It’s a cancer to the whole industry.
Yeah anyway… no survivorship bias here. I lived through those times of gaming. Fuckin paradise, it was.
So this is the last game I played in my early twenties, then a gaming hiatus of 15 years (studying, dating, work…) It was on a brand new PC I had put together for my design studies. Two things I remember perfectly: A) the atmosphere was incredible and scary B) when enemies showed it ran in stop motion. Sadly I had to put my money towards more memory and better monitor and the GPU wasn’t as necessary to me at the moment.
I particularly liked that the original Unreal came with a pack-in note apologising for the crappy netcode.
Something pretty simple but that I think works very well, at the end credits, at the very end, when there’s something in the lines of “…and a special thanks, To You”.
I also thought that newer Halo games aren’t as good as the old ones, simply because in Halo 3 and Reach, the game said “Welcome!” in the beginning of the online matches. I was, like, thank you, happy to be here.
It was just stupid jump scares. It wasn’t even scary because you just knew it was coming on every long hallway.
And darkness. Thanks for the most useless flashlight in history!
And Doom 3 isn’t even that fun gameplay-wise…
Yeah, Doom 3 was so mediocre that it pretty much killed the franchise for years.
The game engine enjoyed some popularity, but id didn’t really know how to make a good “game” for that era.
It doesn’t help that all of the OG Doom developers except J. Carmack left id software years before Doom 3. No wonder it’s so different from its predecessors.
Yeah was interesting to see Carmack and Romero go different ways.
On the Carmack side you had an excellent technical execution of a fairly bland experience.
On the Romero side you had a very shoddy execution of what could have been an interesting concept… Maybe…
Of course Doom itself was fun, but not exactly made in an era that demanded much in the way of plot. Here you are, you got guns, there’s demons from hell… Go for it. The instruction manual introduction, the titles of the levels, and visual design cues were all that was plot wise.
Trying to have a half life style plot didn’t really fit the franchise. Doom 2016 both had a bit deeper plot than old Doom, but was self aware enough to have doom guy just destroy something to make the exposition go away and get on with what needs to go on.
I call it Doom: Teleport, cuz that’s all the enemies do is teleport behind you. Yawn
First, games will need to start including pack-in material again instead of just a download code and EULA.
This is how I played Doom 3 and I fell off the chair a couple of times. It was an incredible experience.
Same here, even at 15 FPS.
What did you play it on? I think I had a modded Radeon 9550 that turned it into a 9600.
I can’t remember, it was so long ago. I think I had a 9550 too. Had to run at 640x480 and turn specular and shadows off to get a decent frame rate, left bump mapping on no matter what because the game just looked like arse without it. I played through constantly turning specular and shadows on and off so I could alternate between gawking at the graphics and being able to actually play the game lol
This game contains scenes of explicit violence and gore
(Obligatory “I wish we still got pack-in material in the new games” “Oh, I wish we still got - you know - packaging these days”)
I literally went to the comments to write that :D It really is such a shame.
I still think of the National Enquirer ripoff that was included in the Zak McKraken box. Young me didn’t realise it was a hint book masquerading as a faux-gossip rag.
The trinkets and inclusions in big box games were cool, whether they were required (Lenslok, codewheels etc) or otherwise.
I remember Star Siege and MechWarrior 3 coming with a big novella book of some sort, accompanying the manual, and Sim City 3000 came with a wire bound TOME of a book lol. RTS games would often come with big foldout tech trees and stuff too.
The original manual for The Sims was really fun to read too because it was full of humorous witticisms at every turn.
I loved playing games in the dark and having the sound loud ( before headphones era). My computer room was tiny and the door was directly behind the chair. it was in the basement and you had to walk through my dad’s workshop. I got a lot of jumpscares from people coming up behind me
