Honestly, that’s the entire reason i lost interest in consoles after buying the PS4. If i need to:
1 Boot up the console.
2 Update the system (twice).
3 PSN account bullshit.
4 Insert disc.
5 Install the game.
6 Download 50GB update for the game.
7 Install said update.
8 Finally start the game.
9 Login and TOS bullshit.
10 Finally play game.I might just as well use my PC for gaming at that point. The games library is larger and the exclusives are just not worth it. Especially after Sony started releasing those on PC as well.
Especially after Sony started releasing those on PC as well.
They put a stop to that, and now it’s more clear why: they want absolute control over the price of their games.
i’ve never had to spend hours finding the ‘right driver’ for my PS4 to run a game. or having to mod the game to get it to just play.
which is why i gave up on PC gaming, I’m old and I just want to play games, I don’t wnat to spend 2-3 hours ‘troubleshooting’ every game on my PC and having to swap drivers because some games only run on some drivers.
i’ve never had to spend hours finding the ‘right driver’ for my PS4 to run a game. or having to mod the game to get it to just play.
Funny, I’ve never had to.do.those things on my PC.
that makes one of us
Two of us.
And we’re on Linux even. It has its own share of issues. Generally, if a problem is game-specific, the fixes are stuff like “switch Proton versions” (there’s a little dropdown in Steam or whatever launcher you use) or “toss some environment variable in the launch options”. But those are really a thing of the past now, stuff just works.
And it never took installing drivers for a specific game (…huh?). Installing drivers is a thing you do once, if that, during initial setup, just like you’d do account creation for a console.
– Frost
cool. I am not you. I have to do it basically every time i want to PC game, and always have.
even my nephews have to do it frequently and they just bought new gaming PCs that are a few months old.
Yeah you should probably stick with consoles then.
On PC I don’t have to rebuy games because Sony doesn’t believe in backwards compatibility.
Back in 1997 I bought the game KKnD (Krush, Kill n’ Destroy) in a local store for what would now be 110 dollars only to discover that it was broken and wouldn’t run on my machine and there was no way to get a patch for it.
I randomly got KKnD Crossfires for PS1 and we played countless hours in split screen :D
The sweet spot was getting the full game on disc and getting included DLC, having the ability to mod the game, and run private servers. It was kinda the golden era of this stage in gaming. Computers were powerful enough to give a great visual experience and studios were still interested in producing engaging storylines in triple A releases instead of just banging out battle royale games.
You could just enjoy the game as-is with a really good singleplayer campaign and then with whatever online offered. To this day I still have great memories of Half Life, Crysis, or even MoH:AA, especially the Snowy Park map. Do they compare graphically with today’s games like Fortnite? Not a chance. But you remember the story and how the game was way better at pulling you into it.
Some of the mods from this era turned out to be just as popular, if not moreso, than the original base game. Some of them live on to this day.
Sure, some Steam games offer mods and the like, but it certainly isn’t the same thing as what we had 15 or so years ago.
If you haven’t grabbed it, Black Mesa is like $3 right now during the summer sale
Never played it. I’ll have a look. Thanks.
It’s a modern day Half Life 1. Fan remake, with greatly expanded Xen levels. Obviously they got Valve’s permission, given the whole companion cube steam machine fiasco.
Okay guys 'n gals. What’s your first game you thought of while reading this greentext?
Mine is TimeSplitters 2 on PS2.
DK64. I see so much hate for it now, with people saying there are way too many collectibles, but those people fail to realize that back then most kids only had a few games that they just had to play over and over again if they wanted to play video games at all. To have a game that always had a new thing to collect even when you went to the same level for the 1000th time was a godsend.
This is def nostalgia goggles, so many games were broken buggy messes back then because there was no way to ship updates
No, they weren’t. Most had bugs, but they weren’t game-breaking. A lot of people took joy in finding and exploiting the bugs too. Dupes, etc.
Yeah, some shitty games were loaded with bugs.
bugs? nah, not a problem
whistles in Morrowind
Thats not really fair. Morrowind was so buggy someone decided they needed to remake the entire game engine to play it. I wouldn’t say most games where like that.
Bloodline the masquerade was also infested. We remember these because the games were so good they were worth fighting to get running. The ones that were buggy and bad are mostly forgotten.
yeah, back in the day it was “crashed to desktop every 15? set a timer to save every 14. this is a cool game.”
Try playing the original SEGA catalog. Lemme know how many of those games work.
Most of them? Care to provide some examples without the ridiculous “don’t work” hyperbole? Clearly most Sega games were functional, otherwise no one would’ve been playing them.
"Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.” ― Douglas Adams, “The Salmon of Doubt”
I guess GenAI slop is making me age faster, then
As someone who recently started hoarding old tools I wish that was true for all things.
We just recently got a singer 500a and its still impressive the engineering that went into that thing. The machine work is beautiful, and if you told me it was made in a CNC machine today I would of believed you.
Today modern and new, just means slave labor and plastic molded parts. Besides computers a lot of things haven’t really changed. And often when they have changed it’s for the worst. If I get a sewing machine today it would come with some app and internet connection for no reason, and would have plastic parts that struggle to get through 3 layers of cloth. While the singer 500a was meant to run 24/7 and is essentially the same exact thing.
For the most part the world has kind of been solved sense shortly after the industrial revolution. All the general commodities we interact with where mostly at their peak form back then. Dish washers, fridges, washing machines, driers. They’re all almost exactly the same as they where when they where invented. There have been minor improvements that have been added over the years but for the most part things are in general just shittier.
You can blame so many things, you can say that mass production, trickle down economics, exporting labor etc all causes this. You can say that everyones access to mass produced garbage is an indicator of wealth and poverty dropping. What I don’t think you can say anymore is that things “products” are better than they where in the old days.
I agree with your statement about cultural aspects though. Other than that when I hear some new innovative product the first thing that comes to my mind is its going to be another internet of things device that constantly bugs me and asks for more data, while providing 0 utility over the old version of the product, if anything its going to add more friction to my task, or attempt to insert a paywall into my life where one never existed before.
With games its harder to objectively say things where worse/better, but this infection of syphoning money out of every possible source infects games too. The only reason I can’t say new modern games are bad is because indie games exist. Some of those indie games actually have brought me back to a childhood state where games where actually fun.
We’re 26. The new stuff is crap, and that’s not just nostalgia goggles, it is actually objectively worse.
There’s plenty of new stuff that isn’t crap, like say indie games. But the platforms, the consoles, etc.? Those are intentionally disrespectful these days in a way even, say, the Wii/PS3 era of consoles wasn’t (and they certainly weren’t perfect either, it just started getting way worse way faster after that).
When a game sucked ass then you had a physical product you could sell or trade to offload it. Instead of the whole game getting the servers shut off and delisted within a year if it’s bad today. Even the bad games were better back then because of this
when can i stop living in this universe and switch back to the one we originally were on? man i miss it so much. That and original pizzahut
you never did and you never will.
games cost about 4x what they do today back then. you were paying 40-80 dollars per game, and they never got discounted really unless they became a huge hit and got a best seller release and maybe they went down to 20-30, in 2026 dollars, that’s between 40-160 dollars per game. which is the reason why most folks only bought like 2-4 games a year if they were lucky. now you are buying dozens of games per year for like $100-200.
In Germany you could buy most games for 12.95DM in the 90s/10€ in the 2000s, if you were willing to wait a year after the initial release. And unless you had enough money to buy the newest PC, you often had to resort to last year’s games anyway. As a comparison, I got 20DM for mowing my neighbours lawn.
These re-releases came with just a jewel case and no box, the manual was a PDF on the disk but on the other hand they often had some bugs fixed since the first release.
Why do people want physical media? It’s shit. Sorry, I have to leave my house and go take the bus to transfer some data? IPoAC is a meme, not a serious distribution system. Yet it would still be better than games on physical media!
If you don’t like the DRM that some digital copies come with I totally get that but GOG has existed for a very long time at this point. Also physical copies frequently come with more DRM than a digital copy from GOG does.
They can’t make my physical copy just not be in my physical library anymore. They sure can any digital they wish. At anytime they wish. Digital is crap because you don’t actually own it.
It would still be in your library, sure. But that doesn’t mean they can’t make it not work anymore. It needs to be on physical media and not be required to connect to a server.
I keep seeing this attitude toward physical media like everyone forgot about what happend with The Crew.
And, legally speaking, you don’t own the software on the disk, either. You just own the disk.
because it’s a physical tangible object you own.
You own your SSD, you can stick it on an SD card if you like.
Why would anyone build a whole ass in split screen mode?
A Wario game?
