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.
Ya but there’s too much. Now we have games getting out half-finished because they know they can patch it later after the public pays full price too beta test it.
It’s almost like there’s good and bad parts.
But beforehand a bad game was bad forever. Now it can be fixed.
Cyberpunk was a buggy mess at launch, but they did eventually fix it and make a solid game.
It’s a shame they fixed Cyberpunk.
It’s rare when a company fixes a bad game.
Has The Lord of the Rings: Gollum been patched into a good game?
I don’t buy games until they’re good. No Man’s Sky and Cyberpunk were both games I waited years to buy.
They’re also rare exceptions. Most games that suck at launch are forever sucky, even if they’re improved somewhat.
Then just don’t play that game LMAO, like bad games are launched from time to time and we should learn to ignore them and move on to play the good games.
If your solution is “just don’t play a bad game” then you have no reason to complain about old bad games either.
“Just don’t play them”
And once it’s sufficiently patched being angry about spending three years with an unfinished game is considered toxic entitled gamer behavior and you’re supposed to pretend like it didn’t happen.
Uhm let me just to an rpm-ostree update first, see you in an hour
The only games I tend to play these days are the ones that I don’t have to update before playing. Such a nuisance to be always online.
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.
I want this so much. I dream about making cartridges that are glorified PCIE NVME caddys and the slot on your console being essentially a PCIEx4 slot.
Maybe we could port some games and wrap them up as flatkpaks.
I’m just spit balling but it could work.
Why would you want that? Do you like getting gift cards instead of the money?
There’s a reason storage media gets cheaper per byte as you go up in capacity, because 30 small drives with their own PCBs and controllers and ram-caches, instead of one big one, isn’t better.
At most, I could get behind taking your memory card with you to a games store, and have them copy game files onto it from a local archive drive.
But who tf looks at all the BluRay boxes in the games section and thinks “these should all have an entire SSD in them.” At least optical media only distributes the actual storage component, all read/write components are in the drive.
Maybe the blue ray box should have an entire SSD in them or some kind of NextGen Compact flash as long as it’s a standard format and not a proprietary format like a switch game. You can buy blank CDs, DVDs, SD cards and there are standards in place to make them readable by entire fleets of devices.
It’s harder for games but I’m coming at this from a games preservation angle.
Games keep getting bigger and require installation to drive to effectively load assets quickly. I really envy the ability to not have to perform an installation to the device. If your game was simply its own storage device again then you could have that plug and play like experience back and also have that ~4GBps read that even the cheapest NVME drives can offer.
I have DVDs, but I also have MKV files, and I have the ability to go between these formats. I suggested something like flatpak because a universal physical media image format for games would be just one more way to easily preserve content offline indefinitely and neatly keep it pretty platform agnostic.
That was my train of thought. I know the likelihood of this being done by a real company is slim to none because of DMCA and over engineering another format is pointless if they can force everything to be download only IRL but I would like to push back and I can’t easily archive all this stuff forever on an ever growing 48TB Nas on my home. I would like offline ownership and convenience please.
If it’s going to be too expensive for a company to put Alan Wake Two onto physical media then I’d like a way to do it myself so it continues to work when epic decides they want to pull a Warner Bros and rip it off the internet forever and claim it was a loss to get tax breaks. It would also be cool if it didn’t have to install and it just started.
I understand the difficulty involved with that but we’re halfway there with software running containerized on Linux.
A man can dream.
Interestingly, the performance aspect is one of the reasons some phone manufactures quote for removing the SD card slot. The gap between the performance of onboard storage and SD cards keeps growing, so people that add an SD card to their Android phone and store all their apps on it have a bad experience because the software isn’t really designed with such slow storage in mind any more.
Maybe SD Express will help? There’s still some issues with it and it’s still expensive, but in theory it should be able to support 800+ MB/s read speeds. Not as fast as an NVMe drive of course, but faster than a SATA SSD.
Maybe the little storage cards from the Xbox Series X need to become a thing that’s more widely used. I’d guess they’re just M.2 2230 NVMe drives inside. Would be an interesting distribution mechanism for games (like a modern cartridge format) but they’re just too expensive for that at the moment.
there where DVDs and and CDs had a perfect balance between storage and read speed
90% of the games didn’t need that much storage. As someone growing up in a country with no copyright laws at the time, I was used to 100-200 games on a single CD. Then my dad got an official copy of MK Trilogy and I remember thinking how wasteful it was to use an entire CD for one game (you could physically see on the surface of the CD how much data was recorded on it, and it was mostly unused space).
Then there was the rare game that used not only the entire storage, but needed multiple CDs for the whole thing (e.g. Phantasmagoria).
We could go back to games coming on flash media, which switch does still do
Switch games get online updates too though. They’re not much different from other platform games in that regard.
The overall issue being discussed is not physical media vs downloading games. It’s the fact that the games you get are not a final playable version, but still need additional downloads to make them playable (zero-day patches are a norm these days).
I remember when games didn’t need updates, they just worked, or the bugs they had were cool (or annoying and required workarounds). Though I guess it makes sense that since games are more complex and larger now, they end up having more bugs and need more updates these days.
Me, an intellectual, modding a game for the next 36 hours straight…then quitting after 2 days
The likelihood of the game simply not working with that much modding done to it is very high, even with load order amenities
You’re not wrong, but I can’t help myself. Just one more mod…
Except when the game sucked, then it was a waste of time
I prefer waking my console and pressing a button to play, no disc fumbling
Turn on PS2
Disc starts spinning
Red screen of death shows up telling me the disc is invalid
Take out disk and wipe it thoroughly
Pray
Repeat 1-5 times until it works
Yeah, good times…
Red screen of death shows up telling me the disc is invalid
laughs in unlocked PS2 with HDD
Never had this issue with a Nintendo 64 :P
I don’t think I ever had issues with the cartridges.
My copy of Beetle Adventure Racing on N64 went through the washing machine after it got picked up with my bedsheets. Left it in the sun for an hour afterwards and popped it back into the console and it kept working perfectly. I don’t know why any console devs ever decided that discs were better than cartridges; it’s just objectively untrue.
The issue was that you can hold far more data on a CD - 650MB on a CD vs 64MB on the largest N64 cartridges. The N64’s 3D hardware was far superior to the Playstation, so sometimes I wonder if having a larger storage medium could have resulted in even better games.
Take a look at what Kaze Emanuar is doing with SM64 if you’re curious what the N64 can do with modern software practices ;D
Yeah I’ve seen his videos - very impressive. He’s spent years working on it though (way more than most N64 devs that built commercially released games), and compiler optimizations that exist today didn’t exist back then.
I don’t think compiler optimizations matter much - supposedly the final build was compiled without optimizations, presumably by mistake, and the N64 has very specific hardware which compilers don’t know how to optimize for.
What we certainly do have are much more powerful machines and software in general, letting you test, analyze and profile code much more easily, as well as vast amounts of freely available information online - I can’t really imagine how they did it back then.
RRoD was 360. PS2 was one of the most durable consoles ever.
I think the 2600 and SNES take the prize for durability. 64 was durable, unless you have the DK64 nightmare game console and played in the sun.
They mean a red screen of death you’d get when the CD was invalid, not a RRoD.
For real. I remember that despite our best efforts discs would get scratched occasionally, and try keeping those disks pristine with kids. That mechanical drive was also a common and expensive point of failure that’s guaranteed to wear out eventually because of those moving parts.
It’s not all sunshine and rainbows, but I think there’s a tendency to glorify the past and hyperfocus on the disadvantages. We forget that there were parts of the past that really sucked.
Cartridge blow jobs
You still had to install the game with a disc most times.
Not on any console older than Xbox/PS2.
Not on consoles. I just bought tony hawk pro skater 2 and popped that shit right in my ps1
Not in the cartridge era! Just pop it in and play.
Oh I’ve been an exclusive pc player.
Well yes, of course Pepperridge Farm remembers this.
Chocolate cookies & goldfish crackers & breads & rolls & pastries. Pepperidge Farm.
Switch games still use physical cartriges (…SD cards) and it’s pretty rad tbh.
I mean… On PC you could grab a bunch of blue rays, burn game files onto them, and then mount them as storage drives whenever you wanted to run a particular game.
But why would you do that? Why would you prefer your game library be stored that way?
Even with my PS Vita, the second that hacked firmware enabled using an SD card adaptor and dumping all my games, and just having them all installed all the time, that’s what I did.
I was livid that the cost of digital copies and the memory cards was artificially blown up so badly, that the most “economical” way to bring a bunch of games with me was 30 storage cards instead of one big one.
A fellow PS Vita enjoyer in the wild
There a dozens of us!
Really want Gravity Rush on PC. More people need to know about that fantastic game.
SD Express should help with this once it’s more production-ready, as in theory it supports read speeds of 800MB/s. The highest-end ‘regular’ SD cards are around 230MB/s.
For systems that need faster speeds, I wonder if we’ll ever see cartridges with an M.2 2230 NVMe drive in them, I guess kinda similar to the storage cards for the Xbox Series. Maybe when the price comes down.
Bro do you remember what load times were like back then?
LOL, what load times? On old consoles, you hit the power switch and you’re instantly at the title screen.
My mind personally goes back to cartridges here. But yeah, load times on early disc games were atrocious.
Ah yes
I don’t know what this gif is about; blowing in cartridges was an NES thing, not an SNES thing.
I’m with you - I never had problems with my SNES games starting, whereas having to re-insert NES games was common. If other people had problems with SNES games, I never heard about it.
It was shocking when I learned many years later that blowing on the cartridge did nothing.
Blowing on a cartridge was a cartridge thing. The idea being to blow dust off the connector pins, the console itself is irrelevant.
Of all the consoles I ever owned or played at other people’s houses, the NES was the only one anybody ever blew on.
My lived experience trumps anything you can try to claim. You lose; good day sir!
I never owned a NES, but had a SNES and my brother also borrowed his friend’s Mega Drive (Genesis for those of you in the US) from time-to-time. All of us would blow the connectors on the cartridges, regardless of console. If anything went wrong with a game, the first step to troubleshoot was to take the cartridge out and give it a good blow.
It was never about how the console actually worked, a five year-old isn’t going to logically think about that. It was all about a perceived performance increase by doing it.
in all your 12 years
All I remember is having to go to the store, walk a 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 have to admit, half the reason I stopped pirating was that Steam made it so easy to just click and play.
But you get obese if you make yourself a sandwich every time the game crashes, because only buggy messes get released nowadays…
If you care about your health, don’t buy overpriced bugged crap!
That’s why you wait half a year and get the game for half the price without major bugs.
I miss being able to play a game without paging through 50 pages of legalese and having to accept their agreements.
You kind of always had to. At least on PC.
For the purposes of this contract “you” means you. “Purchase” means rent. “Buy” means we take your money without guarantees of any sort. “Own” means we own you.
For consoles, yeah that was great. The problem was when you had to download a game on PC either from disc or maybe you used a service like shockwave to get your games. Then the installation felt like it took forever as a kid.
