Retro Gaming Top 5 - Part 32 - Things that Sucked About Retro Gaming!
Retro games were awesome to play, from the rivalry between Mario and Sonic, Solving the puzzles in Zelda and no loading screens. But lets face it, retro games, as good as they are, back in the 80's and early 90's, it wasn't as rosy as many remember. There were a few aspects to the older games and consoles that really did suck/Blow at times.
Here is 5 things that really sucked about retro gaming.
5 – Arcade Difficulty.
In the early 80's, most games were ported from their arcade counterparts. Yes you now have the benefit of not having to pump a machine full of money, but the difficulty remained. Unlike modern titles were the difficulty level can be changed in accordance with your age and gaming ability, arcade games have only one level, and sometimes on a few of the titles, you nearly always had to start back at the beginning if you ran out of lives and died.
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4 – Glitch's and Bugs.
If a game is released today and someone sees or finds a glitch or problem with the game, you can be rest assured that the developers will create a patch for the game to fix the bug. It seems to be pretty standard scenario for this to happen today. When the retro gaming boom happened in the early 80's and even into the 90's and 00's, the game you bought at the game store, is the final product. So if it is sold with a glitch or bug, that can be found in every game sold, you have to deal with it and put up with it. Unless you take the game back to the store and complain like a mad man, chances are you will never get your money back and be stuck with a game that will never be fixed.
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3 – Advertising.
Today's top titles and even Indie ones have great advertising campaigns. You can almost guarantee that you were shown the in game graphics, what the game is about and any special features the game has. When you take a stroll back to the 80's or there about, Advertising was more about people shouting words at you through the screen. The best examples of this was the Atari Jaguar and Sega Launch adds, which hardly ever sold us on any gaming info. It was just a time for buzz words and catch phrases like Do the Math, Feel the Power and my fav, Too Much Fun with the mouse that humps the gamboy.
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2 – No Saves.
The majority of retro games could not be saved. It the the cold hard truth. If you wanted to complete a game, you had to do it in just one sitting. Yes you could pause the game and leave it on over night while you sleep, but nearly no one did that. Only a select few games like Snakes revenge had code saves. If you wanted to save the game, you had to write down a god awfully long code and then when you want to start again where you left off, you had to input that same code. If you wanted to save again after you progressed some more. You would have to do the whole thing all over again. It wasn't until the Play station came up with the idea of memory cards to save your game data in the 90's that allowed us to permanently save games. Everything before that was no saves or passkey saves.
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1 – Bad Games.
If you used to want a new game, you would go down to the store and browse all the different titles that were available. Back then we didn't have the web to research which game we would like to buy, we only had magazines and they only concentrate on the latest and greatest titles. It is quite amazing the number of bad games that were available. So you buy a new game, slam it into your console and bam, it is absolutely shit. And there is nothing you can do about it. You could try to return it to the store, but most of the time you were stuck with what you got.
I got a game for my old NES back in 88 called Silent Surface, it was suppose to be an all guns blazing battle/submarine simulation game, turned out to be a very slow and tedious game with minimal functionality and little to no action gameplay. It was diabolical, I had to save up my spends for weeks to buy that thing and it was just horrible, so I went back to star fox. All we had to go on was the cover art which back then, was very misleading.
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but apart from all the problems we had to put up with, gaming in the golden age of games was fantastic, as long as you chose the right console and games.
Thanks for reading.
Stu @TechMojo
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Thanks a lot for the tag!! I liked this article.
I agree with these five points....
I think it's more of a problem that the mainstream games these days are too easy... I like easy games but I wish that the difficulty made more sense in the game's world.
Not always!!
No Saves? as far as I know... SNES had save files way before Playstation 1!! But I agree with password games... it's so frustrating that it actually become interesting for me now that saving became the norm.
I don't mind the lack of Advertising much because trailers ruin most of the games right now, while I watch trailers and read about games before getting them now... I loved the days where I put a game I don't know anything about in my PS1 and it becomes one of my favorites (Chrono Trigger was one of them).
For bad games, I think there are worse games right now than the retro age... the barriers are removed so anything that can be techically called a game is sold these days... Actually even AAA titles are called bad now... it all depends on perspective and taste. (But this coupled with the lack of advertising at the retro age is what can be called a problem... not each one of these points alone.)
thanks for the insight good sir. much appreciated. ;) and yeah the SNES did have save files but if you switched out the cartridge, the save files were wiped. the memory card enabled permanent save files.
Didn't know that, thanks for the info !!
no worries.
Nice, tip! :)
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STOPThis is like a walk down gaming memory lane for me. Fond memories of my Acorn Electron with it's massive 32k memory! The joys of the tape drive going beep bloop buur while loading games which had an annoying tendency of crapping out half way through the load and you had to start all over. And then the magazines with little games you can input in by punching in 3 A4 pages of code - and then get something wrong in the middle and it never wants to run -_- Kids today, apps and iPad - easy life.