I still have my classic Nintendo systems, NES, SNES, and N64, and they still work. When I feel like reliving my childhood and teen years, I simply insert the game cartridge and flip the on switch. Almost instantly, the game is ready to play.
I also have a PS4, and it seems like every time I buy a new game (and I buy hard copies whenever I can), I always have to download and install some 40 sesquibazillion gigabyte update that takes hours to download and install. Good god! The nearest video game retailer is an hour away, so I’ve already had to drive two hours round trip to buy the damn game, by the time the damned updates finish, the time I had planned to play the game is gone!
As it is that you have a PS4, I would think that you were aware that the games are much better. It is progress.
ETA: I could play “Adventure” on my Atari when I was a kid by flipping a switch. As an adult, I had to wait a few hours while Fallout 4 downloaded and installed, then another hour or so dialing in the facial features of my dude. It is better.
I mean now if games don’t work, they can be fixed. This allows games to be a hell of a lot more complex than they used to be.
I’m a PC gamer though, so it’s almost never been about putting the disc in and playing… but good things have come from that. some of the best things in gaming in fact.
Step 1) Order your game on Amazon and save yourself the round trip.
Step 2) Install the game the day before you plan to play it. When it starts downloading the update, put it into rest mode. It’ll keep downloading.
Step 3) Enjoy your game whenever you like.
Cartridges were nice and all, but there’s a reason why Sony dominated the market with the original Playstation. Nintendo’s insistence on sticking with cartridge technology is considered one of the biggest bungles in gaming history.
Or there’s always the Nintendo DS series. Put in the cartridge and enjoy. It’s a solid system, but nothing on it will ever approach what you get with more memory and processing power.
I remember every Nintendo, even if they were manufactured several years apart, had the same problem where the springs wouldn’t hold the cartridge in the right position, so you had to put the cartridge in, jiggle it, pull it out, blow on it, do a little dance, put it back in…etc. for several minutes before you could play your game.
Plus, god knows PC gaming has gotten easier. When I was a kid, you used to have to reconfigure the memory layout of the computer for each game.
Configure for type of video card, configure sound card [and hope the game supports what you have] then configure for everything else … I hate playing stuff that is effectively VGA DOS and hell if I can remember what type of sound card I had …
I used to have an Amiga set up next to my PC, and had Eye of the Beholder 1 for both platforms, and the graphics and sound were better on the Amiga and you could tell visually that it was running smoother.
Though I will never miss playing floppy disc games where they are on half a dozen floppies and you get prompts to change discs … I think one of my games was on 12 discs…
If you had shown Atari/Colecovision era me, or even Genesis era me, some of the games today I would have hyperventilated and died. So I guess it’s progress. Some initial patching seems like a small price to pay.
There may be later patching but don’t consoles allow that to be pushed while you’re not playing? I rarely have to wait on updates with Steam since it just handles that in the background.
I will say that it is my impression that, back in the day when games went out on cartridges, they tended to go out FINISHED, not sort-of-finished, with a day 1 update that included everything that the game’s makers found wrong during late beta-testing, but didn’t have time to include in the original disc, etc. Of course, now that the game is just downloaded, you’d think that wouldn’t be a problem any more, but it still is. The push to get the game published, and the revenue stream running, outweighs getting the game right. So now, we download something that sort of works, and within a week or two we get version 1.1, correcting everything majorly wrong.
I just bought a new laptop and had to install all of my Origin and Steam games from my old device to my new one. It took over 24 hours to re-install Sims IV.
Not only has the internet created opportunities for post-launch patching, but it also gives developers access to enormous amounts of data.
You can hire two hundred testers to scour a game for six months, or you can launch (or hold a beta) and get much more information in a sliver of a fraction of the time.
Yes and no… There are people participating in a beta test, and then there are beta testers. An ordinary person might notice “Sometimes the screen turns upside-down! Aargh!”, and then quit the game. Or they might like the rest of the game enough that they’ll keep it, and just restart whenever that happens. And maybe, if you’re lucky, they’ll file a bug report that says “sometimes the screen turns upside-down”, and then leave it at that. They’re there to play the game, not to help fix it. An actual tester, though, will actively try to make the screen turn upside-down, and eventually figure out that it happens whenever you equip the Helm of Magnificence and the Shield of Reflection at the same time and then face due south with a monster on the north half of the screen, and submit a bug report stating that. And all the time that they’re working on producing exactly the right conditions, that’s all they’re doing in the game: They’re not wasting time gathering 50 rat tails or whatever the regular players are doing (unless they think that that’s related to the bug). And once the debuggers have the detailed bug report, then they can see about figuring out what in the code is causing that, and how they can fix it.
Even with a massive open beta, I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s still only about the same two hundred people actually working to test the game, in a way that’s productively useful.