cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/13809164
Ignoring the lack of updates if the game is buggy, games back then were also more focused on quality and make gamers replay the game with unlockable features based on skills, not money. I can’t count the number of times I played Metal Gear Solid games over and over to unlock new features playing the hardest difficulty and with handicap features, and also to find Easter eggs. Speaking of Easter eggs, you’d lose a number of hours exploring every nook and cranny finding them!
This brings me back. I grew up with older brothers, watching them play through games that I didn’t have the skill to complete. I remember my oldest brother playing Donkey Kong Country and slapping nearly every spot on the ground to find hidden bananas/balloons, and exploring to find the hidden games and levels. I learned a lot by sitting back and watching until it was finally my turn to play.
I, myself, never made it to the Special world on Super Mario World, but my brothers did. I can’t be sure if that’s the first place I saw the words “gnarly” and “tubular,” but only because Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were equally as popular in our early 90s household and they definitely used that “surfer” language too. I just remember thinking those words sounded weird and funny, and have a strong mental connection between them and this game.
I don’t really have a point to this comment, just reminiscing…
No microtransactions. Games were games. It’s by no means inherent to games back then, and we could absolutely have that again. But, that would require gamers everywhere to suddenly not be whores to mini little dopamine hits like gambling and dark pattern addictions in order to push the industry’s overton window back towards responsibility, respect, and integrity.
I remember spending ages reading the original Homeworld manual/ lore book.
TUNIC
Came here for exactly this.
If you’re the dad in this comic and you’ve never played Tunic, this is your wake-up call. One if the core mechanics of the game is collecting the pages for the instruction manual in game so you can figure out how to play.
I remember home computer and PC games coming in big boxes full of goodies. Especially RPGs often had a poster sized map, a story book, a monster guide and a manual. Also the copy protection often was a physical device like this rotating pirate head thing in Monkey Island, the manual itself or a card that was difficult to copy and could only be read with the included filter glasses.
“Not based on money” As if quarter eaters and movie tie-in games haven’t always been a thing. ET being a notable example.
Also have you played Deltarune?
Infocom’s were the best.
You got sunglasses, a microscopic space fleet, a don’t panic pin, postcards, and something to read.
a microscopic space fleet
can you expand on that, what exactly was that?
Something a small dog swallows, thus unwittingly averting interstellar war.
It is of course well known that careless talk costs lives, but the full scale of the problem is not always appreciated.
For instance, at the very moment that Arthur said, ‘I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle,’ a freak wormhole opened up in the fabric of the space-time continuum and carried his words far far back in time across almost infinite reaches of space to a distant galaxy where strange and warlike beings were poised on the brink of a frightful interstellar battle.
The two opposing leaders were meeting for the last time.
A dreadful silence fell across the conference table as the commander of the Vl’hurgs, resplendent in his black jewelled battle shorts, gazed levelly at the G’Gugvuntt leader squatting opposite him in a cloud of green sweet-smelling steam, and, with a million sleek and horribly beweaponed star cruisers poised to unleash electric death at his single word of command, challenged the vile creature to take back what it had said about his mother.
The creature stirred in his sickly broiling vapour, and at that very moment the words, ‘I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle’ drifted across the conference table.
Unfortunately, in the Vl’hurg tongue this was the most dreadful insult imaginable, and there was nothing for it but to wage terrible war for centuries.
Eventually, of course, after their galaxy had been decimated over a few thousand years, it was realised that the whole thing had been a ghastly mistake, and so the two opposing battle fleets settled their few remaining differences in order to launch a joint attack on our own galaxy—now positively identified as the source of the offending remark.
For thousands more years the mighty ships tore across the empty wastes of space and finally dived screaming on to the first planet they came across—which happened to be Earth—where due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog.
Those who study the complex interplay of cause and effect in the history of the universe say that this sort of thing is going on all the time, but that we are powerless to prevent it.
‘It’s just life,’ they say.
Douglas Adams, The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Chapter 31.
It was a space fleet so small it was undetectable by currently available equipment.
Utterly priceless.
Use your imagination!
