"Do you remember when.."

[Fanta Grape]

Do you remember the 21st night of September?
Love was changing the minds of pretenders
While chasing the clouds away

 

[The Unworthy Gentleman]

Do you remember when one of the biggest gaming headaches was losing your memory cards?

Do you remember when you had to delete stuff off your memory card so you could save another game?

Do you remember how it killed a small part of you inside when you forgot to do that before playing and couldn't save your game?

Do you remember when your memory card stopped working inexplicably and lost a few years worth of save files?

Do you remember when memory cards didn't even show how much space they had in megabytes but in blocks?

Wow, so much about memory cards, I love it.

 

[Wondermint13]

Team Fortress 2 has health meters. o: Both in numbers AND filling/depleting crosses.

And the first reply was somebody posting the complete opposite to the thread. way to go mate.. way to go.... *sarcastic clap*
Atleast try to answer the question!

Ok, and for you OP..

Do you remember when giant blue ants with lazer guns took over planets and not thousands of bloody Angels, Demons and Other Various Gods from around the around the world?
*hugs his Jet Force Gemini case* Ants are so fun to shoot at =)

 

[yeti400]

Do you remember when there were no fanboys?

 

[SL33TBL1ND]

Do you remember when one of the biggest gaming headaches was losing your memory cards?

Do you remember when you had to delete stuff off your memory card so you could save another game?

Do you remember how it killed a small part of you inside when you forgot to do that before playing and couldn't save your game?

Do you remember when your memory card stopped working inexplicably and lost a few years worth of save files?

Do you remember when memory cards didn't even show how much space they had in megabytes but in blocks?

Wow, so much about memory cards, I love it.

Remember when some games required the entire memory card to save?

 

[Sandernista]

Do you remember when there were only 150+1 Pokémon?

There was never just 151, just listen to the Pokemon rap 'At least 150 or more to see.
To be a Pokemon master is my destiny.'

See! more!

 

[Tax_Document]

Do you remember when you blew alot of money on an Atari 2600 and was turned of gaming for a long time.

Do you remember getting the NES and getting severely disappointed and selling it to kid down the street as the gameplay consisted on four buttons and waddling around a crappy 2D world with no fun involved.

Yeah, didn't get into gaming until Diablo 2, because the underneath that thin veil of Gold is the worthlessness of tinny brass.

EDIT: Also, remember when there weren't so many stuck-up snobs on the internet, saying it was better in their day when it really wasn't?

 

[Realitycrash]

Do you remember when you had to wait years for a game and it was a quality product?

Yes, just last year, it was called Starcraft 2

Not to start a flamewar, but; Starcraft was an awesome product. But it wasn't last year. Starcraft 2 was last year, but it was only the first third of the game, and basically a redo of the first game with better graphics.

So, OT; Remember when you played Starcraft for the first time, and your jaw dropped at the graphics in the cinematics?

 

[Zantos]

I don't care if the thread's not about it. Or if it's nothing to do with games. Or if someone's already said it.

Do you remember when we used to sing, sha la la la la la la la la la la te da


OT:

Do you remember when one of the biggest gaming headaches was losing your memory cards?

Do you remember when you had to delete stuff off your memory card so you could save another game?

Do you remember how it killed a small part of you inside when you forgot to do that before playing and couldn't save your game?

Do you remember when your memory card stopped working inexplicably and lost a few years worth of save files?

Do you remember when memory cards didn't even show how much space they had in megabytes but in blocks?

Wow, so much about memory cards, I love it.

Remember when some games required the entire memory card to save?

I think this can all be summed up with, do you remember memory cards? I know mine are somewhere...

Do you remember when you had to wait years for a game and it was a quality product?

Duke Nukem Forever baby! It's taken bloody forever.

 

[SPARTANXIII]

Do you remember when Halo was tolerated?

Because I don't. It's been 9 years of hate threads, if you don't like it, fine. Just stop driving it into my skull. I like it.

 

[StormShaun]

Do you remember when we didnt have so many tv ads...nope, me too...

 

[artanis_neravar]

Do you remember when you had to wait years for a game and it was a quality product?

Yes, just last year, it was called Starcraft 2

Well played

 

[joshuaayt]

Do you remember when we had this free Playstation service called the Play Station Network? Oh, man, those days were good.

Do you remember when not every bit of Final Fantasy praise had to include the "It started getting shit at 'X' qualifier?

Do you remember when Ash had a good English voice actor?

Do you remember that time that Aerith died?

 

[Alfador_VII]

So, OT; Remember when you played Starcraft for the first time, and your jaw dropped at the graphics in the cinematics?

"It's a Zergling Lester, a smaller type of Zerg."

And yes, I do. Blizzard cinematics have always been way up there, for there era.

 

[Sassafrass]

Do you remember when you didn't have to worry about RRoD and YLoD?
I miss how reliable the N64 and PS2 were nowadays. *Is on 3rd/4th XBox 360*

 

[tahrey]

Summary of what follows:

"Ah, remember when computers were 1000x worse?"

Bear with me, I have an explanation. To save time, let's start with a simple scale:

Young: You think modern machines are shit and slow.

Old: You remember when things that were approximately 1000x worse* in almost every measure were the incredible, and expensive, new hotness of the day.
(1995)*

Incredibly freakin' old: You remember when owning a machine that was approximately 1,000,000 worse ** in almost every measure made you one of the elite, or maybe just very sad, few who owned a computer of any sort.
(1980) **

* No I am not making those numbers up
** No I really am NOT making those numbers up

I was super sad recently and did a bit of calculation to see just how well Moore's Law - or at least, the popular perception of it (IE electronics get 2x better every 18 months, rather than the "twice as many transistors on a single chip", which is roughly the same) had been adhered to over the past few decades. Turns out for the past THIRTY, it's pretty good, when averaged.

However, what this means is that in fifteen years you have ten generations, or approx a thousandfold improvement thanks to geometric progression. Over thirty years, it's twenty generations - and a one-million-fold improvement. To break it down further, it's 58% year on year, or a tenfold improvement every five years... with a few disruptive lumps, of course. Which is why you need to average it.

CPUs, display quality, remote comms and memory capacity (both RAM and "backing store") follow this rule pretty damn well, if you allow just a little bit of fudging. A high-multi-core CPU (say, 8-way with hyperthreading and SSE at 3-4Ghz) is about 1000x more potent than a 486 DX2/66, which is itself 1000x better than a 2.5Mhz Z80 or 1Mhz M6800 (likely chips in a 1980 desktop computer). 8kb would have been a pretty good amount of RAM in 1980, and so was a meg of user-file hard store (with commercially available software taking up 600kb on a tape at best). 1995, think 8mb and 1Gb, and 600mb CDs. 2010, an 8Gb PC is a little lavish, but not unusual, nor is 1Tb of disk, and you can easily burn through 600Gb of useful internet data a year (Google Maps, for example, is a massive data hog, and some Wikipedia pages are pretty bad... then we have all those cloud-based apps...).

To go back even further by another 1000x generation... 1965 is the earliest electronic calculators (no actual CPU, and a few tens or hundreds of ops per second is sufficient...) and examples of oscilloscope games (purely analogue), but even industrial computers are still pretty bad.
Then...
1980 is Pac-Man, Space Invaders, VCS, the very earliest BBSes and email.
1995 is Final Fantasy 7, Gran Turismo, Playstation, the start of the web.
2010 is, well, if you don't know, you've got bigger problems than me not spelling it out.

Those of you who, like myself, first cut their teeth on the generation immediately after 1980 (the Spectrum, C64, other Z80A and 6502/6509 etc systems and 80s arcade games), matured with the interim 16-bits, and joined the mainstream when PCs finally properly outgrew their expensive business roots (a 10x power increase each time, let's say), how old does thinking about all THAT make you feel?

And also - how awesome do we think the future's going to be, if by 2026 we may have machines which are 1000x more potent than what we currently enjoy? I mean, even though in real terms we've probably only got 10x the actual utility out of these computing devices with each 15-year generation (most of it being wasted on prettiness and bloat; after all, there was eventually a (monochrome) graphical web browser for my 1985 Atari, alongside crude audio and video digitisers... you could probably come up with some kind of tolerable Youtube interface for it), 10x better will still be amazing.

Singularity? Bring it on. I can't wait to see what kind of sound-driven kaleidoscope THAT can put on screen. The 1990~95 versions were awesome enough.

(((BTW The problem we are having is one of internal transfer speeds. Hard disks haven't accelerated anywhere near as much - in fact, because of the mere physics of it all, their speed has increased by the square root of capacity (because storage space is a function of areal density, but read and access speed are both functions of linear density). So in the time it's taken them to grow 1,000,000-fold (5mb to 5Tb, say... and price dropped from £10000 to £100 too!) their speed has only improved by about 1000x (a couple hundred kb/sec to a couple hundred mb/sec, or 25mb/s if on USB2) and access time by a mere 100x (a few hundred ms, to a few ms). SSDs are closing the gap, but still can't make up the difference. Even the most extreme home desktop tests on overclocking sites have trouble breaking 3Gb/s and some tens of microseconds access time. Memory and peripheral buses are suffering the same problem, which is why AGP and dumb-PCI graphics cards have gone the way of the dodo to be replaced by cards which are basically dedicated supercomputers that receive simple commands and chunks of texture/vertice data from the main CPU and work everything out from themselves - and cheaper display systems that aren't integrated into the Motherboard but the CPU itself.

(Well, mem access ALMOST manages to keep pace, but you have to fudge the figures VERY hard - massively pessimistic about the 1980 performance, and assuming DRAM instead of the more common SRAM; and very optimistic about what can be squeezed out of our very fastest gaming rig memory systems... with the true performance of a 1995 PC as the touchstone. It's still not kept up with CPU development or memory size.)))

 

[Realitycrash]

So, OT; Remember when you played Starcraft for the first time, and your jaw dropped at the graphics in the cinematics?

"It's a Zergling Lester, a smaller type of Zerg."

And yes, I do. Blizzard cinematics have always been way up there, for there era.

AHEM..Starcraft 2? Sorry, but yet another proof that Starcraft 2 is just an expansionpack for Strarcraft. The game-play graphics might be improved, but the cinematics sure isn't.

 

[AFnord]

Did you know that: Blowing into a game is not recommended, at all. Moisture causes corrosion, and by blowing into your cartridge, you are actually setting it up for future problems. Instead, clean your games properly.

I honestly couldn't give a fuck. Always worked for me.

Actually it was not so much the process of blowing into the cartridge as re-inserting it that helped (you might have inserted it in such a way that it helped connect better). And by blowing into it, you are lowering your chance of actually being able to play that game in a few years.

 

[Chased]

Do you remember when there was no save, you had to type in a password given to you after you beat a level?

Do you remember when pretty much the only game on Mac was Myst?

Do you remember when you had to type in command lines in Dos to start up games on a floppy?