Things we DON'T miss from old games

[scorptatious]

This is something that came to mind after reading the other thread about old games.

We all get nostalgic about games from our childhood, and a lot of us wish certain elements of those games would come back in games of today.

But have you ever decided to play an old game from your childhood, and noticed some things that you didn't really care for? Stuff that made you think, yeah, I'm kinda glad this kinda thing died out and didn't catch on.

For me it's the following:

Unskippable cutscenes. JRPG's are pretty guilty of this IMO. An example being Chrono Cross. There's a couple of instances in the game where there is a lot of story and exposition before you actually face the boss. And if you screw up on the boss, you need to reload your last save and go through the entire thing over again before you can try again.

I love me some classic RPG's, but I find that kind of stuff really tedious and annoying.

Lives and continues: Personally, I feel these don't add a lot to a game other than artificially extending it's length if you happen to mess up too many times. And they even became unnecessary when being able to save your game became the norm for games.

Now-a-days, Mario and Sonic seem to be some of the only games that still use lives. And it's mostly out of tradition as the games don't punish you very hard for losing all of them.

So how about you guys? What are some things in old games that you don't miss?

 

[Hover Hand Mode]

Things I don't miss:
- Crushing difficulty where success is hardly reliant on skill, unless your "skill" involves dealing with the game's awful controls and limited jump arcs.
- "True" endings that you can only get by beating the game a certain way. But you aren't given any hints as to how you're supposed to beat it. Except maybe at the very end when you've already beaten it.
- Limited room for content. Seriously, God bless modern storage media.

 

[shrekfan246]

Health packs-

I'm not very good at shooters. I tend to tunnel-vision and periodically stop moving while firing, and I'm terrible at leading targets even when the character is standing still, so I actually prefer games like Deus Ex: Human Revolution or Mass Effect, which have slower, generally cover-based shooting and health bars that either regenerate over time, can be healed at will by inventory items, or both. Scrounging for health and armor packs is one of the biggest things I hate about old-school shooters.

Things you can or are required to do that are in no way indicated to be something the player should be attempting, many of which pop up without precedent-

Pipes in Mario, walls/gates that all have different ways to blow them open in Banjo-Tooie--none of which are ever telegraphed to the player (occasionally it's not even obvious that the player can blow something open in the first place), that gorram barrel in Carnival Night Zone.

I am of two minds about that one, though. It can arguably make for much more interesting puzzles or secrets, but at the same time there should be some visual or contextual cue that the player can interact with that bit of the level in a unique manner comparative to everything else. To use the Banjo games as a positive example as well, many walls you have to smash or blow up have cracks in them that signify you can do something to them. On the other hand, in Grunty's Tower in Banjo-Kazooie, a few hours into the game you run across spiderwebs. Trying to bash them with Kazooie's beak buster does nothing, though it seems like the logical solution to breaking them. What's the actual solution? Shooting them with eggs. Not even the flame eggs you get in the sequel, which would at least kind of make sense, just normal projectiles.

 

[AD-Stu]

Easy: boot disks and everything else that came with trying to get most high-end games to run on PC back in the DOS era. I mean can anyone today conceive of a world where you'd need to reboot your machine every time you wanted to play a game?

What's funny too is that most of those games could run in a browser window these days

 

[BathorysGraveland2]

Having to fight boss battles over and over and over and over.. and over, until you finally get it down. I fucking hate that so much.

 

[ShinyCharizard]

I don't miss those crappy save systems that relied on passwords you had to input in order to skip to the part of the game you last got to. They were fucking annoying.

 

[DementedSheep]

Old RPG?s fucked up difficulty curves and dice roll dependency. It tends to force you to save scums or exploit around the start and makes the end a snooze fest.
Tons of pointless quests that are just padding and are essentially identical(I use to like this cause it killed time, now I don?t).
Pixel/curser hunting to find stuff and sometimes shit graphics making it hard to even see where your enemies are. Lots and
lots of vendor trash and constantly switching out weapons for something slightly better.
Redundant stats and having to pump several points into something before it starts to actually make a difference.
Non party based rpg where your character constantly misses attacks in the beginning, especially if you are actually aiming rather than just clicking to attack.
I still like old rpgs though. A lot them just need cleaning up and less broken endgame spells.

Cut-scenes where you watch a character walk slowly over to a point to do something and they seem to pause between each action making a scene twice as long as it needs to be. It's worse if you can't skip them.

Terrible sound effects and voice acting.

I tried to play Dungeon Siege a while ago. Goddamn that was boring. I found myself barely having to anything beyond clicking on who I wanted to attack and giving one person a heal spell. Switching between spells and was pain in the ass and my character moved to slow.

 

[WeepingAngels]

The other day I tried to play the first Dragon Warrior game on the NES. Instead of walking up to a door and pushing a button to open it, a menu popped up and you had to choose what to do. Even though, there is only one right answer, you still had to pick it from a menu. Same with anything you interacted with, treasure chests, NPC's and even fuckin' stairs. Believe it or not, you could walk back and forth over the stairs but you couldn't go down them until you opened the menu and chose "stairs".

It blows my mind that shit like that was even acceptable in 1986. I know it came from PC RPG's and that makes even less sense since PC's had more than 2 buttons.

 

[Weaver]

The other day I tried to play the first Dragon Warrior game on the NES. Instead of walking up to a door and pushing a button to open it, a menu popped up and you had to choose what to do. Even though, there is only one right answer, you still had to pick it from a menu. Same with anything you interacted with, treasure chests, NPC's and even fuckin' stairs. Believe it or not, you could walk back and forth over the stairs but you couldn't go down them until you opened the menu and chose "stairs".

It blows my mind that shit like that was even acceptable in 1986. I know it came from PC RPG's and that makes even less sense since PC's had more than 2 buttons.

Some of the systems like that in old games are so unbelievably unusable in the modern age I really do find it amazing they were ever acceptable.

However, I wanted to talk about stairs since you brought them up. Stairs, in a lot of games, seemed to be a huge problem. It's like the character would enter an entirely new way of moving on the stairs and it just always felt awkward, strange and beyond clunky. So like, suddenly because you're on stairs you can't attack, or jump, and you move at like half speed and it was just, in general, really terrible. Some games you had to like line up PERFECTLY to get going up the stairs, things like that.

 

[WeepingAngels]

The other day I tried to play the first Dragon Warrior game on the NES. Instead of walking up to a door and pushing a button to open it, a menu popped up and you had to choose what to do. Even though, there is only one right answer, you still had to pick it from a menu. Same with anything you interacted with, treasure chests, NPC's and even fuckin' stairs. Believe it or not, you could walk back and forth over the stairs but you couldn't go down them until you opened the menu and chose "stairs".

It blows my mind that shit like that was even acceptable in 1986. I know it came from PC RPG's and that makes even less sense since PC's had more than 2 buttons.

Some of the systems like that in old games are so unbelievably unusable in the modern age I really do find it amazing they were ever acceptable.

However, I wanted to talk about stairs since you brought them up. Stairs, in a lot of games, seemed to be a huge problem. It's like the character would enter an entirely new way of moving on the stairs and it just always felt awkward, strange and beyond clunky. So like, suddenly because you're on stairs you can't attack, or jump, and you move at like half speed and it was just, in general, really terrible. Some games you had to like line up PERFECTLY to get going up the stairs, things like that.

In a turn based RPG going down stairs simply meant that a new screen would load. There was no chance you would already be in a battle since battles take place on a separate screen. So having to choose stairs from a menu even though you are standing on the 16 x 16 stairs tile is beyond retarded. Luckily JRPG's quickly solved this problem because it was never necessary.

 

[Zhukov]

The graphics, the writing, the lack of voice acting, the bad voice acting.

Pretty much the everything.

 

[Ihateregistering1]

-Expansion packs (this is what we had to rely on before DLC).

-In RTS games, putting limits on the number of units you could select at once. Also, not being able to queue units at a production facility.

-For some reason, in old school shooters, climbing down ladders was often incredibly difficult, and half the time when you tried to use them you'd just fall off.

 

[Evonisia]

Jumping, in pretty much any game that wasn't a platformer. Yet I miss it somehow, maybe they went too far in the other direction. Maybe games should have jumping like Halo, you can do it, it's effective and you can reach some places doing it but it's not necessary to complete anything.

 

[TehCookie]

Loading/saving times. I'm pretty patient when it comes to them, but waiting for 3+ minutes pushes the limits.

 

[Yoshi4102]

The graphics, the writing, the lack of voice acting, the bad voice acting.

Pretty much the everything.

You can't say that 8 bit/16 bit sprites were awful. I always thought that in general, it's a fantastic theme that inspired tons of creativity. I prefer it to the generic anime style found in a lot of today's games.

As for myself, I sure won't miss bad menu systems or unneeded complexity.

 

[Stevepinto3]

Surprised no one has mentioned interfaces yet. Good lord have UI's come a long way. My occasional desire to restart Fallout is immediately shut down when I start clicking around outside of the vault and remember that the gameplay itself is slower than cold molasses, and the inventory is just a single vertical column that only displays 5 items at a time.

 

[Zhukov]

The graphics, the writing, the lack of voice acting, the bad voice acting.

Pretty much the everything.

You can't say that 8 bit/16 bit sprites were awful. I always thought that in general, it's a fantastic theme that inspired tons of creativity. I prefer it to the generic anime style found in a lot of today's games.

As for myself, I sure won't miss bad menu systems or unneeded complexity.

I most certainly can say that 8 bit sprites were awful. I think those things look ugly as fuck.

16 bit less so, but I still wouldn't call them pretty or visually interesting.

That said, I actually rather like pixel art. Sprites can look great when the time is taken to animate them thoroughly. I'd honestly like to see some modern games, presumably from indies, use pixel art, but in a way that uses the tech we have available now rather than just aping ugly, old art styles for the neckbeard nostalgia appeal.

 

[Pink Gregory]

I can't be the only person here who finds the idea that shooters should only ever have been designed a certain way (ie Duke Nukem 3D) infinitely tiresome.

 

[Clive Howlitzer]

Extremely poorly designed and clunky user interfaces combined with equally clunky controls. Even when I see retro games get released that try to emulate old games. If they also emulate the god awful controls, there is just no excuse. Everyone has a huge monitor now, and widescreen, take advantage of that. I don't need to click 500 times to get to something.
Of course, I still see terrible interfaces designed today and it blows my mind. It makes me wonder where these game developers are coming from and if they've ever played a game in their life. Information needs to be easily acquired and displayed.

 

[White Lightning]

-For some reason, in old school shooters, climbing down ladders was often incredibly difficult, and half the time when you tried to use them you'd just fall off.

Holy shit balls this, You'd clear out a section and see the ladder and be like "...so it begins" and it was more frustrating then the actual fight.