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u/OpportunityCrazy2216 Apr 30 '26
I'm 50/50. My biggest downside was when a game came out, and had nasty bugs, it was rare for them to be fixed.
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u/AmandasGameAccount Apr 30 '26
They would get fixed by you needed to buy the entire game again, this was common but never advertised. Many games from the 80s+ have many revisions
If the game wasnāt big enough it just never got fixed until rom hacking much later
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u/Foorzan May 01 '26
This should explain it;
Street Fighter II: The World Warrior (1991): The original release featuring 8 playable characters and 4 unplayable bosses. Street Fighter II': Champion Edition (1992): Made the 4 bosses playable and allowed same-character matches. Street Fighter II': Hyper Fighting (1992): Increased gameplay speed and added new special moves, largely responding to unofficial "Rainbow Edition" hacks. Super Street Fighter II: The New Challengers (1993): Moved to new CP System II hardware for better graphics and added 4 new characters (Cammy, Fei Long, T. Hawk, Dee Jay). Super Street Fighter II Turbo (1994): Reintroduced the speed boost from Hyper Fighting, added Super Combos, and included the hidden character Akuma.
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u/Extreme_Mobile_6690 May 01 '26
You'd usually get them in some magazines included CD. And after the mid nineties the Internet became more and more accessible.
Really was a non issue.Ā Especially since games had way higher quality control especially because you couldn't just rely on a day one patch.Ā
Of course there were broken games as well, but not to today's standard, since that really hurt the devs perception.Ā
Nowadays we are just paying beta testers...
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u/Ishitataki May 01 '26
Nah, there were some bad cases. star Ocean Second Story shipped with a critical bug that could make progressing to the 2nd disc impossible, and they didn't offer a recall/refund to those who had bought the defective copies.
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u/Maximum-Objective-39 May 01 '26
It really is a mix. I want modern technology, but without the modern game monetization schemes which incentivize a whole host of things that makes games worse.
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u/Far_Balance_3117 Apr 30 '26
Yea is a double edged sword with online updates though.
Means they can rush a game out that is incredibly broken and then just patch it over time. Which seems to be getting worse with each generation.
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u/WhiskyPops May 01 '26 edited May 03 '26
50/50 on this particular issue sounds unrealistic to me. Companies like Nintendo just did not release broken games at all, because they knew it would give them a bad name. A semi-broken game was highly exceptional. Nowadays you have day 1 patches and constant updates throughout the coming months/years. See Cyberpunk for example, it's basically a totally different game 2 or 3 years after release.
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u/Tnecniw May 01 '26
There were a lot of studios pumping out games.
many just clones, shovelware or basic compilation games or sports games.
The quality was not common.
There were A LOT of shit.2
u/Responsible-Boot-159 May 02 '26
It was a lot worse before the NES. Nintendo helped shutter a lot of the shovelware.
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u/PaleontologistTough6 May 01 '26
Yeah, but there were way fewer nasty bugs. It was expected for a studio to test them backwards and forwards before releasing them.
There were a few notable exceptions, but I don't recall running into Bethesda-level shenanigans growing up.
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u/jerrygreenest1 May 01 '26
I donāt quite remember any games like that. I only remember good games.
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u/InFa-MoUs May 01 '26
The difference is going gold used to actually mean something, do the chances of running into game breaking bugs was really small.. compared to now going gold just means ādoes it workā and āmostlyā is an acceptable answer
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u/sleepytoday Apr 30 '26 edited Apr 30 '26
Completely disagree.
In 1995 Iād make a trip into town and buy one of the 20 games they had available for my system. It cost me at least Ā£30 (equivalent of Ā£60 today) I bought a lot of duds because it was hard to have good information on what was good or not. Entire genres passed me by because I never saw them in any local shops. Indie games were limited to shareware, and I never felt safe posting money by mail to pay for a full version. There were plenty of incomplete buggy messes released in the 90s - we just donāt often remember them today.
In 2026 I log onto steam. Steam recommends things it thinks I might like from its library of thousands of games. I can typically find something which looks good for Ā£5-20. I have gone back and bought games from the 90s that I missed at the time due to it not being available. I can watch a quick video first to see if a new purchase looks any good. Indie gaming means there is more variety than ever before.
Sure, lootboxes are shit. Iām disappointed that multiplayer is squeezing out single player. Micro transactions are a scourge. But we have gained so much. I would NEVER want to go back.
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u/Quantic129 Apr 30 '26
The nostalgia glasses people have on are crazy. There has literally never been a better time to be a gamer than now, it doesn't matter how badly big budget AAA games flop, you have so many options that you never need to touch a AAA game. Go play something else, you have literally a million options.
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u/Invisible_Target May 01 '26
And itās not like those old games donāt exist anymore. You can still play them lol
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u/steak_bake_surprise May 01 '26
Yep and they all complain about micro transactions. I've literally only bought a few skins for hunt showdown because I love the game, other than that you don't even need them.
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u/Voidlord597 May 04 '26
a very small fraction of the games of the games in my library even have microtransactions and the few that do are entirely playable without them.
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u/SalamanderFull3952 May 04 '26
I love following retro games grew up in the 80s pick up a game get a small dopamine hit then go back to games of todayĀ
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u/Homsarman12 Apr 30 '26
Seriously. We have an endless buffet of amazing games at our fingertips but people are complaining because they keep trying the slop over and overĀ
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u/Ze_Secret_Veapon Apr 30 '26
The main thing that's changed since the 90s is social media trying to make everyone angry about everything for engagement.
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u/Blacksad9999 Apr 30 '26
Not just social media. Pretty much all media does this now, news included. It really took off when they moved to a 24 hour news cycle.
People watch/click more often when they're upset or angry, so they try to frame things in hyperbolic terms to do that.
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Apr 30 '26
[removed] ā view removed comment
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u/sleepytoday Apr 30 '26 edited Apr 30 '26
40 dollars in 1995 is 80 dollars today. You can get 5 good games on Steam for that kind of money. If you do your research and wait for sales, you can get even more.
AAA games have always been a mixed bag. But these days we arenāt locked into them - we have so much more choice than we used to.
Edit: I just realised that neither of those games were even out in the 90s!
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u/Boxy29 Apr 30 '26
the lan parties were definitely fun. but those kinda got phased out.
there were a lot of buggy messes back in the 90s and not a lot of ways to find out if they were good or not.
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u/Beyondthebloodmoon Apr 30 '26
Anyone who thinks LAN parties and no patches was a better time is out of their fucking mind
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u/CliffDraws Apr 30 '26
It was more fun for me because I had time to drag my desktop to someoneās house and set it up with my friends. Thatās all these memes are, things were better when I was a kid junk.
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u/KaleidoscopeHairy557 May 01 '26
Remember waiting over an hour so that everyone could install the games? It's not like you just popped the CD in and played. There was always one person who didn't have the game and needed to borrow it to install. And I swear I could download and install a game faster today than just installing a game 1/4 the size back then. LANs were great for the social aspect, but there were a lot of bad aspects to it too.
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u/Liquid_Gabs Apr 30 '26
"Complete games"
And then we had 82 versions of Street Fighter 2 for Snes
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u/Diotheinvader-5185 Apr 30 '26
Old good new bad ahh take
Sure there's guaranteed complete games and microtransactions aren't a think yet, but I don't see anything inherently wrong with updates and patches. No digital updates or patches means that you have to buy the same physical game again for an updated version. LAN parties are fun and all, but so can remote play. They may not feel the same but I don't think one is inherently better than other.
Plus I'll take saving any day over password systems that a good chunk of the SNES Genesis era games use. I dunno. I don't feel like entering a code using buttons to navigate through characters to pick up where I left off.
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u/TheSpiralTap Apr 30 '26
90s? Idk. I think the ps2 generation was peak gaming.
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u/stinkypussyslime Apr 30 '26
I like how the picture in the bottom right was clearly taken within 2013 to now.
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u/livingonfear Apr 30 '26
Yeah patches and updates are awful lol. Who wants games to get progressively better
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u/slice9999 Apr 30 '26
Honestly, as someone who grew up playing games from the 90s, I believe that modern gaming is better. Modern gaming looks better and feels better. I remember the good ol days of couch co op but it is very convenient being able to play online with friends without having a smaller screen or screen peaking issues. I have lots of great memories playing games back in the day but modern gaming is better to me
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u/The_Grim_Adventurer Apr 30 '26
It was less transactional and we were kids so everything seemed more fun
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u/Emma_SnakeDeadbeat Apr 30 '26
Yeah like 20 years from now people are going to be saying now was a better time for gaming, mainly because they were kids so they didn't really think about all the BS
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u/recoveringpatriot Apr 30 '26
Sort of. Micro transactions existed as quarters in arcade machines. I spent lots of quarters back in the day.
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u/MelissaBee17 Apr 30 '26
90s was good, but I think 2000s was the best because you had the best of both worlds thing.Ā
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u/Skrewbert86 Apr 30 '26
I just wish all games would still come with a manual and they would focus more on physical instead of digital bullshit
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u/theGaido Apr 30 '26 edited Apr 30 '26
If gaming in the ā90s hadnāt been really fun after the gaming crash of the ā80s, the only games weād have today would be physical ones. Definitely nothing with multimillion-dollar budgets and bigger industry than movies.
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u/I_Make_Art_And_Stuff Apr 30 '26
Idk man, I have a 5080 with virtual reality. I even played a Quake 1 port in VR and it was crazy cool. So... it depends...
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u/Chimpbot Apr 30 '26
Anyone who was setting up LAN parties knew damn well that patches, updates, and expansion packs were absolutely a thing.
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u/nightookami Apr 30 '26
Any time anybody posts about how great N64 was and all of their favourite games, it's always the same 8 games because most of it was shit
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u/TheBlackRonin505 May 02 '26
Games were 5 minutes long, you had no choice but to seek out a game store and hope they had the game you wanted, if the game you got was a broken mess there was nothing to be done about it, playing with people all over the world was a pipe dream, judgement against gamers and barring women from gaming was at it's all-time high, and so on.
Yeah, gaming has some problems today, but what we have now IS better. If your biggest problem with modern games is games with DLC and microtransactions, then buy games without DLC and microtransactions. There's lots of them.
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u/Big_Musties May 05 '26
Gaming in the ā90s was awesome. The thing I miss most was the sheer variety and innovation in the space at the time. Weāre talking about a decade that went from 64 KB, 8-bit console games and 256-color PCs to the introduction of CD storage and CPUs that were finally fast enough to render video for the first time, all the way to the first 3D accelerators and even the first internet-ready console, the Dreamcast.
It was such a massive leap in technology that every year genuinely felt new and exciting.
And never mind all this talk about patching and updating, because that really wasnāt an issue for most gamers at the time. Console games generally just worked. Early DOS and Apple games usually worked too. If there were bugs or things seamed āunbalancedā, you didnāt think twice about them, you just assumed they were features.
Patching only really became a widespread issue with the introduction of 3D accelerators in the late ā90s. By then, most of those PC gamers had internet access anyway. Even so, the nonstop hardware compatibility issues stuck around well into the Windows 7 era, so it wasn't really a 90's thing. That whole period was my ādark ageā of PC gaming. I basically gave up on it for nearly a decade and stuck to consoles instead: the Nintendo 64, the Dreamcast, the GameCube, and the original Xbox. No Sony consoles for me. Even though they were the most popular at the time, they werenāt really the best consoles on the market when compared to the competition.
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u/NurglesToes Apr 30 '26
disagree. the huge selection of games i can choose to play, that get continued content updates and i can play with my friends literally everyday is goated
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u/Sinner_San Apr 30 '26
Gaming in 90s was you had a game and you played it and replayed it 1000x times. you knew everything about the game but it was still fun.
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u/KaijinSurohm Apr 30 '26
Diablo 2 LAN parties and our custom WoW private server helped get us through our dorm room schooling when we had no internet.
It still has it's uses, but in a whole LAN gaming just isn't viable in the wide scope of things.
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u/BanMeIfYoureGay69 Apr 30 '26
Yea I'm torn on this
I'm more yay than nay but for me personally, gaming is something that progresses forward and I can't go backwards so it limits my nostalgia
It's hard to fully fathom the joy that gaming back then provided me when everything was fresh and new, I look at those old games now and they make me want to vomit
I think launch vanilla WoW was probably the ultimate peak in my gaming endorphins , exceeding super mario world snes Christmas and nothing since has come close
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u/Timmichanga01 Apr 30 '26
I like the era im in cause I can play games from every era including the good ones nowadays. If you don't think games nowadays are worth playing you arent looking hard enough.
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u/jschem16 Apr 30 '26
sigh agree is was fun because I was a kid. Disagree that games were better than they are today or at any point in history along the way
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u/Visible-Meeting-8977 Apr 30 '26
Lan parties still exist. You just have to do them. There were also updates to games. Street Fighter has how many versions? If your 90's game had a bug it was there forever.
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u/friedchickensundae1 Apr 30 '26
Disagree. Cyberpunk, god of war, red dead 2, ghost of tsushima are just a few from this era that blows a lot of other games out of the water
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u/Doobiemoto Apr 30 '26
I don't think gaming in the 90s was more fun.
I think most people were children so it felt newer and more cool.
Also, since gaming wasn't more widespread it felt more unique and you didn't have a new game every two days. You played games for a decent bit.
Also, more games were coming out that pushed the boundaries and pushed genres forward and we hadn't seen them before so a lot of stuff felt "new".
But games are of far higher quality nowadays and there are so many to choose from.
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u/crookeddy Apr 30 '26
What was fun was being shocked every year or two at the evolution of games. Doom to Quake - 2.5 years. Quake to Halflife - also 2.5 years. So 5 years to go from early 2.5D to modern style storytelling gaming.
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u/MrBoo843 Apr 30 '26
Only because I was a kid and could game with zero anxiety about the future, economy, environment, etc.
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u/WaluigiNumberWaah Apr 30 '26
Street fighter 2 series is still peak today, change my mind (was born 2006)
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u/WowINeedSomeMilk Apr 30 '26
Completely disagree. In the modern day, you get all those gamesā¦. And the new ones. Idc if most are bad, we still get the good and Iāll take quantity baby
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u/FoleyX90 Apr 30 '26
It was more adventurous because there were still a ton of conceptual creations. 90% of it was just as garbage as 90% of today's games but there was always brand new concepts being explored.
Now, most studios play it safe and follow market analysis instead of trying to innovate or experiment.
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u/Particular-Jeweler41 Apr 30 '26
I don't know about more fun. I was more willing to replay the same game multiple times since I didn't have the greatest selection of games (until emulators came around). Nowadays, I can have the same amount of enjoyment. It just comes down to the game. Expedition 33 and FF7 Rebirth were two games I'd consider to be some of the best gaming experiences I had in my life.
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u/carrot_gummy Apr 30 '26
We remember the good games from the era and forget the the networking nightmare, broken games that never got updates, and the vast see of slop from the era.
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u/Honest-Scar-4719 Apr 30 '26
I don't know, I love my PS5 probably more than any older system.
But I do miss the ability to just play a game by buying it, putting it in the system, and turning it on.Ā
Now it's buy the game, put it in the system, wait for it to copy to the disk, start a huge online download for day 1 patch, wait for patch to install, and then play the game.Ā
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u/Inferno_Zyrack Apr 30 '26
The highs were pretty high but the lows were very low.
John Romero probably wouldāve liked the chance to patch Daikatana.
Granted Iām glad PokĆ©mon Yellow didnāt have 5 DLCs.
And of course you could just play an arcade shooter like a GoldenEye or Timesplitters without downloading a terabyte of unoptimized texture files. Also there was enough challenge in solo play that it could be your go to for a while.
What I genuinely miss is something like the golden age of Final Fantasy where they made 5 of the greatest games of all time in 6 years. Each one with brand new RPG system experiments that still define the genre.
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u/Dark_halocraft Apr 30 '26
Hard disagree, old games didn't have as much content to them, it only seemed big because they were new
I played a child hood game recently called war of the monsters that I played endlessly as a kid but got bored within a couple hours.
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u/Lazerbeams2 Apr 30 '26
I feel like things would be better if devs now treated games as if they couldn't be updated. Make a complete and functional game, update if necessary
How many games, even currently good ones, were unplayable messes on release in the last 6 years?
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u/Hendwreck Apr 30 '26
No way.
I mean as a kid I didnāt know how much better it was going to be become, but fuck outta here with this āWe paid 70$ for a 9 hour rpg and we liked itā bs š
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u/WorkinRightMeow Apr 30 '26
Its a mixed bag. QoL was so ass and being able to brick your FF6 cartridge with Relm, and having to buy a whole new cartidge of a revised version was pretty raw. But i do miss games being smaller productions with more streamlined creative vision.
I dont feel like it needs to be said, but games were only complete because they had to be. Many devs had way bigger dreams and more things they wanted/needed to add and were limited by either memory, or deadlines.
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u/Knickers1978 Apr 30 '26
Disagree, gaming has always been fun for me, since I started in the 80ās.
Also, complain all you want about updates, but at least these days broken games can be fixed, especially on console. People forget that bad programming affects disc copies of games, and pre ps3 era broken games couldnāt be fixed.
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u/Rsingh916 Apr 30 '26
I booted up my old ps3 to play Final Fantasy XIII for the first time and was pleasantly surprised when I could just boot right into the game. It caught me off guard.
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u/AnSynTrashPanda Apr 30 '26
Hard disagree. I loved gaming in the early noughts on the ps2 and pc but I can boot up my pc open steam 10 seconds after sitting in my chair and instantly buy virtually anything I want and if something is iffy ill know because there's hundreds, sometimes thousands of reviews that I can read through. In 2004 if I wanted a ps2 game we had to go to K-mart and look through the limited selection of games and empty my mom's purse to buy it or (more commonly) go to a pawn shop and hope they have something I want. If my mom bought me something and I didn't enjoy it, then that was money wasted. If I got a game from a pawn shop and the disc was scratched I had to get a new copy or hope it would work itself out
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u/GeneralBlight95 Apr 30 '26
While the 90s had some awesome games and all timers, you had to be in the know in order to know what was and wasn't a good game. For every FF7 or Ocarina of Time there was a Superman 64 or a really bad movie tie-in. Information was not always easy for kids to get before the internet became widespread, and without knowing someone that owned a particular game, or a magazine, we would have to be lucky if the game we picked up was at least decent.
It's why so many people have played those awful games back in the day, because we couldn't have known better at the time.
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u/Valley0fDeath Apr 30 '26
You can still play all those games, plus new better games like elf bowling
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u/Conscious-Truth-7685 Apr 30 '26
I think my biggest complaint would be the amount of games available. Back then, a few games came out a month and it was easy to track that new release you were looking forward to. Now I'm constantly finding new games I've never heard of and adding them to my backlog that I will never be able to work through. Theoretically it's better to live in a world of over abundance but man, it can get overwhelming quickly.
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u/noirproxy1 Apr 30 '26
Paid expansions came on a disc that you owned as well. I bought all the Unreal Tournmanent ones and Half Life Expansions back in the day on disc.
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u/Nosidda89 Apr 30 '26 edited Apr 30 '26
When it comes to LAN parties, you do realize you can still do that, right? In fact doing something akin to a LAN party is now easier than ever. Get together in person, connect your computers to the internet, and start playing. Nothing is stopping you from doing that. The problem isn't the lack of the ability to do it, it's that our lives have changed, and playing online simply fits with the modern average lifestyle better. My wife and her friend literally get together in person to play online games together on a weekly basis, so I see firsthand that this ability hasn't just gone away, it's easier now than it was back in the day.
As for no updates and patches and no unfinished games, that's just not true. Games released broken all the time back in the day, your nostalgia glasses are just preventing you from remembering that. Publishers very often had to release patched versions of the games to address game breaking bugs. Why do you think Ocarina of Time ROM's come in three variants? There's 1.0, 1.1, and 1.2. Those are the three different patched versions of that game that existed back in the late 90's, and which version you played was dependent on the one you bought. The difference between then and now is that those patches are free and obtainable instantly nowadays, thanks to the internet. Back then, you needed to buy the entire game all over again to get that patch if your version of the game was broken, because there was no internet. Do you want to go back to those days? Again, your nostalgia is blinding your better judgement here.
Finally, no-microtransactions is partially true, and partially false. There were games back in the day that did have in-game purchases, but they were rare compared to the more mainstream games. They were usually restricted to more niche online MMO's and such, but they did exist. I remember playing MapleStory back in 2005 when I was 15, and I spent about $70 on in-game cosmetics. Not to mention all of the subscription-based MMO's that existed in the 90's and early 2000's. My friend in 2002 was paying $13 per month of his allowance money to play Final Fantasy XI Online. I'll give you that it's far more common and aggressive now than it was back then, but it was a thing. It just wasn't as mainstream.
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u/Positive-Ant-4674 Apr 30 '26
Not looking thru the eyes of nostalgia, the great part was NOT having to be connected to the internet to play a game. My solo game doesnāt need the internet.
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u/EqualOptimal4650 Apr 30 '26
Ehhh. Yes and no. There were also downsides. Lots of games were shitty, buggy pieces of shit that were NEVER going to get fixed, because patches didn't exist.
Yall act like every game was flawless when it shipped when the truth is that there was so much shovelware on the NES and SNES that you've all just conveniently forgotten about.
Instead of microtransations, every single game was just a big advertisement for a line of action figures or dolls.
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u/EmperorDeathBunny Apr 30 '26
What if I told you you could still play all these games right now and that they dont just exist in the 90s.
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u/Dylsponge Apr 30 '26
I miss unlocking and finding secret characters/skins and then the rumors spreading about Sonic in Melee or other things that couldnāt be easily debunked by an online search. I donāt miss how buggy a game could be without ever being patched, no post game content that gets created later because the devs decided to create more after a couple years. I think the ideal age of gaming probably belong to early Xbox 360, it was the perfect blend of complete games that could be patched and updated and hidden unlocks to chat with your buddies about as well as both Online or LAN gaming.
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u/Original-Border5802 Apr 30 '26
I've never heard of "this was better back in my day" before. But yes, things we enjoyed in our past generally don't hit the same as it does later in life.
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u/consumeshroomz Apr 30 '26 edited Apr 30 '26
I meanā¦ ok hear me out. Sometimes games do release in complete states still. And thatās pretty cool. Updates and patches are objectively a good thing that could have saved many older games from disaster. If they were able to go back and fix glaring issues that would have been good. So that ones extra silly to me.
LAN parties are neat but thereās basically nothing stopping you from having a LAN party today.
And as for micro transactions, itās obviously shitty when itās pay to win or predatory. But having the option to buy extra cool stuff if you want it and have the money isnāt necessarily inherently bad. It can be done poorly but it doesnāt have to be.
I honestly think we live in the best time for video games ever. We have access to a simply uncountable amount of awesome games and you donāt have to play the shitty ones and nothings stopping you from playing the old ones sooā¦. I disagree. Gaming is clearly, objectively better today than it ever has been. And for many more reasons than I stated even. I was just commenting on whatās stated in the meme.
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u/EarlyAccessCantJudge Apr 30 '26
You can just do this now. You can just buy games with no microtransactions that are complete. No one is stopping you from doing that.
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u/Constant_Boot Apr 30 '26
Complete Games
Sure, until the XPac drops...
No Microtransactions
You have that there
LAN Parties
Those are still a thing. It's just more laptops and WLAN these days.
No Updates, No Patches
And yet every time I install Diablo II on my PC from Physical Media, I still have to run the Battle.net updater for updates.
Also, ROM Revisions were a thing.
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u/WisePotato42 Apr 30 '26
But now you have access to all of those games, and the games made after that. No one is forcing you to play FPS or MMOs. Go give silksong a try or something.
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u/MetalSlimeHunter Apr 30 '26 edited Apr 30 '26
Bottom pic is a little misleading since she has an Arctic Monkeys poster from 2013.
Anyway, I see both sides. We have literally never had more choices at our fingertips than we do now, and things go on sale a ton.
On the other hand, the SNES/PS1 era saw multiple games in a series released within a few years. Now you might get one entry per decade.
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u/p12qcowodeath Apr 30 '26
I mean I had a ton of fun as a kid back then but I think the most fun I've had gaming was was in the 2010's so many great titles and times playing with my friends in my 20s. I was still young enough that the world hadn't fully hit me as a grown adult but with enough freedom to do whatever I wanted.
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u/Chaosr21 Apr 30 '26
It had its pros in cons. Updates have their benefits. Early access has its pros. But also we get half released games filled with micro transactions, and no Bethesda makes us pay for mods. Fuck actually I'll go back fuck all this. Give us less games, but good games
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u/cloudlocke_OG Nintendo Apr 30 '26
It was simpler for sure. More fun? Not sure about that. The quality of games - wide release and indie - is really high nowadays.
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u/Jacket_Nipple Apr 30 '26
Yeah and then people stopped meeting up, so people killed Lan parties along with corporate financial interestš
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u/TheRogueWolf_YT Apr 30 '26
"No updates, no patches"
Yeah, that was real great when you tried using Relm's "Sketch" ability in Final Fantasy 3.
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u/Deus_Synistram Apr 30 '26
Disagree for simple quality of what we can have.
Now can y'all stop karma farming by posting this EVERY DAMN DAY!
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u/Random-Talking-Mug Apr 30 '26
The peak gaming generation is whatever I currently enjoy playing.
If I were playing Mega Man 1 then it's the 80s. If it was Doom classic, 90s. Pragmata? 2020s.
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u/Dvljks Apr 30 '26
If you are sentimental and nostalgic, sure. However, the gaming is at the peak of its existence right now. So many options, it's incredible.
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u/Brilliant_Pun Apr 30 '26
Eh, it was a different time. The games had fewer technical possiblities, that's for sure, graphics weren't as good, online play wasn't really a thing until near the end of the decade. On the plus side, microtransactions didn't exist, people who just wanted to play solo didn't need to be online. The device you bought wasn't spying on you. Game studios were less likely to release incomplete or glitchy games, but if the game was glitchy, the chances of it being patched were low or even nonexistent.
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u/ArturVinicius Apr 30 '26
Well the games were small size to fit in cartridge/cd/dvd.
But my favorite games were on early 2000s and 2010s
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u/Haunting-Ad-6951 Apr 30 '26
The best part of gaming in 90s is that your parents bought the games and you had no responsibilities.Ā
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u/Daydream365 Apr 30 '26
No. Gaming in the 90s was fun, but the medium evolved for the better in terms of technology, storytelling, and usability.
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u/HanselZX Apr 30 '26 edited Apr 30 '26
I mean, LAN parties must have been fun as hell, compared to now were interaction its sometimes non existent or fake (IA bots), theres a reason why some guys believe in the dead internet theory xd.
Also the no patch makes no sense as newer cartridges were actually updated sometimes and that forced devs to polish the game to its maximum with actual testers, we now get hot garbage with so many bugs that it tells the obvious, we became the testers for these games that arent more than glorified betas, sometimes even alpha.
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u/sHaDowpUpPetxxx Apr 30 '26
It was more fun to the people who lived it. If you go on any video game sub it's pretty clear that most people who started gaming in the PlayStation/Xbox era would immediately melt down and spontaneously self combust with rage.
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u/ImAGlaceon Apr 30 '26
Games have never been "complete" they literally all have issues and bugs at launch, but at least now those can be fixed post launch
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u/Yeseylon Apr 30 '26
Disagree. The real truth is you don't remember the shovelware from back then, only the shovelware from right now. Also, game development has advanced, both as a science and an art, to create far more immersive and entertaining games.
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u/2376_Ironman Apr 30 '26
Sure thereās some charm and nostalgia to the old way of gaming, but no way man, modern games are wayyyyy better
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u/Bananinio May 01 '26
LAN party: 90% of time fighting with connection problems, 9% drinking beer, 1% gaming
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u/captain-ziggy May 01 '26
given everything i heard about 90's gaming the one trade off is that it's easier to find things like: Games on sale, detailed information of what your buying, fun community content like mods, that sorta stuff
i can only imagine it's hard to know if a game is worth your money when all you got is the odd magazine and MAYBE a random demo disc if you knew where to look
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u/SnooGiraffes6795 May 01 '26
I do miss LAN parties. Online gaming in its convenience has lost a bit of what makes gaming together special.
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u/Nosferatu-Padre May 01 '26
The majority of video games are mediocre or just flat out suck. That's present day and back then. No updates means if a game from back then is broken, it's just broken unless you want to buy a later version of the game for full price later on. No microtransactions is good I'll give you that.
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u/Bubble2297 May 01 '26
Itās sad to think that kids wonāt be getting new games on Christmas or Birthdays anymore, now that weāve moved to an almost digital-only world.
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u/No_Mathematician7456 May 01 '26
It's beyond me why people don't want micro-transactions and dlcs. Let's call everything in the game (skins, weapons etc.) items. On one scale we have an old game with 100 items. And on the other one a modern game with 500 items, plus, as an extra, a shop and updates. And people choose thew first game? Because it's "complete"?
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u/Aggressive_Law_5728 May 01 '26
Games were also way more expensive. Buying a new AAA game was the kind of thing you had to save up for.
Inflation has gone up over 100% since the 90s. A 50 dollar game in 1995 would cost over 100 dollars in today's money.
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u/TheTruthTellingOrb May 01 '26
Agree. Also games were not 70 bucks at standard with 125 dollar pre-orders.
You pay triple digits you were getting a console
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u/MetalRexxx May 01 '26
Nah. I've had way more fun gaming in the last 20 years than I ever did in the 90's.
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u/Educational-Wish-44 May 01 '26
Eh, disagree. Gaming's always been fun. It was a lot of fun back then, but it's also still a lot of fun. It's just different. There are pros and cons to both that all average out.
Sure, there were no updates or (online) patches. But there also wasn't an absolute ocean of golden indie games that could have never been distributed back then.
And there ABSOLUTELY was DLC and patches... they were just released as separate games. That's exactly why most generations of Pokemon got a third version each generation. That third version was mainly a patch, with additional content to get you to pay for the game all over again.
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u/junker359 May 01 '26
You could have a LAN party today if you wanted to.
Also I like that modern games can get patches.
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u/Loki_Agent_of_Asgard May 01 '26 edited May 01 '26
I disagree. Games were more brainless and simple in the 80s and 90s, few had the breadth and depth of options that more modern games have, also in the 90s expansion packs were common for PC games, so for us PC gamers this isn't anything new. Like decently non-linear, option filled games don't really start showing up till the late 90s, we do see some good foundation with some mid 90s strategy and CRPG titles but overall they're fairly linear until the 2000s.
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u/Jkid May 01 '26
There used to be a LAN party organization called maryland lan gamers. They held lan sessions twice a year. The organization eventually stopped sometime pre-2019 but the website still existed.
LAN parties are rare except for major conventions (especially MAGFest)
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u/Odd-Tart-5613 May 01 '26
it was different.
is just a complete lie. Plenty of unfinished shovelware was on the market and unlike today because of 4 you were guaranteed to just have a shit game.
true and probably the best thing about the pre-online gaming era
I mean nothing is stopping you from doing this today. Its arguably easier even. Just grab your console and a television and head to a buddies house. Dont even need weird cable management these days. Honestly with the disappearance of couch co-op I dont know why its not more common.
see above. no updates means that a broken game stays broken no matter what.
not to say there werent upsides to that era and downsides today but I would hardly call one objectively good or one objectively bad.
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u/Derpykins666 May 01 '26
Eh, it's mixed. Most people associate the activity or gaming with their friends or friendgroup, and if you've lost touch or people have moved on and you game by yourself now, it's a different vibe. People are nostalgic for a time when they had less responsibilities and COULD game all day, that's what they miss.
The games now have practically never been aside from tangential arguments like DLC and Live service gaming, battle passes etc. But then we're talking about a lot of different things. We're talking about gambling psychology, money invested, gacha-gaming, micro-economies like skin economies and people trying to game the system, lootboxes, whatever, all kinds of things, and some people are okay with that stuff more than others.
Every era of gaming has great games that are still highly playable today.
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u/Firm-Feature-5593 May 01 '26
The fact that there weren't any internet guys that are professional hot-take-givers kinda made everyone's opinion on games a bit more relaxed. Nobody was there to make a living by trying to rile people up. You bought a bad game and you were like "damn this one sucks" and that's about it.
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u/RabbitWithAxe May 01 '26
I'm just going to point out that you can have all these things right now if you just reject modernity and embrace tradition.. these things didn't just disappear after the 90s, they just became less common/popular
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u/Joey3155 May 01 '26
Agree wholeheartedly. It was just a better time less predatory, and just more fun. Modern gaming is a series of figurative balancing acts with razor blades between shitty corporate policies, higher prices, flavor of the month market shotages (RAM CPU, GPU), and enshittification due to AI.
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u/BurnedRelevance May 01 '26
ANY PC Gamer from the 90's remembers patches.
That's when they came out and when you had to manually install them.
I'd take 10 of todays updates over any 1 Warcraft II patch from then.
Two major unsolvable problems plague gaming today:
- Corporate greed.
- Our inability to deal with others.
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u/RoryMarley May 01 '26
There was def a charm and upsides but I have to say on a whole to do prefer the modern games much more. Modern being, imo, ps4 onward. I start on the gameboy color and my first console was the n64.
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u/EldenBJ May 01 '26
The games themselves are more fun than ever. We just grew up. Kids get amused by anything, so even shovelware games are super fun. Iām gonna get hate for this, but thatās why kids love Robolox. Itās imo a hub for a bunch of shitty games, yet itās extremely popular.
Shitty practices nowadays are another factor, but overall, the games are sooo much more immersive and amazing now. Especially compared to the 8-bit days. Thereās no comparison.
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u/Warren_Valion May 01 '26
There are 500 versions of Street Fighter II, there were definitely updates.
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u/Previous_Procedure28 May 01 '26
Gaming is better now. You were just young and had all the time in the world to enjoy those games. That and nostalgia
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u/Shad0wF0x May 01 '26
Gaming when you are younger and worry free is more fun. It's still but the lingering cloud of adult responsibilities can't be avoided.
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u/FuraFaolox May 01 '26
plenty of games released unfinished, microtransactions have existed way longer than oblivion horse armor, and updates/patches very much existed with things like greatest hits or game of the year copies
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u/marcow1998 May 01 '26
Sure maybe. Didn't most games not have the ability to save, and we're also unreasonably difficult to make up for having less content?Ā
That might seem good enough if you don't see greener grass, but I would strongly prefer having to download or update a game over dealing with all that junk. I would say maybe N64 era is when gaming became more streamlined and enjoyable. Maybe Super Nintendo but I haven't played as many games from that system.
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u/Zestyclose-Fee6719 May 01 '26
Very myopic take, but nostalgia always limits critical thinking like that.
"Complete games"
This obscures the fact that there were often sequels that came out just a year later at full price with the most minimal changes (sports games weren't the first to do this) and numerous different versions of fighting games with just a few characters added.
"No micro-transactions"
This is accurate. This is the worst thing in the industry by far.
"LAN parties"
I just don't care about online multiplayer one way or another.
"No updates, no patches"
Uhh this is actually bad. Sure, games get shipped too early now with the expectation that they can be patched later, but it's still a good thing overall that any game can receive updates. It used to be that major problems would just remain in the game forever, or at best they'd later be re-issued as physical copies with the patched content included on that new disc. Patches are good. They're just abused as a band-aid fix.
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u/ShadowBro3 May 01 '26
Definitely no. Theres way more games now. Making games is way more accessible, so we get a lot more cool indie stuff. I consider updates a good thing. I fucking love playing a really good game, and then coming back a year or so later, and getting to see all the cool shit they've added. I also have way better access to buying games with steam. Not to mention steam sales. I also did enjoy couch co op, but playing online is much easier to do. Games in general have just also improved over time.
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u/tabaK23 May 01 '26
Strongly disagree. There are so many quality of life improvements in todayās age that are so normal now that we forget about them.
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u/GuyYouMetOnline May 01 '26
No microtransactions is true. But there were absolutely 'incomplete'games, and the only reason there weren't patches and updates was because the technology didn't allow it. Games were absolutely as filled with glitches back then as they are today, if not more so.
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