Gaming Then vs Gaming Now

Absolute bullshit, lol. Nowadays you can boot your PC, launch Steam and start into your game while 20+ years ago you were still looking for the damn CD.

And don't get me started with game updates, you had to do them MANUALLY. Go to the developer website, look at a download page, then you get offered updates: 1.0.1a, 1.0.1b, 1.0.2, 1.0.2b, 1.0.3, 1.1.0, 1.2.0, 1.2.1abc, ...

For smaller updates you had to install them in order, so you download 1.0.1a, install it, then download 1.0.1b, install it, then download... if you are lucky the bigger updates like 1.1.0 or 1.2.0 could be directly installed without any in-between steps.

Oh and installing games? World of Warcraft had 4 CDs and if you bought it with Burning Crusade you had to use 8 CDs in total for installation! And the install took ages too.

And during the installation you had to type in a cd key, which took longer than all your popups you're describing together.

I've been mostly playing on PC for the last 27 years, what we have today, even if some stuff is annoying, is 100 times better than how it was back then.

Back in the day:

Click game.exe

"What's the 8th word on the 24th page of the manual?"

fuckwheredidiputthemanual.png

Do people forget that games used to require you to have the CD-ROM in the drive before they would run? Even though most of the time the entire game was installed on your hard drive? It was an anti-piracy measure, but incredibly annoying. Even for games I owned, I would find patched no cd exes to avoid it.

Before I figured that out, if you lost or damaged your CD, you were just screwed. Buy the game again. My dad had a lot of character flaws, but at least when I was a kid he would take the time to call game companies and get a new CD for a few dollars if the disk stopped working.

Using Steam is incredibly more useful than what came before. Almost every game I owned in the era before Steam is just plain lost. There's only one set of games I still have easy access to -- Half Life, because you could register your CD key in Steam. I have a bin full of old game CDs, and I'm sure none of them work. But any game I've bought through Steam, in the last 20 years, I can click to download and play right now.

Add on to that that, no, lots of games did not actually work well out of the box, and needed updates to work. And you had to hunt down those updates. And a lot of those update sites do not exist anymore. Any game I install from Steam is the latest version of the game, and will auto-update if there's a new one.

Somebody clearly doesn’t remember boot disks and configuring your soundblaster hardware interrupt number.

I remember visiting my friend while he was in the middle of installing a game, and it failed on the 10th of 10 disks

• Open cracked games folder
• Find game
• Double click .exe

I know what you mean, but who are this "double click" and "exe" guys?

• Press RUN/STOP and SHIFT.

• PRESS PLAY ON TAPE

• Press PLAY on tape.

• OK
  SEARCHING
  FOUND Ultimate Game II

• Take walk with the dog.
• Play game.

The steam ad window can be disabled in settings.

Who here remembers inserting disk 4 of 12?

something changed

Pop up window minimizes game: do you want to allow this program to communicate on private and/or public networks?

Install with GOG a single time. Be able to archieve old versions in case gameplay changes.

wine ./bin/x64/Cyberpunk2077.exe

Done.

Gotta add a few hours of fiddling with your AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS to free up memory to the "Gaming Then" column.

Depends on the game, factorio is available both on steam and as a direct download (in fact, devs recommend purchasing on their site and transferring to steam if you want) and you can just click the factorio executable to start the game. Now KSP2? That's the second thing by far

Don't forget about:

#THIS GAME SUPPORTS AN AUTOSAVE FEATURE DON'T SHUTDOWN YOUR COMPUTER #🆗

I don't know what time in the past you compare the present to, but my current PC boots quicker into Windows, starts up Steam, and launches a 70 Gigabyte game than a 286 could count its two Megabytes of RAM on POST.

To "double-click an .exe file" one had to manually launch DOSShell or Windows, because else one would have to traverse into the game's directory (by heart). But launching a game via Windows would often leave the machine with too few resources to run the game.

Did I mention the constant reboots to switch RAM and driver configurations because not every game would just run? The hassle to setup sound cards? Having to have the game disks ready all the time?

Legitimately why I still pirate some games that I purchase through Steam.

The pirated copy runs better 95% of the time, and people can't even argue that you're meaningfully stealing because you already own access to the same exact game.

The enshitification of everything.

EULA bullshit

• uninstall
• reinstall
• uninstall
• reinstall
• uninstall
• reinstall
• uninstall
• reinstall
• uninstall
• reinstall
• uninstall
• refund

😬

To be fair, the vendor intro 1-2-3 taking a while has been a problem since PS1 era. With the PS2 came an extra serving of infinite cutscenes

Itch.io is pretty straightforward. Download .exe and play.

Ya'll motherfuckers are forgetting the days when you had to have a fucking paper-slot decoder thing or read word 3 on page 50 of the manual to start your game.

Vulcan Shaders have stepped into the ring

TBF it used to take a really long time with multiple disks to install literally anything.

pirated games don't have this issue. been doubleclickjng exe files for all my games

This is why I just went back to playing Red Alert 2. My install from 2001 still works.

I hate this, above Steam client is slow as hell (GOG isn't much better). But you can hack it in most games to start the game clicking in the Icon. Look at the properties of the games in the folder, there is usually a game launcher, it is this one whose icon appears when this game is installed, it is this one that launches Steam (or GOG), but apart from that there is usually the original executable (look also in the subfolders, mostly in bin) which directly launches the game without Steam or GOG.

I dunno about all this, I just play games from Atari, NES, SNES, Genesis, Game Boy, Playstation, etc. Maybe I'm simple but I'm also having fun :P

I had ME legendary edition in my steam library. I wanted to play. It asked me to sign up for all the EA bullshit.

I still haven't played it.

missed the bit about windows forcing an update and reboot, then crashing to an irreparable state, forcing a reinstall of the whole os and games that were installed.

well at least I don't have to keep the CD in the CD Drive to actually play the game now

Hate this bullshit so much.

I hate that this is so accurate

Half of that never happens to me tbh and the vendor intros were mostly a thing in 2010ish games (for me).

But something that is not on the list and I hate is if steam just starts another game launcher where you have to click something (like Witcher 3 or cities skylines).

I remember having to hunt high and low for the dune 2 manual to find out how heavy an Atreides airfield is because that’s what anti-piracy measures were back then.

Also it was much more of a crapshoot whether or not a game would work at all. Some games just completely refused to be played outside of specific hardware, especially when it came to video cards. Stupid messages like “sorry, you must have a GeForce 2300 or newer to play” that literally checked if your video card name started with some specific string…

Similar kind of thing with sound cards. Most games had a couple options for sound: if you have a sound card that contains the magic words “sound blaster” you got to enjoy nice sounds! Otherwise hope you like some kinda shitty half-attempt at MIDI sound.

And every game ever came with an EULA, if it wasn’t in the game it was in the manual or in some readme. It’s just as meaningless now as it was back then.

Then when CDs came out, sometimes they’d get scuffed and become impossible to install, so you’d have to end up buying a game twice because your cousin got a hold of it.

Things haven’t changed that much. There’s still a lot of shitty games, with a few that are great. It’s more like micro transaction or “free-to-play” games instead of shovelware now for the most part it seems though.

Everyone remembers the classics and forgets the duds!

Some of my favorite games from back in the day had a half dozen vendor intros. There were a few years where they were completely out of hand. It's not all so bad these days.

Made by someone who wasn't around back then. Getting games to run was just as if not more tedious than it is now.

you can disable steam ad windows

Don't forget you gotta update your driver's too before even beginning "Launch Steam"

For most games, including ones on Steam this is what I do.

Being up program launcher with key combination.
Start typing name of game, hit enter.
Then if Steam is not open Steam launches,. Game launches.

Get yourself a launcher program. Having to bring up Steam and search a library of dozens of games seems maddening when you could just type a few letters.

Minesweeper might be the only game I know that opens directly into play game. Everything else "then" still needed us to press play.

I used to have the irq of my sound blaster 16 memorised because you need to put it in for every game.

I love the fake "offline mode" of Steam which for certain game, doesn't work.

I knew it was already shitty 20years ago when Steam get popularized by this shitty game (Counter Strike),

i'm tired of software constantly needing to download fucking updates for every little fucking thing. you can't just use sEcUrIty as an excuse to make things 2000x more annoying

People praise Steam, but it's one of the most bloated, unnecessarily convoluted examples of feature creep on my machine, and it always wants to run in the background and check for updates. Even when I do remember to exit properly, it takes several seconds of thinking before it closes. I've resorted to using task manager instead.

Almost any launcher is less annoying to me than Steam, but then I've never been one to use or want the various social aspects. I wish there were a lite version for people who just want to use it to buy and play games.

All the people that defends steam, probably use mcafee antivirus.