You We're Lucky! - that was luxury! (today's gaming youth have never had it so good) - The Bear and Badger

Blocks100

Ahem, *Adopts Yorkshire accent*

'4K with ray tracing but you're crying it doesn't run at 60 fps too?! When I was a lad, I had to run for miles in rain to 'shop to buy a 'magazine' which had lines upon lines of poorly printed code that you had to type-in by hand to first play a game! A misspelling could set you back hours!

Load screens?! When I was a gamer, we'd count ourselves lucky if we even saw a Load screen. Countless days spent hunched over a tape deck listening to the distressed wails of a cassette player load/shred the data, one level at a time!

Day one patches! We never even had patches! We'd be lucky if we could lay our hands on a Poke many months later that enabled 'infinite lives' to save us from a completely broken game with scarce content masked by impossibly faux levels of difficulty. We had more bugs in our games than grandmother had in her sodden downstairs mattress and we were glad of them!

Have today's gaming youth never had it so good? Has the relentless march of new tech completely done away with 'gaming hardships'? Will gamers of this gen wistfully look back in thirty years time to chide the new next gen of needlessly complaining about 'how a glitch in their Metaverse' has completely ruined their total immersion.

Or do hardships still exist? Streamers playing non-stop sacrificing their mental health less they lose followers and income? Online gamers having to put up with sexist, racist, homophobic abuse? Anti-consumer practices like NFT in games?

Or have we never had it so good?

Kow

Eee, I remember a 200mb patch for Battlefield Vietnam on t' pc. It took me all day to download it then I had to burn it on to a disk and install it by launching the exe from the right folder. And it probably didn't even work.

davyK

I've heard stories of humungous downloads, patches and installs on the XBox/PS. Is that still the case? Kills any immediacy for me that. When I turn a console on I want to play. Even the Switch can occasionally throw an update at me which doesn't take long but grates.

The big downside for modern games - for me - is the loss of physical copies and the game manual. I look forward to the day it does a vinyl and comes back. Games can be transient in these times. Some deserve to be maybe. Does it matter if games get lost? I think it does.

And online isn't what it could be. Too many dickheads. I know they can be blocked but still. It doesn't hold much attraction for me but I've never experienced the full fat experience of playing with chums with headset & mic.

Local multiplayer is the biggest casualty of modern times, never mind gaming.

Kow

Ah the good old days of pot luck with who you had to listen to on multiplayer. Or before that, what offensive text you had to read at the left of the screen while you were playing. It was considered impolite to shoot someone who wasn't moving as they were most likely angrily typing something.

Time_on_my_hands

Often overlooked side to gaming, but aged 15 in the early 90s me and my best friend would have killed for the free dev tools that are available now.

Back then I was lucky to have gfa basic (no compiler) and devpac on the ST - and even then finding tutorials for assembly language was near impossible unless you knew someone who was in the know. At least I had DPaint so I taught myself pixel art.

I'd have loved to have had a copy of Unity plus the time to use it.

afgavinstan

This week I had to prepare a Xbox One and a og PS2 for sale.

One took about an hour and a half, downloading updates to allow it to then be wiped and restored. The other just took a good rub from a microfibre cloth and a tiny smidge of Mr Sheen.

That PS2 will outlive me.

LivDiv

Saves as standard, auto saves, quick resume and decent checkpointing.
Plus little to no loading.

Jumping in and out of games is so easy now compared to the past.

You had to buy a memory card ffs. If you played FIFA or GT(?) you had to buy a memory card just for them.

MattyJ

Thread title is killing me

EvilRedEye

I definately think there's a good argument gamers have never had it so good at the moment. Loading times were becoming problematic at the end of the PS4/Xbox One generation, resolutions were dropping below 1080p on base PS4, there were fewer measures in place to optimise patch download sizes. And now we've got a new generation of consoles that have made significant strides towards fixing those issues and we now have unprecedented choice on consoles now of whether we want to prioritise raytracing, resolution, framerate and so on. And now even if you love retro, there have never been more options available in terms of FPGA devices and reconditioned portable consoles, CRT shaders etc. etc. Plus cheap and free games are positively spewing out of every gamer's bumhole at the moment, even without piracy.

It's certainly the best time to be a gamer since the move to HD.

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