15 annoyances that gamers of the 90's still remember

Today I am going to go a little retro on the blog and make a list of those annoyances that we gamers in the 90's had to go through, but are completely unknown by anybody who is too young to remember. There is a lot of talk about how good gaming was in that decade, but not everything was sugar coated for us, so let's begin.

1. Living in the years when videogames became very unpopular with parents in America. This happened in the early 90's and it meant that a lot of times we were forced to play less than we wanted to and when we did play we were heavily criticized because we were "going to do bad at school", "suffer mind problems or epileptic attacks", "playing videogames that came from the devil" or just because "those things used too much electricity".

2. Been a broke (or too young to work) gamer and having to buy cheap discarded disc based games at video clubs. It was really a gamble where we had to bet 5 to 15 dollars in favor of the game actually working when we put it on our console. Sometimes it paid off, some times it didn't (and as far as I know, there were no returns).

3. Buying a game because the cover and description looked nice (information was scarce), only to find out that it was a piece of crap. In other cases it would be a good game, but one that could be finished in just a couple hours, which also felt like wasted money (I'm looking at you D!)

4. Been unable to buy a newly released game and spend months going to the video club each week to see if that sole copy of the game was available for rent.

5. Having your parents bring you a new game as a surprise, hear them boasting about how expensive it was, only to find out that is was a crappy game. You had to pretend you were having the time of your life so you were not considered an ungrateful brat.

6. Calling a gaming tips line (because some of us didn't knew about the concept of payed calls at the time) and then been scolded when a buffed up phone bill arrived.

7. Pre-ordering a game, wait for it to release, go to the store on release day and find out that the UPS (or Fedex, I don't remember) hadn't delivered the orders yet so you would have to wait for hours or just go home (which wasn't an option if you weren't old enough to drive and depended on others). This is the only thing where the standardized Tuesday release date of these times work to our advantage.

8. Having your console's internal battery go dead and be forced to go to the clock screen each and every time you turned it on (Sega Saturn owners can relate).

9. Hearing a dumb rumor about doing something incredible with your console (like using the extension sockets on a console to play games from another) and waste hours trying to do it (don't blame us, most of us were gullible kids at the time and internet was limited if not non-existent for us).

10. Trying to surf the web on a Sega Saturn or Dreamcast browser because you didn't had a computer yet. Yep, browsing on 56k modem with a browser that had an outdated Javascript version in it, fun right?

11. Been all pumped up playing a stage in a game (cartridge based), then having somebody stumble upon the gamepad's cord. Now your game graphics are all glitched and you have to hold on to dear life, hoping that when the screen changes the problem goes away and you can keep playing without having to restart the console.

12. When you had to do a lot of networking in order to borrow games so you could play them. It was sort of like bartering in ancient times because if you didn't had a game that the other person was interested in you were screwed. Also visiting a neighbor or just calling him/her out just because you wanted to borrow a game was not fun at all.

13. Been clueless about what was happening in the industry (magazines did not had it all covered) and having your hype crushed by unexpected delays, changes to the game or in the worst case scenario, the game been cancelled.

14. Renting a game that you couldn't understand (remember, most of us 90's gamers were kids at the time) and having to rely on trial and error if the video club wouldn't let you change it. (I love all rpg games now, but my first experience as a kid was Shadowgate (NES) and it was horrible to say the least).

15. Playing a disc based game that skips all over in the cinematic scenes because the disc was slightly scratched at the wrong part, you could play the game, but could not see the video cutscenes which sucked at a time where the reason you passed the stages was to see the shiny graphically polished videos.

A non-objective take into old school gaming

Hello folks. Up until now, I have been trying to be as objective as possible when I treat anything related to old school vs current gaming, but today I think I will go with something a little out of the ordinary and write a little more freely, just as a treat for all of the old school gamers out there. Don't get me wrong, I love many of the games that the previous and current generation have given us, but my criteria about what games are good and what games are legendary is still rooted to my old school background (especially from the 90s up to the early 00s), so now let me share with you some of my thoughts.

Details, details, details...

The first thing I must mention in this old school extravaganza is that I miss all the detail that getting a new game use to give us. With the lack of reliable internet in the 90's and a limited selection of information up to the middle 00's, buying a new game was sort of an adventure within itself. This gave a lesson to gamers at the time on how to use their imagination and intuition to fill the blank spaces that games had (because of technical issues and/or lack of technology). This attention to detail was fed by pretty much everything in sight, from clever game descriptions on magazines/catalogs, awesome looking television adverts, posters, sweepstakes, excellent box art, superb game manual content (like comics strips, detailed explanations, etc) and of course a game presentation that was hellbent on getting us interested in the game's storyline.

If you weren't alive at the time, this is how most trailers used to look like back then... 

(Be aware that this creative trailer is very recent).

Nowadays we have a lot of easy access to websites, blogs and videos that feed us with all sorts of information which is awesome, but feels somehow different. You see, back in the old school days, players received information in the same way that you could get drenched while running outside on a rainy day (raindrops = information). Now on our present times, the rain of information doesn't fall on us because we actually live in the rain cloud, which can sometimes make us feel a little overwhelmed. This overflow of information dampens our ability to use our imagination in order to cause our own hype and to get immersed in the game way before it releases because we are confronted with so many digested opinions that we start taking things for granted. We are not allowed to see games with the illusion of a kid anymore and this is not because we are older, but because there is no space for it on the current gaming market. Now speaking of such market...

It was that simple...

Convenience and simpler social gaming.

Back then, from the moment you got a gaming gem on your hands, you knew that you had plenty of time to finish it before the next big thing got into stores. We used to have the luxury of been able to just sit there and play without worrying about trends or what our friends were playing. In the end, any group of gamers would just get together and talk about what games they were playing (sometimes ending in a borrowed game fest), rather than been in the constant struggle of trying to be in the same page (playing the same game, because of its online feature). Be aware of the fact that I love playing online, but it sometimes feel like games are been thrown at us at a machine gun's pace and this puts us in a tight spot where we have to choose between finishing that game we were playing or just jump ahead to the newest online experience with the rest of your friends. Its a personal satisfaction vs social gaming war that can sometimes affect our gaming experience.

Chaotic, but fun game releases.

From high school and up until halfway through college, my friends and I experienced what I used to call "gaming road trips". This kind of thing happened because game releases were kind of random, rather than controlled by the standardized schedule we have now. Many times, our gaming group was not aware that X game was going to be released, so once we got that piece of information we rushed to the cyber cafe to see what was is all about and if we liked it, we made a road trip to the nearest video game store (which at the time was a 40 minute drive because of heavy traffic) and get the game. The cool part is that sometimes we didn't just went directly to our homes in order to play, but kept on going on our little road trip, which really fed our sense of expectation up to a point where we woke up very early on the next day and basically played till we dropped. That type of experience is kind of hard to replicate on our present day when most games and updates are released on Tuesdays (except for Nintendo who does it on Fridays). It just doesn't provoke the same excitement as it used to because it feels a little too structured for the old school gamer mindset as the random factor is taken away from the equation. Some of my friends tell me that I have to understand that this is done in order to make it easier for retailers, but I still believe that it was better in the past.

A pristine online gaming scene.

This one is really important because this is one of the main things that has changed. I remember that back at the day I played a lot of MMORPGs and online games that were either legitimately free to play or just a pay to play experience. This doesn't mean that micro-transactions were not existent at the time because they did exist, especially on free to play games. That free to play business model of the past was based on a different kind of payment-reward system where the "merchandise" in question was basically special equipment that made your character look cool, items that gave some little extra conveniences like moving a bit faster, items that temporarily boosted your stats/skills/crafting/experience points and stuff like that.

This whole argument can be summarized in the following way. If you had the dough you could get your hands into some nice treasures, but even if you had those awesome angel/devil wings on your back, had a special pet/mount with you and a skin for your armor that made you look like you were some kind of final boss, you still had to work your way up or else you would be just another cool looking noob. There was no easy way up and progress within the game was way slower than it is now, but once you got to play the game you could go through everything without skipping parts or having to pay for content that was already in the game. This made for online games that had stronger communities which looked for one another in a full online game experience that was not involved into any pay to win schemes.

Believe it or not, this "opening doors" effect became a whole argument when the HD version of the Resident Evil remake was launched on PS4 and Xbox One.

Games were not criticized using boring raw logic.

At the time, one of the things that made gaming to be so special was that it was a hobby that did not took itself seriously. We could have the wackiest of game characters, stories that felt like they were written by someone who was doing acid and we just didn't care at all. In that day and age, we as gamers saw fiction for what it was and we didn't felt the need to force logic into it. We went through the "opening doors" loading screens of Resident Evil, played as a magical jester that flew through your very own dreams in Nights, spent hours trying to solve the piano keys puzzle in Silent Hill, ran through an island trapping monkeys in Ape Escape, destroyed each other using weaponized cars in Twisted Metal, walked through virtual worlds without a single clue of what to do next on Myst and so on without even flinching. For us, each and every one of those game worlds had their own kind of beauty so we fully appreciated each of them.

Nowadays gaming criticism has become softer in what needs to be scrutinized and stricter with things that are not important. I've read and heard complaints about a character that looks "too unrealistic", cutscenes that are "too slow", stories that are too "farfetched" or "weird" and the list goes on. I really think that critics should stop this because games are supposed to be a ticket out of reality itself and not a carbon copy of it (at least until we manage to make a holo-deck or something). Game criticism is a good and necessary thing, but we need to point our guns to the things that really matter like game content, game design, shady practices and stop picking on trivialities.

Wrapping things up

To end this little mind to the past that I have taken you through, I must say that I believe in change and I do understand that things evolve over time. What I don't understand is why sometimes (like in the case of gaming) the people behind such a strong industry insist on eliminating the good things even though those good things still represent good profits. Taking the cheap-ass way may work for a while, but ultimately, small details like the ones previously mentioned are the criteria that separates common games from extraordinary ones and little by little gamers are waking up to the fact that gaming could be a lot better than what it is now and that we need to go back to thinking that improvement comes by adding, not subtracting.

Have a great day/night people, game on!