Gaming Then vs Gaming Now

Meme transcription: A table comparing the steps to start a game ‘then’ vs. ‘now’.

Content of the “Then” column:

  • Double-click GAME.exe
  • Play game

Content of the “Now” column:

  • Launch Steam

  • Steam updates

  • Steam opens

  • Close Steam’s ad window
  • Select Game

  • Game launcher starts

  • Game launcher launches Game launcher updater

  • Yes
  • Yes
  • Yes
  • Ok

  • Would you like to sign up for our newsletter?

  • No

  • Our EULAs have changed. Please review them before continuing

  • Scroll
  • Scroll
  • Scroll
  • Scroll
  • Yes
  • Yes
  • Yes, sell my soul
  • Start game
  • Skip vendor intro
  • Skip vendor intro #2
  • Skip vendor intro #3
  • Sit through nVidia The way it’s meant to be played
  • Skip opening cutscene

  • Main menu opens

  • Would you like to connect your Steam account to account?

  • No
  • Press play.
  • Play game.
ares35,
@ares35@kbin.social avatar

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.

underKap,

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

Sotuanduso,

From “double click game.exe” to beginning actual gameplay took all of 68 seconds just now on a fairly average AAA game I have (Gotham Knights,) and 90% of that was just loading time with no further input required. This was on Steam (which was not running in the background because I stopped it first,) but because I used a desktop shortcut, I did not have to click through all the menus and close the ad window.

I use Avast, thank you.

Vlyn,

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.

altima_neo,
@altima_neo@lemmy.zip avatar

The fact that the “then” is missing so much of the bullshit we dealt with back then shows whomever made this “meme” never gamed back then.

There’s also the issues with your disks getting corrupted, discs getting scratched, or losing them because they came with so goddamn many.

GreenMario,

Same type of kid whom believes every single game worked perfectly on release and didn’t need patches back then.

Sorry bro you only remember the Gems. At least a game isn’t getting released that will delete your OS when you uninstall it.

chocobo13z,

Ooh, was there a game that did that?

fkn,

Actually there was a steam script that deleted your Linux root drive… that was a real thing.

I could also totally see a botched install script for win95 totally bricking a win98. Install…

GreenMario,

Myth II by Bungie of all people

As well as Pool of Radiance 2

brick,

DOS/4GW Professional Protected Mode Run-Time Version 2.01a.

Fatal error (1307) not enough memory. PRESS ANY KEY TO CONTINUE…

Runtime error (1604). PRESS ANY KEY TO CONTINUE…

Error (2504): can’t create swap file “.” DOS/4GW Professional fatal error (1101): initialization error [1] PRESS ANY KEY TO CONTINUE…

Ok, guess I’m just never going to play Wing Commander then…

Dubious_Fart,

I wish I still had options to install updates or not.

Cause sometimes I like to fuck around with silly bugs and exploits in your old solo games, or because some amazing mod only worked on X version and not Y version. which is not something you can do anymore because you are only allowed to have the most recent version or else.

shadowSprite,

FYI GOG lets you decide whether or not to update, and if you update and don’t like the update or it’s buggy you can roll it back. They don’t have as wide a selection as steam, but they have a lot, and they actually have a ton of old games too. I love it for games that I’ve modded and the mods get abandoned, I can play my modded version forever

Vlyn,

Not true, go to your Steam library, right click the game you want to change, Properties -> Betas -> Select the game version you want.

Not every developer offers this, but there’s plenty where I could go back 10 years in updates.

Zron,

Most of the time, at least up until a few years ago when I last had to do this for a Bethesda game(thanks tod for releasing Skyrim 7 times) You can also download any released version of the game from the steam database, provided you own it of course.

I needed a specific patch of the original Skyrim release for an overhaul mod I wanted to play, and was able to find the release through the steamDB.

Of course, that’s a game that released 1.0 on steam. Anything released before steam, and you’re probably still going to have to go spelunking through old archives and shady websites to find old versions of games.

festus,

Not to mention how annoying it was to even buy games - if a popular game was released you might have wait for the store to open to buy it before it went out of stock, and if it was more niche you might have to mail an order form in and wait for them to ship it to you.

altima_neo,
@altima_neo@lemmy.zip avatar

Back when you preordered because theyd run out!

Valmond,

That was IMO part of the charm :-) especially as they don’t seem to do games like that anymore (again IMO).

Vlyn,

I absolutely hated it. If you just wanted to switch between games you had to get up and physically get the other CD. Oh and you better not drop that CD or scratch it, or your game might be lost.

Besides that buying games sucked too. Nowadays I can buy and download a game in an hour tops, smaller games in minutes. Back then you had to go to a store or wait for shipping…

Don’t get me started on DRM, SecuROM doesn’t work nowadays, so all games you bought with it are broken.

There was no charm, it all sucked.

Valmond,

Totally true.

But you waited for Diablo 2, Red Alert, and so on so …

johnthedoe,

God damn I completely forgot about multi disc installs! That was the pits.

coffinwood,

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?

altima_neo,
@altima_neo@lemmy.zip avatar

And screwing around with irqs because some games were picky and expected your sound card to use a certain one. The were ruined when I had to decide between using a joystick or having sound.

Blake,

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!

LinkOpensChest_wav,
@LinkOpensChest_wav@lemmy.one avatar

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.

Getallen,

Yeah, steam is way too bloated for me. Usually it makes it impossible to do stuff at startup since the new UI version uses more resources

LinkOpensChest_wav,
@LinkOpensChest_wav@lemmy.one avatar

I’ve come to accept that it’s going to update every time I launch it, which makes it a pita since I work long shifts and have very little time to play games to begin with.

rodolfo,

I wonder if a batch program wouldn’t help you to bypass task manager too, mmmh

LinkOpensChest_wav,
@LinkOpensChest_wav@lemmy.one avatar

It would! I’ve actually considered that, but honestly I just don’t use Steam enough to justify it. I’d probably use it a lot more if it didn’t feel like such a chore to run.

thisfro,

What other launchers do you use?

For me its like yeah steam has some annoyances, but overall it is pretty good and mostly works. Ubisoft and EA usually have more annoyances and/or straight up don’t work.

LinkOpensChest_wav,
@LinkOpensChest_wav@lemmy.one avatar

EGS only takes a few seconds to launch, doesn’t shove an annoying popup ad in my face every time I open it, and completely exits the application when I click X

I’ve actually bought the EGS version of several games just so I don’t have to deal with Steam’s bullshit

I’ve also got some indie games that don’t use a launcher at all, and I use the Windows version of ESO so I don’t need a separate launcher for that, which is my most-played game of all

thisfro,

Interesting, for me it is EGS that has all the bs haha

Its slow, ads all over, store is horrible

LinkOpensChest_wav,
@LinkOpensChest_wav@lemmy.one avatar

At least it’s just a few ads for games, and my recently played games are right there at the left, ready to be launched.

Steam is virtually unusable upon opening, looks like visiting a virus-ridden site without an adblocker, and it made me sign in again even though I’ve just used it recently. The only way to prevent having to sign in frequently is to leave it running in the background at all times, and that’s not going to happen.

thisfro,

Yeah maybe its just works well for me. I set steam to load the library instead of the store and I never get these popups. Also I never have to sign in again. But steam is always open, since I use my desktop nearly exclusively for gaming at this point.

Glifted,

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.

such_lettuce7970,
@such_lettuce7970@kbin.social avatar

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

Weirdfish,

Yeah, I went console when I realised I wanted to spend time actually playing the game.

Sure I’m missing out on the absolute highest settings, mods, etc.

However, I spend 55 minutes out of an hour actually playing the game.

JoeCoT,
@JoeCoT@kbin.social avatar

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.

pjhenry1216,

Do people forget that games used to require you to have the CD-ROM in the drive before they would run?

They weren't always like that though. Don't forget piracy didn't start with the video game industry. It only started once it took off. CDs came later.

Source: person who remembers playing games off 8" floppies.

Edit to add: a game 20 years ago will only run because Windows says it's ok. If it's a linux-based game from 20 years ago, then it depends on a lot of other stuff. It's not Steam that keeps them running. Steam just provides you a copy for the most part. GOG exists and doesn't have the DRM that Steam allows. Does it have the same library? No. But we shouldn't support DRM to begin with, so if it's not on GOG, than I don't trust the game itself.

JoeCoT,
@JoeCoT@kbin.social avatar

I also played games off floppies, sure. And there were anti-piracy measures there too. I remember playing a pirated copy of Leisure Suit Larry as a kid, and you had to answer questions about pop culture kids wouldn't know, followed by specific questions about wording in the manual. Before CDs, manuals were the anti-piracy measure.

mark3748,

I used to play Faery Tale Adventure on Amiga. The anti-piracy was code phrases around the edge of a paper map.

Valmond,

Hello fellow oldie :-)

All those young kids have never heard of the no-CD crack you think?

aksdb,

Also updates were typically incremental to save bandwith. So not only do you need “the update”, you may need a cascade of updates you need to download and install, in order.

Atomic,

Only for noobs who didn’t rip the CD to an ISO and used that with a mounter 😎

Turious,

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.

The_Picard_Maneuver,
@The_Picard_Maneuver@startrek.website avatar

something changed

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

bleistift2,

The funnest part was when the popup didn’t minimize the game and you were wondering WHY THE FUCK MULTIPLAYER didn’t work until you gave up and saw the firewall window.

GreenMario,

press more than one key

DO YOU WANT STICKY KEYS, BRO?!

AlexWIWA,

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

marv99,

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.
bleistift2,

Judging from your username, you must have had very old hardware when you were young.

marv99,

Or … 99 has a more uncommon meaning for me 🤓

(in reality the hardware in question was brand new hottest stuff when I was young)

waz,

And when it’s loaded: ‘> You are standing at a crossroads, there are ways to the North, East, West and South. There is a Dwarf. The Dwarf throws an axe at you, the axe misses ‘>_

ProvokedGamer,
@ProvokedGamer@lemmy.ca avatar

‘>Grab the axe

DmMacniel,
@DmMacniel@feddit.de avatar

Datasette was so fricking slow…

Thanks for fastloader

DrPop,

Commodore 64?

marv99,

Yes indeed. It would also work (at least similarly) for the VIC-20 and other Commodore computers 🧑‍🏫

GreenMario,

Ok, gramps it’s tile for your nap.

marv99,

https://feddit.de/pictrs/image/85fd8165-48b5-49ad-90d0-943d63e62359.png

strawberry,
@strawberry@artemis.camp avatar

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

ninjan,

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

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