We all remember when we first started gaming and can get quite nostalgic about it. The first time you played any of the Grand Theft Auto games, you were always blown away by how incredible they looked. By comparison to the 4K gaming we have today, some of the old games that we once thought had incredible graphics now look like Lego blocks. GTA emerged in the 1990s; some of us have parents that grew up with consoles in the 1970s, which could only play Pong and saved them for us to see. Good memories, but much like the outdated graphics, what else don’t we miss about retro gaming?
No Saving
Before hard drives and cartridges were widely available, very few games had the ability to save your progress. You would be playing Sonic on the MegaDrive for hours, and then all of a sudden you face Dr Robotnik on a level that you can’t beat him on and you had to start again. The only way around it was to pause your game and leave your console on and hope you didn’t have a power cut.
Controller Wires
Before the PS3 and Xbox 360, your controller needed to be connected with a wire to the console. Changing batteries can be irritating but imagine a tense moment at the end of a game in FIFA, and your dog runs by, trips over the wire and it is pulled out of the console. This resulted in a loss of concentration and games would sometimes start immediately when you plugged the wire back in.
Lack Of Multiplayer
Enjoy gaming online with your friends? Many of the early consoles were single player only. You and one friend could take it in turns to play a game over at yours, but if you wanted to enjoy gaming with a few friends at the same time, your best bet will have been to go down to the arcade, putting money in the machine every time you wanted a game. Now, near enough all games have some element of community and playing with each other, from games for PS4 to leading online slots operators like mFortune; through the likes of tournaments and social media.
No Updates
Today you might play one of the latest titles and come across a glitch that might slightly affect the way you play a game. Maybe it freezes a little bit on one level. You have to sit for a few minutes for the update to go through to patch it. In the olden days of gaming, if you had any glitches that would be it. There were no means for updating the game, so you were either stuck with a broken game or would have to wait for the developers to release a new game, which meant a new purchase.
Physical Games
Having to use physical discs is something that many gamers still do, but now gamers have the option of downloading games to their console hard drive. On retro consoles, this wasn’t possible, and in particular PS2 discs were prone to scratches, which meant very easy your games could stop working all together, or at best take 5 minutes to start from the initial loading screen.