Cheat codes:
Yeah cheat codes. It's not just about cheating to play, I actually forced a personal policy where I had to beat the game once or get super stuck before punching in even silly codes. However codes could add replay value. They could actually influence my entire decision on games, and how I played them. For example, Star wars Battlefront was fun, but if I punched in the "no AI" cheat which could be toggled and disable spawning, I could wage a no respawn war and see who won through pure battle. It was also a blast playing with infinite ammo, especially back in the era where crazy guns was the standard. I don't know what really happened to them. It was likely the idea of trophies/achievement, and how nobody wanted a cheater winning them, however this is kind of invalid as the very few games that have cheats will have a disabled trophy mode. I guess the devs just decided to stop supporting it to the public, or possibly patch it out of games after they've used cheats to test stuff. One article I read even suggests that cheats were intended for the official journalists, and now they get a separate copy with cheats versus the public copy without cheats. Well whatever it is, It is a feature that I miss, and one that was always fun to goof around with once you played the game normally. It also kind of defeats this idea of casualizing everything, because if someone wanted to play a game that was too hard, cheats solved it. I beat the entire starcraft campaign with them because I honestly just suck at RTS games, yet I loved starcraft.
Jam pack, and demo discs:
Well this obviously died. I mean c'mon, we have digital demos for games now that you can get for free. However, back in the PS1 and 2 era you could get discs from magazines, stores, and bundles that contained 10-20 demos and some trailers. It's kind of how gaming publicity spread before everybody used the internet in the PS1 days, and it was also just a ton of fun to punch through each demo, even if a game wasn't your type. Back in these eras, I was also very young and didn't have much choice in my game library (most of the games I played were my dads, rentals, or games that we somehow stumbled upon in some luck). I think this was also around the time where the house rule was no videogames on weekdays. So having the time to play a disc full of so much variety in quick sample bursts was kind of awesome from my perspective. Just something that'll live on as one of the nicer small things of older gaming.
No influence:
I like the internet. Mostly because of the vast storage of knowledge and perspective, but secondly because of gaming. However they both combine to make a big chunk of the awesome gaming culture with reviews, forums, and interviews. You can even search up the cult following of an underdog game, something that I seriously need considering I play plenty of games that nobody really talks about. However, I didn't discover most of this until I was in middle school. I first found out about forums when I was watching some cool Worms 4 videos on youtube, and found the forums upon trying to learn how to mod. I wanted my super sheep to be a controllable flying UFO, and my air strikes to leave trails of flames. However after the amazing forums, then the leap to gaming journalism, you tend to wonder about the impact they leave on you. Don't get me wrong, I love all of this, but it's a gift/curse situation. I kind of miss the days when it was just me, my console, and a disc. No reviews to tell me how crappy the framerate or camera was, no feedback forums with whiny people who make up most of their complaints, and nobody telling me what was what. It was all about my thoughts based on personal interaction, and what I made of it. This was a truly relaxed and lenient time for gaming. We all get influenced in some way shape or form when we surf the net. And I love it, I love opinion, and I love the spread of word, and a fluid community. Otherwise, I wouldn't be putting hours and hours into a blog (that I'm sure no one is reading, but I don't care, it's fun). However sometimes I think we need the type of break from it that we can't really get. We get told that our game has some error that never crossed our minds, and now we see that error and remember all the criticisms when we play it. We think more critically because we see how that works, and now we can recommend games better, but we're also thinking (and evaluating) more about details that we didn't originally care about. For example, I didn't even know what framerate was until reviews came along and marked almost every awesome game down for bad framerate as though they had a speed gun for it. Sometimes it's just nice to remember the time when something like a spongebob game could be fun instead of thinking "Do I really want to play a cartoon tie-in game from some kids network?". Or you're looking at that shelf of games in the store, something catches your eye, and instead of trusting your insticts and trying to enjoy a new game you pass it by as "well metacritic gave it a 40, so it must not be worth it". Y'know the influence can be a good and bad thing. Your original mind and child-like innocence can be replaced with the distrust and criticism from "the real world" once you start getting into the whole internet scene with gaming. So I kind of miss the era when I had that pure mindset of just sitting down with a game and seeing what it was about.
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