Re: When Is A Game Old?

On Sun, 21 Apr 2024 12:07:30 +0200, Kyonshi <gmkeros@gmail.com> wrote:

On 4/20/2024 4:21 PM, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:

I was always a "Might & Magic 2" fan myself.

I only started with 4, then got 5 (and enjoyed the experience of putting
both of them together to make the combined world; that was one expansion
which totally held the promises it made), then moved to 3.

MM4 (Clouds) and MM5(Darkside) were probably the best of the series
(despite my enjoying the 2nd game more). The entire 'merge the two
games into one, or enjoy each separately' thing was a gimmick, but a
neat one. Overall, it had a mix of good graphics and gameplay.
Nonetheless, the entire tile-step mechanic just felt so old-school
(this before old-school was seen as cool) that I had a hard time
enjoying them. Why play such clunky games, my train of thought was,
when there was so many other games exploring newer and more exciting
ways of playing?

(You can argue that I was shortchanging the games with that line of
thinking, and I probably wouldn't disagree with you, but that's how I
viewed it back then ;-)

I all got
them as cover discs on some magazine that only existed for selling old
games to people (Bestseller Games). I spent a lot of time in games from
that magazine, and I didn't mind they were older because at least they
were running fine even on my antiquated computer at the time.

Ah, cover disks. The magazines that came with floppies were a useful
source of spare disks (after you tried the demos, of course!), and the
ones that came with CD-ROMs were a bonanza of goodies that never
seemed to end. Especially in the early/mid-90s, when they squeezed
literally HUNDREDS of games onto each disk.

Having access to the Internet even back then, I was less dependent on
CD-ROMs to get access to demos, but they were a useful 'archival
medium' for demos that I knew I might want to look at later. Even for
those of us with online access, downloading a 5 or 10MB demo was a
time-consuming chore. Unless you absolutely needed the
latest-n-greatest demos, it was better just to slip in a handy
cover-disk and install it from there.

And those rare cover disks that offered COMPLETE games (sometimes
unintentionally ;-)? Those you hung onto like they were the rarest of
4-leaf clovers.

I still have a few cover disks lingering about just for that reason.

Floppy disks were a surprisingly costly part of game development in
the 90s, and ate up a significant chunk of the profits for publishers.
Disks were expensive and - even purchased in bulk - could cost
anywhere from 50 cents to 2 dollars US! So with a game that shipped on
8 floppy disks, that might mean $10 of that might be spent on media
alone! The weight of all those disks also made it more expensive to
ship the games too. It's one of the bigger reasons why publishers were
so quick to switch over to CD-ROM, even when the game didn't really
need all that much storage space; it was a huge cost-saving for them.

I never thought about that, but that actually is totally true. I thought
it was mostly the convenience, but yes, just shipping one disc instead
of 8 was certainly cheaper, even with the higher prices for CDs back then.
I still remember that some publishers went overboard and started to ship
some games on multiple CDs (FMV games mostly, which everybody forgets
for good reason)

It wasn't just the price of the medium itself, but getting the data
onto the CD-ROMs was both cheaper and faster. CD-ROMs were also less
likely to go bad, which meant fewer returns/exchanges too.

Multiple CD-ROM games (not just FMV games) were the bane of my
existance for years. Sure, at the start it was exciting (a game that
spanned multiple-CDROMs? Some games used up to 8 CDs; that's 5.5GB!!!
How in the world could any game need that much data? It was
mind-blowing ;-) but the appeal really started to fade as /every/ game
did it. Not only did it extend installation time, but you'd have to
constantly juggle disks just to play the game. It took me back to the
8-bit days when PC games constantly asked you to swap floppy disks!

But what really annoyed me was storage. Because I hadn't the room to
keep all the boxes for my games, I stored my CDs in those large CD
binder books (some of which held up to 200 disks). And because games
kept coming on ever larger number of CD-ROMs, I kept having to buy
more (and larger) binders to store them. What was worse, the continued
this long after DVDs became a viable medium.

(Unlike the floppy-to-CD transition, there was much less financial
advantage to moving to DVDs. While publishers might have saved some
money by pressing fewer disks, creating a DVD was still more expensive
per disk than making a CD-ROM. It also required investment in DVD
pressing hardware, and risked losing a not-insignificant number of
customers who didn't have DVD drives yet. So PC publishers were slow
to jump onto the DVD bandwagon).

And by the time DVDs were starting to become common, the transition to
digital downloads had started in earnest (not to mention games were
becoming so bloated that even DVDs were barely able to contain them).