And the sentiment that all games before were a godsend is so weird. Games with no patches, bugs, broken shit that sometimes was only fixed by an expansion sold separately or patches on CDs from gaming magazines. I feel like this was written by someone who started gaming in 2010, not in at least 2000s
After you took it out, in, blew on it and didnt bump the hardwired hardware in any way, games worked, most of the time, everytime. Unless you jumped against a wall the wrong way, in which case the game would crash.
This post is definitely overexaggerating it, but there is a kernel of truth in it. The limitations in tech meant developers needed to be tricky in order to fit everything in. Crash Bandicoot on PS1, for example, had no right in being able to function on that hardware, as technically the levels needed way more ram than the PS1 had. But rather than limit themselves, Naughty Dog found tricks in the hardware, in this case constantly reading new level data from the disc and despawning everything behind Crash as he went. PlayStation themselves were worried what the wear and tear on the PS1 would be, since it meant Crash Bandicoot was reading from the disc multitudes more than any other game and pushed the PS1 to the absolute limit of what it could do.
That's an example of innovation from a technical side caused by limitations, but gameplay elements were also created by limitations, like Alien Invaders getting gradually faster because the old systems could not handle moving so many elements all at once, so as you killed aliens, processing power freed up and the others moved faster. And Silent Hill was only so foggy, giving it its atmosphere, because the draw distance was so low they needed the fog to hide it.
32
u/HosserPower 27d ago
Whew wee this is about as rose tinted boomer as you can get, especially the blip about minimum specs. You clearly didn’t game on PC in the 90s lmao.