Gameplay mechanics were also a lot better with more replayability.

Games were definitely buggy and I honestly think people forget how much better the quality is nowadays.
I also think there is something to it just being the 90s or so and not having much choice. If you only have one game to play then of course you're going to replay it to death. If I have a steam library of 1000 games then I'm much less likely to.
A lot of this is just nostalgia for the past and the environment as opposed to games being any better.
- There's also the SNL effect. Everyone remembers the great games like Mario. Nobody remembers World Games.
  
  World Games was so good they made a spoof sequel of sorts called caveman games. A lot of people remember world games, it was a well received game. You had so many actually forgettable garbage games to choose from....
  
  I'm unfamiliar with that game. Was World Games buggy or just bad? The quality the OP referred to was bugs, not gameplay.
  Even the worst AAA game today has better game play than anything from 30 years ago. It's the nature of extreme complexity that allowing players freedom makes complete debugging impossible.
- They weren't as buggy. People making excuses classify exploits as bugs ignoring that modern games have more bugs and exploits.
  I played Atari 2600 games like space invaders, adventure, and pitfall for thousands of hours without ever running into a bug. The only game with an exploit was Combat where you could put your tank muzzle into a corner and make it loop across the map. But both players could do it.
  
  https://www.mariowiki.com/List_of_Super_Mario_Bros._3_glitches
  
  some games would be unplayable without hand-patching the code that you'd find in a magazine.
- Yeah quality has improved massively, maybe not the initial release but 90% of games i recently played were regarded as buggy messes on release. After years of updates they mostly work.
- Nah, in the 80s we had hundreds probably thousands of games for the commodore 64 and later the amiga 500, all of them pirated. The piracy scene was huge, and often the games were free as we just copied them from friends
- I've grown up with a PS1 and a handful of pc games, and I don't remember any of them being any more bugged than modern gaming. The only exception being Digimon World 1, a notoriously buggy game (but to be fair, half of those bugs were introduced by the inept translation's team).
  I know people nowadays know and use a bunch of glitches for speedruns and challenge runs (out-of-bounds glitches being the norm for such runs), but rarely, if ever, those glitches could be accessed by playing through the game normally, to the point that I don't remember finding any game breaking bug in any of the games I played in my infancy (barring the aforementioned Digimon World).
- I have 1000 games, but I still replay a bunch of them over and over, just at a less rapid pace.
- I don't agree with that first point at all. Games were not all that buggy, It was orders of magnitude better than it is now.
  
  I think it's because people only remember the good games and not the stinkers.
  I played a lot of shit games I can't recall because I played for 30 minutes max. There was one game I never passed the first level as I couldn't figure out what to do, I think something to do with jelly beans and a blob. How is that good gameplay lol?
  But of course myself and others can tell you about the games we played for hours like Super Mario Bros which didn't really have bugs and were good.
- I also think there is something to it just being the 90s or so and not having much choice.
  Absolutely. I enjoyed and played a lot out of King of Dragon Pass back in the day. Yesterday I sat down to finally play its spiritual successor Six Ages: Ride Like the Wind. From what I remember from KoDP it plays exactly the same (at least during the first hour). Yet I couldn't force myself to keep playing it. Same way nowadays I can't seem to get hooked with genres I used to play a ton as a kid: RTS games like Age of Empires II and Warcraft 3, life sims like The Sims, point & click graphic adventures like Monkey Island, traditional roguelikes, city builders, etc. Other genres I try to get back into and I do manage to play a ton of hours of but I'm never able to finish like when I was young (e.g. JRPGs)
  When I try to play many of those games I tend to feel kinda impatient and wanting to use my limited time to play something else that I feel I might enjoy better. A good modern 4X game with lots of mod support like Stellaris or Civ6 instead of RTS games which have always felt a bit clunky to me. Short narrative games like Citizen Sleeper or Roadwarden instead of longer ones I'm not able to finish. Any addictive modern roguelite, especially if it features mechanics I particularly like (like deckbuilding and turn-based combat). If I ever feel interested to play a life sim or a city builder nowadays it has to feature more RPG elements and/or iterative elements and/or deckbuilding and a very compelling setting to me. And so on.
  It feels like many of the newer genres (or the updated versions of old genres) are just more polished and fine-tuned than genres that used to be popular in the 90s and the 2000s. They just feel better to play. And to be fair in some cases they might be engineered to be more addicting, too. Like, I did finish Thimbleweed Park some years ago but I feel like nowadays no one is going to play witty point & click graphic adventure games with obscure puzzles if they can play a nice-looking adventure game filled with gacha waifus.
- A couple years back I found my old Gameboy advanced. I tried to play Kirby on it and I was taken back by how much it sucked. The screen was way smaller than I remember it being and there was no backlight which meant I had to play the game in a well lit room. I don't think I could ever go back to those days.
- I mean technical wise, games are better now and could easily be patched, but I think that's why games had better gameplay in the past to make up for the lack of gamer accessibility to patching.
  
  You're saying that because games couldn't be patched, they had better gameplay? That makes no sense at all.
  Lots of games had crap gameplay. There are more junk vintage games than good ones. The gameplay was simple because it had to be. The consoles didn't have the power to do more. Chips were expensive. So they had to invent simple gameplay that could fit in 4k of ROM. If dirt simple gameplay is your thing, great. The Atari joystick had one stinking button for crying out loud.
  You think Space Invaders has better gameplay than Sky Force Reloaded? Or Strider has better gameplay than Hollow Knight? You're insane.
  E.T. for the 2600 had gameplay so bad it crashed the entire video game industry.
  Double Dragon on NES had a jump that was impossible to make forcing the company to make a new cart and give refunds.
  
  It's a nostalgia thing - I don't remember the games where I got stuck on the first level and could never finish the game (which happened). Or were just boring so I quit after a half hour.
  I do remember donkey Kong country, super Mario bros, sonic Etc. Which all worked well and were fun.

They didn't need updates because they gave you the whole game, (usually) more-or-less bug-free, the first time!
- That's some survivorship bias shit right here. I can't tell you how many shitty, buggy games I played in the days of early console and PC gaming. Even games that were revolutionary and objectively good games sometimes had game-breaking bugs, but often it was harder to find them without the internet.
  Plus, don't you remember expansion packs? That was the original form of DLC.
  
  There are different kind of DLC, and the kind that's similar to actual expansion packs is usually not criticized (or not by most).
  
  Expansion packs were more complete experience than DLCs sold piece by piece.
  
  THANK you. Fuck the upvotes, that person is objectively wrong. Maybe they just didn't play that many games during the early PC/console era?
- Console:
  Except for when they did not, which was actually somewhat common.
  But it also became quickly known, respectively stores stopped stocking buggy games. So in return, larger publishers tried their utmost to ensure that games could not have bigger bugs remaining on launch (Nintendo Seal of Excellence for example was one such certification).
  But make no mistake, tons of games you fondly remember from your childhood were bugged to hell and back. You just didn't notice, and the bigger CTDs and stuff did not exist as much, yes.
  PC:
  It was just flat-out worse back then. But we also thought about it the reverse way: It wasn't "Oh this doesn't work on my specific configuration, wtf?!" but "Oh damn I forgot I need a specific VESA card for this, not just any. Gonna take this to my friend who has that card to play it.".
  
  Even the concept of taking your game to a friend to play it is basically impossible today
- Counterpoint: budget re-releases of games (e.g. 'Platinum' on PlayStation) were often an opportunity to fix bugs, or sometimes even add new features. A few examples:
  Space Invaders 1500 was a re-release of Space Invaders 2000, with a few new game modes.
  Spyro: Year of the Dragon's 'Greatest Hits' release added a bunch of music that was missing in the original release.
  Ridge Racer Type 4 came with a disc containing an updated version of the first Ridge Racer, which ran at 60fps.
  Super Mario 64's 'Shindou Edition' added rumble pak support, as well as fixing a whole bunch of bugs (famously, the backwards long jump).
  Those are just off the top of my head. I'm certain there are more re-releases that represent the true 'final' version of a game.
  
  That's the exception rather than the rule. If you have the opportunity to make some changes in a new batch, why not take it?
  Generally, when the game was released, it had to be done. If there were any major bugs, then people would be returning their copies and probably not buying an updated release. It'd also hurt the reputation of the developer, the publisher, and even the console's company if it was too prevalent of a problem.
  I don't think anybody I knew ever got an update to a console game without just happening to buy v1.2 or something. There were updated rereleases, but aside from PC gaming, I don't think most console gamers back then ever thought "I hope they fix this bug with an update".

games back then were also more focused on quality
This is selection bias. You remember Metal Gear Solid, but do you remember Iron & Blood: Warriors of Ravenloft? Do you remember Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero? Bubsy 3D? The million-and-one licensed games that were churned out like baseball cards back then?
and make gamers replay the game with unlockable features based on skills, not money
If we're going to say that a full-price game today costs $70, Metal Gear Solid would have cost the equivalent of $95. Not only that, but that was very much the Blockbuster and strategy guide era. Games would often have one of their best levels up front so that you can see what makes the game good, but then level 2 or 3 would hit a huge difficulty spike...just enough to make you have to rent the game multiple times or to cave in and buy it when you couldn't beat it in a weekend. Or you'd have something like Final Fantasy VII, which I just finished for the first time recently, and let me tell you: games that big were designed to sell strategy guides (or hint hotlines) as a revenue stream. There would be some esoteric riddle, or some obscure corner of the map that you need to happen upon in order to progress the game forward. The business model always, at every step of the medium's history, affects the game design.
"Value" is going to be a very subjective thing, but for better or worse, the equivalent game today is far more packed full of "stuff" to do, even when you discount the ones that get there just by adding grinding. There are things I miss about the old days too, but try to keep it in perspective.
- “Value” is going to be a very subjective thing, but for better or worse, the equivalent game today is far more packed full of “stuff” to do, even when you discount the ones that get there just by adding grinding. There are things I miss about the old days too, but try to keep it in perspective.
  Exactly this.
  Games back then were pricier - once you account for inflation.
  Games back then did expect you to pay extra - in fact quite a few were deliberately designed to have unsolvable moments without either having the official strategy guide or at least a friend who had it who could tell you.
  
  Games back then were pricier - once you account for inflation.
  That's commonly said but ignores other economic factors such as income, unspent money, and cost-of-living.
  Though lots of things are better now: the entire back-catalogue of games, more access to review/forums, free games (and also ability to create your own games without doing so from nothing) etc. Aside from when video store rental was applicable, early gaming was more take-what-you-can-get (niche hardware/platforms might still have that feel somewhat).
  
  Games back then were pricier - once you account for inflation.
  This has always been a weird argument to me. Did wages go up to match inflation? If not, they’re not actually getting any cheaper.
  
  a few were deliberately designed to have unsolvable moments without either having the official strategy guide or at least a friend who had it who could tell you.
  Do you have an example?
  I knew kids that bought strategy guides, I worked at a game shop that sold strategy guides, and as far as I could tell they were for chumps. People who has more money than creativity.
- There's just so much everything now a days. There's tons of great new music and tons of great new games buried in all the new stuff thats being pumped out that it's hard to find the gems. There's lots of passionate people out there taking the time and effort to try and make the best
- Son, are you crying?
- I forgot about hint hotlines. They'd charge per minute and did everything they could to keep you on the phone. I called a hotline once and my parents weren't too happy about it.

This is just nostalgia.
Case in point, you can still play all of these old games. If you are willing to pirate, you can get access to thousands of games, most you never even played before, for free. You never have to pay for another game as long as you live and a still be playing new games from this era of "better" games.
I've done this myself. Played for like a month, and then for bored. And basically noone does that. I have the Nintendo switch access to old nes games. My kids never touch it. No one can really say because there is no novelty.
You know why? Modern games are way better. This isn't to say these isn't some annoying shit that goes along with them. But the old days weren't some magical time of gaming. It seems magical because it was new, especially to the people living during that time, and simply due to nostalgia.
I know I won't be popular, but I love modern gaming. I throw a game I'm interested in in my steam wish list. I wait for it to drop to below 20 dollars, and then I buy it.
The most recent games that I've put a ton of hours into are bg3 and anno 1800. No micro transactions, unless I missed something.
I also played a ton of supercell games: coc, cr, and bs. Many entertaining hours over years. Never spent a dime. Micro transactions other people paid allowed me to play for free. How is this not amazing?
I'm open to hearing competing ideas, but if you do you disagree with me, expect me to ask why you don't do the things above, and just answer the question in your post. If that's ignored, it will just indicate to me that you realize I'm right.
- Good games are good games no matter the era. I don’t think you can find many serious people claim that Barbie’s Horse Adventures is better than Red Dead Redemption 2 just because it’s retro. And No serious person is going to claim that Suicide Squad is better than A Link to the Past, just because it’s a modern game
  
  Agreed. Although that's not what anyone actually says. Just read the comments in this thread. You would think they rdr2 was completely unplayable shit hole of micro transactions.
  But what about rdr2 to link to the past? Removing the "considering the era" part of the equation, just 1 to 1.
  
  Competitive NES Tetris exemplifies this. The game was already retro when most current top players were fetuses, which completely eliminates nostalgia as a possible factor.
  
  Depends a lot on the games for me. I can spend a lot of time on old games, if they were mechanically well made. But if the controls are clunky (like e.g. in old adventure games) I am out.
- What was great is that we had more free time.
  
  I also think there's a genuine drop in satisfaction when people are presented with more options. I limit myself and only buy new-ish games when I feel like I've extracted as much enjoyment out of the last one I bought as I can. I think this helps a lot.
  Because what I see a lot of people doing is jumping to the game-of-the-week and then getting numb and saying "there's no good games" even as they continue to buy new ones every week.
- No need to pirate. There is a shitload of games on the internetarchive: https://archive.org/details/internetarcade
- We all have to be very specific about how you're defining "better" here. To me, it's people being very bad at explaining what they mean by it when they say that, making it easy to dismiss as nostalgia. I think you're mostly right though.
  People have become used to better graphics and smoother gameplay. You can't go back after that. People like having other people to play with too. So, I think those are unfair criticisms. They mean, old style made with the new tech. However, there a whole host of things that have gotten better with modern games. I think we can agree on the last part at least.
  Having lived through both, old games were not "better" per se but there is something modern games have lost, in amongst all of the improvements. Games "back in the day" weren't made with algorithms designed to mess with your psychology to keep you playing, even if you hate the game. They didn't design the games into evergrinds that only a few sweaty types and professionals can genuinely enjoy either. Old games had a logical, satisfying end where you would put them down afterwards.
  Despite all the crap you get with old games, you can tell that so many of them were made to be as much fun as possible. Like, that was the main aim and not "engagement at all costs, even enjoyment." They were labours of love, warts and all.
  That's why they'll never remake morrowind as it was but with better graphics, mechanics etc. because it'll be so apparent imo. I mean, you start off fighting rats in a basement with a toothpick and eventually end up being able to make game breaking gear, just for the hell of it. You had to earn it but it was just really fun. Powerstone 2 was just pure, silly fun.
  Fun doesn't generate as much permanent engagement as whatever the hell they're using now. I'm not saying modern games aren't fun, just to be clear. But they're not made, from the ground up, to be as much fun as possible anymore imo. That's what I think they've lost. But I agree, that doesn't make old games better, despite their being so old.
  
  Games "back in the day" weren't made with algorithms designed to mess with your psychology to keep you playing, even if you hate the game. They didn't design the games into evergrinds that only a few sweaty types and professionals can genuinely enjoy either. Old games had a logical, satisfying end where you would put them down afterwards.
  Well, many old games were. Arcade games specifically were often designed to get coins from players, with extreme difficulty encouraging grinds and sweaty playthroughs to achieve mastery.
  If anything, multiplayer and GaaS brought us back there.
  Many new games, especially single player games, are still designed with "fun" in mind, or with even loftier goals and themes, many without exploitative gameplay loops, yet still with distinct, pleasing graphics, art styles, and polished gameplay.
  
  A lot of times people use the word 'better 'when instead they should be using the word 'prefer'.
  
  People have become used to better graphics and smoother gameplay. You can’t go back after that. People like having other people to play with too.
  This is what it ultimately comes down to for me: the games are better, and they can't go back. If the games from back then were actually better, then people would be playing them all the time. But the reality is that people seem to pull more enjoyment from modern games, which is why they keep going back to them despite the constant "they suck!" complaints.
  Despite all the crap you get with old games, you can tell that so many of them were made to be as much fun as possible. Like, that was the main aim and not “engagement at all costs, even enjoyment.” They were labours of love, warts and all.
  And I feel that's true now, like with the games I mentioned (BG3 and Anno 1800). And back then there were definitely cash grabs, like ET jumps to mind as the most famous example, but almost every NES game that was based on some kind of movie or other pop culture thing. It's just they are better at grabbing cash now. But there are also plenty of modern games that don't implement these addictive features, in order to keep siphoning money off of you, they are just fun and people play them infinitely more than going back to the olden days.
  And, again, I don't want people to get me wrong. I definitely agree that there is a lot of shit, especially dirty shit, where they abuse human psychology to keep people playing and siphoning off money. But I feel like it's ridiculously overstated and people are also ridiculously blind to how much better gaming is now than it was "back in the good old days."
  
  I somewhat disagree about being "unable to go back", but I will say it's sheerly the style of game itself.
  Take a game like A Link to the Past. Now look at a game like Retro City Rampage. Despite some 30+ years difference, they are visually nearly identical. Or any of the 2D Sonic games, them being 30 years apart is effectively meaningless.
  But yeah, trying to play old Tomb Raider? If you're expecting even PS3 graphics, boy are you in for a surprise.
  However I think there is also an annoying amount of push for "better graphics or bust". That was the main debate for the console wars, the Wii sucked because its graphics weren't good and it's a baby console, Gears of War and Lost Planet for the XBox are the pinnacle of gaming!1! What! No the God of Wa- sorry I got caught in a flashback.
  But there are plenty of games you can emulate that can be upscaled and remove the archaic visuals, then it's just the game design and control scheme. Red Dead Revolver looks and plays great, there's no reason for anyone to stop playing outside of it just being a little less "AAA". Similarly, pretty much any of the PS2 exploration games - Jak and Daxter, Spyro, Sly, Ty, Crash - hold up wonderfully today. They're a bit slower, but they are the foundation that modern games of that genre use.
  I don't think them being slower, clunkier, less "AAA" makes them bad games. I think it makes them older games, and that is not inherently bad. In fact, I would argue that it's gamers being bad at them, and that games today in many ways are easier to keep people engaged. The D&D arcade game is great, difficult, and would be absolutely dunked on by gamers today for all of its awkward gameplay.
  This reminds me of an article I read about "Blade Runner, and old movies in general, are harder to watch because contemporary audiences have gotten used to movies that are faster, which makes them better." The whole article was effectively trying to state that because new movies have shaped audiences, old movies are becoming unwatchable. In some respects, I'm sure there's merit to that. In many other respects, I completely disagree. Just because something is in a different language does not remove its value. I see that as a reflection of the viewer, not a reflection of the art.
  With that in mind, old video games are a different language. We have to play them with the mindset that things will not be familiar. That does not make them bad, it makes them something to learn, and it's going to force you to learn things that are uncomfortable because it's unfamiliar to what you would rather be doing. Old movies are a different language.
  Just because you may not understand it does not mean it is worse. Likewise, just because you are familiar with modern games doesn't make them better either. And finally, better is subjective for the most part anyway. (None of this is directed at you btw, lol not at all trying to say that you don't understand things!)
  
  I am in full agreement with this statement, and would like to add that I think that older games often have a much greater artistic value. They were concerned with crafting an intricate plot, super immersive environments, powerful and transformative music, memorable characters, etc. One game where in my opinion you really feel the volume of love and artistic expression as well as perfectionism put in is the first Risen, and it's fairly obscure, but I find it to be so captivating that I'd easily play it with greater enthusiasm than any new Ubisoft copy-and-paste title or Valorant / Overwatch / CS:GO. Still, I think that this art / passion approach of quantifying a game's "goodness" produces just as many contemporary candidates for great games, like The Witcher 3, Baldur's Gate 3 or Red Dead Redemption 2. The things I like about old RPGs / adventure games are probably not specific to the past, but instead heavily developer dependent. Developers that love their work and are given enough time and money will produce great works of art in the same way that they have 20 years ago.
- I mean, I do still play these games. I also play new games, so I don't agree with the comic. Still, Chrono Trigger, FFT WoL, Secret of Mana, Parasite Eve, Xenogears, and some others are still on my PS Vita and I've been replaying them. I need to find Megaman X as well, as I loved that game.
  
  It's available on Steam, as well as the Zero series of games.
- @EatATaco @TankovayaDiviziya I somewhat agree.
  But there is also how games have aged over time. Some game mechanics still work and are fun.
  I just recently bought "Populous" on steam for 2$. After learning how to use DosBox the game is still as addictive as it was on my Atari-STE ... but now I have bad old PC sound.
  Compare this with "Command & Conquer Tiberium Wars" I should have skipped buying that. The conversion is so faithful that it still has the same stupid unit movements.
  
  I just recently bought “Populous” on steam for 2$.
  It's funny because I was explicitly thinking of populous at some point when thinking about replayability. What a great game. Although I played it on SNES. Countless hours on that game. Almost as bad as Tetris.
- Skill issue on your part, you got duped by pretty lights. Super Mario is to this day playable. Megaman X is still one of the thightest platformer games ever made, the controls nearly feel like they read your mind.
  Also notice how the few games that are better than these classics were either made by the same people (Igarashi's "Bloodstained" reboot of Castlevania) or were HEAVILY inspired by them (Hollow Knight, Shovel Knight, 30XX etc)
  
  How on earth could you conclude from my post anything about my gaming skill?
- I collect games, mostly PS2 and PS3, and you're largely correct. Games from back then had just as many issues, we were just more willing to look over them.
- I regularly play 90's and 00's FPS games. All the new release ones I play follow old design philosophies with the hindsight of knowing what doesn't work. There's not much in the way of modern, triple-A FPS titles without some form of microtransactions or whatever the hell "seasonal content" is. I wont touch anything that's a "live service" game. Hell, Epic shutdown the Unreal Tournament servers and even delisted the single player stuff.
  
  Just curious which games you are playing and if they are on servers. That being said, I've had a ton of fun playing battlebit.
- It is just nostalgia. Like it or not, that's the first gamers' generations saying "everything was better in the good ol' days". It was not, we just choose to remember the good stuff.
  
  Its the same with film and anime ,probably also aplies to comics and books Everyone remembers a few good titles from the 'old times' ( and the old times depend on the person complaining ) and comapres it to every modern production convieniently forgeting about the garbage and medicore stuff that was put at that time.
  And then there is the case of some genres falling put of favor. Whetewer we are talking about western in film or RTS in computer games . That actually is pretty reasonable complain since the way it usualy goes we have a massive oversupply of certain genres followed by a drought because as it turns out there is a limit to how much harem school anime horny teenagers and middle aged corporate workers will watch per year.

The good thing was that games were complete and they didn‘t try to suck ever last penny out of you post-launch. Also, no updates meant they actually couldn‘t just ship them broken and fix later…
- But it did mean they would ship them broken with no chance of fixing them, tbf.
  
  That only happened extremely rarely. Nowadays it seems to be almost mandatory, precisely because the mindset is that they can just fix it later
  
  That happened like, 6 times.
  I can literally only think of a handful of games that had serious bugs.
  There was that ninja turtles game for nes with the impossible jump, there was enter the matrix for PS2/xbox that was completely not done. There were a few games that were poorly conceived in the first place like ET for Atari...
  But yeah, what else had serious bugs?
  
  Still happens, used to be rare
- Tekken used to have more than half of the characters HIDDEN. Now they just sell them one by one.
  
  Well the new Tekken games launch with more and more characters, besides 7 which did launch with less than 6, and if you consider that the price of games has gotten cheaper due to inflation since the first Tekken it starts to make sense that they're trying to make more money off them. Games have been costing more to make while costing less to buy for decades now and the industry is reaching a point where that's become unsustainable but people just won't accept a larger sticker price and longer development cycles so studios are finding new ways to make money. Personally I think selling characters as they come out for a few bucks is actually not a bad thing in fighting games, it keeps the games alive and interesting for much longer so long as it's done well.

- Yeah. I mean there was shitty stuff back then, of course.
  Arcade games, games designed to not be beatable without their guides (it's why moon logic is a concept in the first place), that kind of stuff. But it's a whole different level nowadays.
- The game was about the game. Get off my lawn.

Maybe I am old, but having no micro-payment bullshit is what made gaming better.
- Never been to an arcade, eh?
  
  Yeah, but Arcades are Arcades. They were also not really a thing in Germany (because they are 18+ in Germany). I only ever used them on vacations.
  
  Not really a microtransaction as much as a leasing payment
  
  You could buy most of those games for console though...
- there are plenty of modern games without micropayments, play smaller indie titles.
  
  Or indeed some bigger games not from shitty publishers.
  God of War, for example. A lot of Sony's exclusives (and many are now on PC) are completely MTX-free. Even EA's It Takes Two was free of them.
  The issue is that they don't make the return on investment that an exploitative multiplayer game does. So the big publishers prefer to make those.

You didn't have to deal with random re-balancing changing your gameplay, spying and tracking embedded in everything, hackers ruining the game or targeting you, invasive DRM (consoles), being forced to update your system for an hour before you can play, being forced to sign up for bullshit accounts in order to play the game you just bought, games that have required updates the day they come out, your games disappearing forever because the publisher changed their mind and removed it from the store, game content being removed to sell as DLC instead, being pressured to link social media accounts, bigger companies buying the game and forcing you to use their services to play it, companies monitoring and recording player interactions, companies going under making it impossible to play the game you already bought...
Holy shit. I never realized how bad modern gaming has gotten.
- Modern AAA gaming, this is like complaining that all movies are copy+paste superhero flicks because that's all you see at the cinema!
  
  I think that's a fair point.
  A lot of my favorite games are indie titles or from small dev teams.
- Fucking capitalism. Ruins everything. Including, according to studies of divided Berlin; sex.

The level of quality and number of bugs depends a lot on the era you're talking about, as well as the platform. As a PC gamer from the 90s, much of my technical literacy came about from trying to coax games to work. My experience with console gaming was usually much more hassle free, though I have far less experience with it and don't have a modern point of comparison (last console I even used, not even owned, was the PS3).
My real point of "it was better in the old days", is the industry learning to exploit addiction. It's everywhere, and it's not just gambling. The longer you play the more likely you are to pay so even without loot boxes and the like, games are taking as much out of casino playbooks as possible. It's fucking revolting and should be criminal.
As someone who has had problems with addiction of various kinds in the past, it's so blatant to me. I can feel it playing into my vulnerabilities and it makes my blood boil. I avoid most gaming these days because I know if I let it become a habit, the next time life knocks me down I'll fall victim to this.
- As a PC gamer from the 90s, much of my technical literacy came about from trying to coax games to work.
  Kids these days have no idea how easy they have it. Tracking down a driver update or patch (that you just moved to an unencrypted folder) on a dial-up connection? Re-installing your OS from a series of floppy disks because something broke, again? Limiting clock speed because so many things were tied to CPU cycles and wouldn't function on new hardware?
  PC gaming was a nightmare but you put up with it because StarCraft or Quake 3 online was dope as hell, we had Diablo and Myst and Half-Life and Doom and Putt-Putt Goes to the Goddamned Moon so it was all worth it.
  
  Limiting clock speed because so many things were tied to CPU cycles and wouldn’t function on new hardware?
  I remember the day I learned this lesson.
  
  Young gamers don't know the pain of a BSOD and the interminable wait getting back into game on an IDE hard drive. Even a CTD was a nightmare.
- This is restricted to a small part of modern gaming, though. In indie games, for example, you find none of these exploitative practices (talking in general, of course) and get wonderful, masterfully crafted works of art by people who do game development out of passion (also speaking in general, of course).
  
  This is restricted to a small part of modern gaming, though. In indie games-
  Yeah, no, maybe the fact that you had to immediately jump to indie games should have been a hint that it's not a small part.

Could do without online play.
- I do go without. The only time I ever play online is playing PvE games with my good IRL friends that live in different countries and states now, and that's maybe twice a month.
  No randoms, no tantrums when we make noob mistakes, no toxicity. When my friends aren't around, I play single player games or play with bots instead of people. I highly recommend it.

just buy indie games lol
- Those have manuals you can read on the ride home?
  
  Actually there is a company called limited run games I think that goes all out and prints physical copies of some indie games with instructions and bonus stuff. It's pretty awesome but takes a while to get it.
  
  These days I'm driving on the way home.

Game updates bring bad with the good, because devs often rely on them to deliver a full, playable game.
When you bought a game back in the day, you got a full, playable game on the media. It wasn't always bug-free, because... you know... it's software, but they had to at least quash all the showstoppers without the benefit of a Day 1 patch.
And don't get me started about DRM...
- They were also much simpler and smaller back then with often extremely limited specification variations. And DRM existed back then too, with some fairly egregious and infamous physical DRM checks.
- When you bought a game back in the day, you got a full, playable game on the media
  ET would like a word....
  
  Fair, but ET was such an awful debacle that it killed Atari as a company and paved the way for Japanese companies to take over the entire market for the next couple of decades.
  Now it's just business as usual.

I do miss manuals though.
- The appetizer before the main course.
- I think you can probably still get them for some modern games that were crafted with passion, through special editions and box sets. I think that the standard store edition of Total War: Warhammer actually came with a manual as well as a novella, and this was coincidentally the last physical copy of a game I bought.

I loved reading through the manual for Morrowind with the copy we got on the original XBox. I read all the class descriptions, details about the schools of magic, and had a whole character planned out before starting the game. I didn't get into tabletop gaming until much later, but looking back, that manual really captured the same feeling of reading through the D&D players handbook and picking out a race, class, background, etc.
I think that feeling is why it's still my favorite PC game.
- This was my exact experience. I read the book and looked through the map it came with. Morrowind was the game that caused me to change from FPS and Sports games to RPGs.
  
  Ahh, the maps were so good. I remember using the extremely detailed hand drawn map to help me locate the Cavern of the Incarnate, and other cool locations. I am sad that I didn't keep them.

If you are talking about the late 90's and early 2000's there was plently of multiplayer games and saving was pretty much standard.
- I honestly think the generalization of parents here are GenX where we grew up on Atari, colicovision and then the original NES.
  
  There were still plenty of 16-bit and even some 32-bit era games that didn't have saving...or used passwords to save.
  Or if you could save, did you have space in your memory card?...

i remember when games were artificially hard so you had to keep renting it longer to beat it. and if you die you go all the way back to the start of the game. so much fun
- I'm an oldschool gamer but unlike many of those of today, I don't miss that part one bit. Infinite lives? Checkpoints? Autosaves? Yes please.
  
  I have a feeling their comment was tongue in cheek. I absolutely agree too, for while I do think there is some merit in artificial difficulty and creativity within set restrictions, I also enjoy games much more when I emulate them and have save states.
  I think a great example that bridges the gap between more modern-style hardware and daily living, and old difficult repeatable gameplay is the era of the Gameboy Color. So many of the games for these style of consoles were meant to be played in bursts (arcades, anyone?) due to the on-the-go nature, and since that fit so in line with the already existing mechanisms gaming had -- artificial difficulties by design -- there is a very streamlined progression from 1980's games and early 2000's games.
  So, what changed? Well let me tell you, it wasn't the Blackberry.
  Honestly, the iPhone. As mobile game consoles like the Nintendo DS got better, games got more fully fledged like the home console games were. Developers were recreating game experiences like Spyro, putting in huge games in tiny mobile consoles (Toon Link, anyone?). Yes, the Nintendo DS still had its shovelware but the iPhone was the new bridge that gapped the old arcade style pay-to-play. Games with artificial difficulty now had micro-transactions allowing you to bypass the designed limitations. As mobile consoles got better games, mobile gaming got far, far worse, leading us to """"random"""" RNG -gacha and lootboxes and all the great gambling starters.
  That's only further developed for offshoots of software. Just look at all the junk between the: FOSS stores, Apple Store, Play Store, Samsung Store, Meta-Quest Store, going even further some devices have their own separate store entirely. And now these stores ship updates, so you don't even have to finish your game before selling it!
  Ironically, Nintendo paved the way for a really great opportunity, then capitalists saw the opportunity to exploit the free market and now there is literal garbage everywhere.
- Fucking Lion King game

That was a large part of the charm for me in Tunic. The core mechanic was collecting pages of the instruction booklet as you adventured so you could learn the mechanics of the game. The other part of that being the manual was written in an unknown language* and you'd need to infer what the instructions meant using context clues. It was an absolute blast and hit the dopamine button when I figured out some puzzles.
*Btw, if you know, you know
- Oh man, I was coming in here to recommend the same. I'd say to look up nearly nothing about it in order to enjoy the mystery the best.
  Sometimes you'd beat a boss, get a manual page from it, and it's like "oh I could've done this the whole time, holy crap"
  For any of the Outer Wilds or Obra Dinn fans, play tunic for the mystery. For the ALTTP fans, play it for the combat!

A few days ago, I found out that one of the first games I ever owned, The Broken Land, was abandonware. I knew that it was generally considered a bad Diablo knock-off, but I had it remembered as at least the items and enemies being 'meaningful' in ways I don't see it today anymore.
Lots of games just look formulaic and predictable to me now. Like, there's a small and a medium potion, yeah alright game, I'm slowly getting too large of a health pool for you to not give me the big potions.
Well, I looked a little closer at the screenshots, and yeah, fuck me, the game doesn't even try to hide its formulaicness. Health potions are literally just PNGs with a number attached, in variants, small, medium, big. There's like 10 different PNGs of armor. And you'll frequently have just one or two enemy types copy-pasted all over an area.
I guess, that is why people call it a bad Diablo knock-off. But having been a kid without expectations when I played it, that had me remember specifically that part as comparatively good, when it was objectively pretty bad...
- When I was a kid, some piece of computer hardware came with some game demos. There was one called Taskmaker. It was not good graphically, but I really enjoyed it. It allowed access to three areas, I think. I played so much that I was able to beef up my character significantly. I was eventually given the full game. I played it so much. I tried bribing all of the NPCs to see what they'd say/do. There was a text box where you could type spells into. The normal progression of the game didn't really give you many of them, but bestowing stuff to NPCs was one way to learn some.
  Anyway, I found an abandonware version of it a while back and installed it on an old Mac virtual desktop. It still holds much of the same magic for me. I don't have time to bribe every NPCs now, but I remember a lot, and google helps me with the rest.

Yes, there was no online play or updates, so they couldn't steal back the game you paid for because they decided to stop supporting it one day.

Well yea:
No online play meant game had to be played with people sitting next to you. You had to socialize;
No updates meant games had to be finished when sold, none of the early access or battle pass bullshit;
Games were made hard to artificially give longer play time but this resulted in sense of achievement when you beat the game;
Booklets were actually awesome because you had lore in your hands which was written in a way not to spoil the game but hyped you to play further so you could get to that content.
Sure for the most part it's nostalgia, but technology brought as many, if not more, bad things as it did with good things. We've seen games get much better than old games and we've seen them much worse.

A couple of points.
We didn't need online access back then, we had LAN parties.
Most of the time you didn't need updates, because back then they were much more diligent about making sure a game released without bugs. Yes a few existed, but much less than what you see in today's games. A showstopper bug was death for sales, since it couldn't be fixed inexpensively.
And those instruction books, especially if you are into the artistry that they put into them, is sorely missed, truly.
- Couch multiplayer and LAN parties had a sort of friendly atmosphere that is sorely lacking from most online multiplayer today. Folks are all business, no fun. Even in casual modes people get mad if you fool around.
  
  I miss open server browsers. I had a few servers I would frequent for UT2k4. It was nice just bouncing in for a few rounds. People were there to win, but between teams being shuffled between games and no real ranking system, no one was really a tryhard.
- Hmmm, I don't think that I can agree with the point about older games having fewer bugs. In my experience, 2000s 3D games are riddled with bugs to the point of becoming unplayable in many instances.
  
  Yeah I always get pushed back on that, but honestly, I'll "die on that hill". Also, speaking of games not just in the 2000s, but even earlier.
  Back then corporations had to sell cartridges and ship them, and if they shipped with any bugs, that was the death of the game.
  At the end of the day, usually when I'm debating this topic with someone, they can only point to a few examples of bugs in cartridge games or in PC games back then, which was a very small ratio to all the ones that shipped correctly.
  My point is basically the ratio of good games to buggy games was a lot better back in the day than it is today, because developers are time-pressed and semi-lazy, and they just figured they could fix bugs in post-production.
  And funny enough, the pushback I usually get seems to be from astroturfers trying to hide that fact, of not doing as much due diligence before shipping, because it could just be fixed after the fact, regardless if the customer gets a worse product at first or not (not saying that of you, just generally).
  
  There were some pretty bad bargain bin releases, and a lot of games had glitches but I can't remember any game from a big company that released with a critical bug. I do think today companies are much more blasé about releasing games with serious issues and patching it later.
  
  And you had to scour forums with dubious links to find official or unofficial patches.

You don't miss those games, you miss being a kid playing those games.
- I still go back and play some old stuff from my childhood. Super Mario 3 is still a really good 2D platformer.
  
  Exactly. If people missed playing those games so much, they'd be playing those games. NES games are trivial to emulate.
  And this is the ultimate in survivorship bias. Super Mario 3 is often touted as the best game of an entire generation. There are a lot of mediocre NES games.

Reading my Diablo 2 and WarCraft 2 manuals on the toilet were some of the highlights of my childhood

Dude I remember reading the original X-Com manual like it was a novel.
- The manual for the original Elite was literally a novel, well one of the many volumes of printed documentation it came with was

Dunno. I like both old and new games.
- How dare you

Taking my kid home with a new (used via GameStop) Nintendo game sucks. I excitedly hand him the case and theres like nothing for him to read.

Games back then were also typically made by two dudes: one programmer and one artist. Heck, the original doom was made by five dudes: two programmers, two artists and one designer. I wonder what kind of nes games could be made back then if they had AAA budget like modern games.
- two programmers, two artists and one designer
  One of those programmers was John Carmack, who happens to be ridiculously talented, and actually revolutionized PC gaming multiple times throughout his career.

oh fuck, those beautiful manuals just came rushing back into the surface from the depths they were buried under.

- Some games really needed manuals to play. That's what text files were for.

Comparing modern game with games from the olden days is a little bit like comparing a savery steam pump with a modern internal combustion engine. Sure the general principles are identical but the complexity of the system is a manifold of the other.
I really love retro games, i have very fond memories of the C64 and SNES, but i am not a fan of the glorification of those games. Only a small part of the old games are still fun today and lots of them have bugs. Secret of Mana on the SNES for example has a fun bug where leveling all weapons and spells to max can create a overflow error in the final fight of the game, which removes the mana hero completely from the game, rendering the last fight impossible because only the mana hero can damage the mana dragon significantly.

I remember when volvo invented lootboxes to make tf2 free to play instead of selling a $60 "AAA" title with a battlepass and lootboxes included.
- They should have made the patent free to use as long as the game was free to play, like they did with the seat belt patent
- If memory serves, Valve got the idea for the loot boxes from Korean free to play games. As far as I know though, they did invent the battle pass with Dota 2.

They had soul

playclassic.games is a website

Fun anecdote. The PAL version of Digimon World 1 had a serious bug that prevented your progress to recruit Ogremon, which you needed to recruit Shellmon, which you needed to recruit a bunch of late game digimons, and made your access to several areas extremely harder. A 100% completion was impossible. It was still such a neat game tho.

        Into my heart an air that kills
    From yon far country blows;
    What are those blue remembered hills,
    What spires, what farms are those?

    That is the land of lost content,
    I see it shining plain,
    The happy highways where I went
    And cannot come again.

Of course I still have the manual of these old games. The characters were always hand drawn and properly described. For rpg they also used a nice medieval fantasy style. A lot of these descriptions were not even necessary but they were cool to have.
We don't miss these games because they were inherently better, but because they were fun in their own way, and enhanced creativity due to their own limitations. Also these were console games, so you had a specific time and hardware to play them. It's not like a moder multiplayer pc game, that somehow follows you beyond the gaming time, and that are played on the same machine you use to work.
Sometimes I feel like these games are exhausting when they take so much energy. Than you have updates, tierlists and a new meta every week. I used to sit down and play without thinking at anything else on old consoles. Still do. They don't send me unwanted notifications. Than you have all the lootboxes gacha stuff.
Games were technically limited but built a simple and fun experience.
- True. I feel that particularly with ranked shooters like Valorant and their competitive modes, playing becomes less enjoyable and more of a chore. In RPGs and strategy games on the other hand, I can lose myself for hours in wonder and awe at the gameplay, story, atmosphere, setting, etc. That's why I'd much rather play something many people would consider less exciting like Crusader Kings 3 than Valorant, Overwatch, Counterstrike, League of Legends, etc.

I would have appreciated a more robust modding community for NES, etc.

I think there is something to respect about both types of games these days.

There's an analogy with the music industry too. Music recording before was for the "elite" who were sure that their music would hit. Nowadays, the music recording broadens to the public, ergo more less quality focused music is released.
The same goes with video games