Yeah we all know modern gaming has turned to shit with live service models, DLC, buggy games and other bullshit. Buuut forgive the negativity but not EVERYTHING in the golden era of gaming in the 90s-2000s was exactly pitch perfect either. So for anyone who was around or have started doing retro gaming for a while what are some things that bugged you about 90s-2000s games that thankfully seemed to have go away or got better with modern gaming?

Forced vehicle driving sections with piss poor controls.

Shitty PC ports that usually weren't even the same game as on Console, or was straight up worse.

I can't really think of anything else, gaming as a whole imo just picked up a ton of annoying shit in the 2010s.

Ridiculous casualties in war games and friendly ai in general almost always sucks.

I remember one Vietnam game where your entire base camp is wiped out except 2 guys, hundreds of grunts dead except you and a friend. Especially in the Vietnam games American killed in action is always 99 percent of any friendlies you come across; they all just die. Everyone dies and sometimes main characters can get hit fifty times and almost never hit an enemy ai. Even nowadays it's still a problem but not nearly as much as it used to be. I feel they're just lazy and don't want to make good allies because they want the player to do everything themselves instead of making a realistic battle.

Vietcong the video game for pc did it right, your teammates can die but they can also kill, you do lose when one of your squad mates gets killed but there are other squads in the game and sometimes a lot of them die and sometimes a lot of them live. It doesn't feel like you're the lone hero and all your allies just suck or die.

• Games couldn't run at all if they didn't meet minimum requirements.
• Had to swap CDs to watch cinematics and/or play the next part of a game.
• Older DOS games ran way too fast on newer systems.
• Some games required configuring memory...

And that's just '90s and very early 2000s.

The sheer number of shitty WW2-themed video games that tried to be next Medal of Honor or Pre-MW COD will never make me not surprised.

Quite a lot of things, really. It's surprising how many things have not aged well in gaming at the time, if we just took off the nostalgia glasses.

There were quite a number of games that had either a lot of loading screens or those that took longer than it should. (Sometimes both) If you were lucky, they might have some interesting hints or lore to ease the wait at least. It still exists now, but consider how big games are now compared to then, and even the former usually isn't that egregious.

More so in handhelds and gimmick consoles, but shovelware was ridiculously common and simply hard to avoid, particularly with movie based tie-in games that usually was rushed to cash in. (Granted there were quite a few exceptions that stood out, but that was few and far between.)

I honestly find it amusing that people are bitching about localization being "bad" today, where in the early 2000's and before, localizers were actively trying to whitewash a lot of Japanese things in Japanese games, with the partial exception of Squaresoft and Capcom games. Japan and America in the 90's and 2000's had a quite odd relationship with each other, where we liked certain things or aesthics, but at the same time tried to downplay or outright dismiss their origin as being "too foruinn" for kids.

(It's one thing if it was due to dancing around copyrights like with JoJo or Resident Evil, it's quite another where entire characters and plots were altered in simply lazy ways, like with the first Persona game on PS1.)

Fuck ass controls

Spent 5 minutes trying to think of something but I have nothing.

Physical computer games that came with an activation key, and if you got that sucker secondhand you'd better pray that the key was reusable.

RPGs were sometimes so obtuse that you'd think they were deliberately made for you to get lost in so you'd have to beg your parents to shell out for a strategy guide.

Renting Animal Crossing GC and needing to wipe dozens of game saves from my memory card in order to be able to hold my save data.

Oh God. Oh God. Looking for help online. Forum? Get ready to be bombarded by the least funny people online deliberately giving you misinfo or just spouting a meme. GameFAQs? Looks like the walkthrough is half-finished and just assumes that you grabbed that missable weapon that trivializes the upcoming boss who fucks you sideways if you don't. There is a backup option for those who missed the window for the Boss-Cheeser 9000, but the author hasn't finished writing it yet.

Whatever this is

Timed events. You've to collect 30 wing-wangs in 60 seconds, or you can't progress any further in the game!

Every time a times trials would pop up, I'd immediately want to quit the game.

Long, unskippable cutscenes

Cartridges. Dust sensitivity.

On PCs: the Blue Screen of Death because the computer wasn't made for gaming. Also, CD ports broke, sometimes with the disk stuck inside. (I still have a working CD port on a newer computer. They did get better.)

Being too young to make accounts and having no job to buy gear for online gaming. Missed out on ps2, most of ps3, wii, 3ds, and pc online gaming. Now I'm called hipster just trying to catch up in a mostly defunct or preserved community. I thought club penguin was lame too and animal jam demanded too much money and was lame to continue. I played single player unless mobile games like clash of clans. In my tweens, ps4 came out and I finally started progressing in the rest of online gaming, finally getting my own email.

Sucking ass.

The need of memory cards for games. I don't memory cards themselves, but if you're playing an rpg game and you die, you usually get sent back to the title screen, and if you don't have a save file. have fun starting all the way back to the beginning. after leaving your console on for multiple days in a row.

"Cover me while I hack this terminal!"

*5 minutes go by*

"Alllllmost there..."

*10 minutes go by*

"Juuuuust a little more..."

*15 minutes*

"Eureka! I've got i--AUGH!!!"

(An enemy sneezed on him and he died instantly)

MISSION FAILED

the timers. games had beautiful scenery i wanted to enjoy, but couldn't because the timer forced me to rush or die. made even worse in maze levels with dead ends. also, if your protagonist would die from a single touch, you'd still have limited lives AND continues more often than not, even if you were not playing on an arcade machine (where this limitation is justified). the lack of guides also didn't help, specially in RPGs (for most of them, all you had to do was read the bloody text, but in some you could get lost or even stuck without a guide)

You were a toddler.

Yep, And I was playing video games even back then.

horse armor.

Back when you had to trust the cover art hoping for a good game (now we know a lot of shit games that had killer cover art lol). Even the gaming magazines weren't that reliable because a lot of them had bias, i still remember a magazine that recommended the Lightspeed Rescue 64 game lol

Looking back that infamous Oblivion DLC was pretty much a grandfather of Fortnite Skins lmfao.

The worst term of Avant Garde if you gets me.

Spot on!

That, and the cursing at the ceiling "escort" mission.

Scratched Discs

Random encounters in RPGs age a game more than basically anything. I tried to get back into Digital Devil Saga recently and I'm realizing I've got way, way less patience for it than I used to before every RPG figured out on-map enemies (something SMT and its spinoffs would figure out just a couple years later, to be fair.)

The only people that miss random encounters are liars or morons or both.

Having to buy a memory card just to save damn the game. I used to leave my game on so I wouldn't lose my progress.

Saving your progress as a gameplay mechanic. Most notably GTA series where you couldn't save anywhere except from houses you had.

I feel like probably something odd from the era is that everyone tried to go edgy just cuz' games like Halo, GTA, Half Life and others were success.

I mean, it wasn't bad at all but also felt weird, specially considering how things went with Jax and Daxter and Naughty Dog in general.