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The content is way more developed, and instead of loading a pile of floppies Ahhhh ok you got me there. Floppies were terrible, and playing games on a low end

The content is way more developed, and instead of loading a pile of floppies Ahhhh ok you got me there. Floppies were terrible, and playing games on a low end DOS machine was terribly slow. I have played modern games that were about as frustrating though, but only if they're completely broken. I was referring to game consoles though. Load times on Sega CD on 3DO were terrible for the time and turned off a lot of consumers back then (though not the only reason those platforms failed, they were just the slowest of the bunch). But the load times in modern games is typically far worse than those systems ever saw. I switch between modern and retro era systems frequently, and I find modern load times embarrassing given what people were up in arms about back then. Jonathon Blow tends to agree with me, FWIW. Check out some of his talks on the lack of optimization in modern software if you have the chance. Modern software should be a lot faster than it is given the hardware capabilities, according to him too.

just_myles 7y ago
I remember when I tried to run Doom on my old 386 HP and man was it slow haha. I think nowadays, these online arena games take forever to load. Back in the 90s it was all about loading and performance. Quite the shift in gamer expectations.
- scarecrowbob 7y ago
  I remember thinking I was a badass because I filled Wolf3d's resource meters all the way up. I think one of the first actually useful programs I've written in my life was a conditional in the autoexec.bat script that let me choose different memory configurations. What fun times :D
scarecrowbob 7y ago
Yeah I grok what you're saying. I personally only game in short bursts so it's not a big deal to me to let the machine spend a whole damn day downloading fallout over a 10Mb DSL line. I mean, that was better than spending the whole night DLing Commander Keen. My view is that there's a certain amount of time that I'm willing to wait for certain interactions, and that's pretty consistent regardless of the tech stack. So if I have to wait a bit, I do. I'm far less patient with things like keyboard shortcuts, UX interactions... but I feel like a lot of those really have gotten way, way better (like, no more floppies). Perforamnce is just one aspect of UX, and while you're right that it could obviously be better, there are so many other parts that are so much better (and performance really isn't worse that it was when I was playing Police Quest V).

just_myles 7y ago

I remember when I tried to run Doom on my old 386 HP and man was it slow haha. I think nowadays, these online arena games take forever to load. Back in the 90s it was all about loading and performance. Quite the shift in gamer expectations.

scarecrowbob 7y ago
I remember thinking I was a badass because I filled Wolf3d's resource meters all the way up. I think one of the first actually useful programs I've written in my life was a conditional in the autoexec.bat script that let me choose different memory configurations. What fun times :D

scarecrowbob 7y ago

Yeah I grok what you're saying. I personally only game in short bursts so it's not a big deal to me to let the machine spend a whole damn day downloading fallout over a 10Mb DSL line. I mean, that was better than spending the whole night DLing Commander Keen. My view is that there's a certain amount of time that I'm willing to wait for certain interactions, and that's pretty consistent regardless of the tech stack. So if I have to wait a bit, I do. I'm far less patient with things like keyboard shortcuts, UX interactions... but I feel like a lot of those really have gotten way, way better (like, no more floppies). Perforamnce is just one aspect of UX, and while you're right that it could obviously be better, there are so many other parts that are so much better (and performance really isn't worse that it was when I was playing Police Quest V).