If you’re an older gamer, it can often feel like computer games have gotten easier. And it’s not just because you’ve overcome your skill issues.
Whether they’re better designed or the mechanics have been upgraded, modern video games are a breeze compared to what they used to be like. A big part of this change though is the internet, which holds all the answers to those tricky levels.
To give youngsters a taste of what gaming used to be like, itsashieowo put this question to r/AskReddit:
‘Gamers over 30, what’s a video game secret you had to discover the “hard way” that kids today would just Google in 5 seconds?’
Here are the top replies that used to make people rage quit…
1.
‘Buying a game and basing that purchase pretty much entirely on the box art and description.’
-Sohtes
2.
‘Figuring out good builds for Diablo 2 in the early days was a trial. No resetting stat points.’
-therealhairykrishna
3.
‘In the original Metal Gear Solid, Col. Campbell told me to contact Meryl, and that I could find her codec frequency on the back of the CD case. I searched the tank hangar and the helipad for a CD or a CD case for an hour. I thought maybe my save file was bugged and was about to start over already. Thankfully, my little brother, who was watching me play, was the one that figured out what that meant.’
-Tiexandrea
4.
‘Figuring out dungeons, and just crawling through them and backtracking a lot. It does really allow you to be fully enveloped in the game, both by longer time in the dungeon, and by not having to break the immersion by consulting a guide.
‘Some are better than others. Ocarina of Time’s water dungeon was particularly rough on 1st go-around. As are almost every water levels.’
-zk3033
5.
‘How to get game (x) to work with soundcard (y) while also using graphics card (z) so the dma and IRQ numbers are not standard’
-Midnidht_toast
6.
‘The fatalities in Mortal Kombat. Nowadays you don’t even need to google, they literally tell you how to do it in the game itself.’
-ktr83
7.
‘Whether a game is good or not.
‘Being at the mercy of the magazines, who were at the mercy of their advertisers, was not a good situation. Rise of the Robots getting 90% reviews in certain publications and 20% in others comes to mind.
‘God bless the demo disc.’
-ferris2
8.
‘It’s not really a secret, but the amount of hours I wasted on so-called hacks on pokemon trying to find a togepi or a mew or get into Bill’s garden is embarrassing.’
-JFN90
9.
‘The importance of saving is lost on some. I grew up in an age of consoles that couldn’t save & had to run through a game in one go or if there was a save point it was a checkpoint & could sometimes put you miles back from where you were previously. I still sometimes just randomly save just in case.’
-Rossco1874
