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How were you meant to complete games that had no save system? (feddit.uk)
submitted 9 hours ago* by to c/retrogaming@lemmy.world
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Most of the games I played back in the day had some way of resuming your progress at a later date, whether that was an actual save system, a password system, or even a hidden warp zone. What were you supposed to do for longer games that had no way at all of resuming your progress after switching the console off? Get good enough at the start of it that you could play the game faster and eventually complete it in one go, or just leave the console on overnight and continue the next day?

(and yes, my Mega Drive is currently sitting powered on because I couldn't think of a better way to keep my progress)

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[–] 36 points 9 hours ago (6 children)

In one sitting. You'd have to get good at them by playing them over and over and over again. And they were really hard so that it would take a long time to get that good.

This was intentional. Games from the 80s had a lot more technical limitations compared to today and this was a way to increase their replay value. Otherwise you'd spend $30 on a game ($93 today) and beat a game in a couple tries, and it wouldn't be worth it.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 hour ago

    Games in the 80s were largely modeled after arcade cabinets, where the game design was based around "moar quarters omnomnomnom". That kind of game design heavily influenced basically all 2d platformers and rails shooters in the arcade and at home well through the 90s.

    Then someone figured out you could sub it with "moar microtransactions omnomnomnom" and we circled right back around to it again.

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  • [–] [S] 10 points 9 hours ago (4 children)

    Yep, I'm very much experiencing the artificial lengthening of a game through some absolute troll level design sending me all the way back to the start

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  • [–] 14 points 9 hours ago (3 children)

    I don't think it's quite right to call it "artificial" lengthening because it's an intentional game design choice. The whole game is artificial, after all.

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  • [–] [S] 5 points 8 hours ago (2 children)

    Well I guess we'd consider it artificial by today's standards. If a modern game tried to claim their game contained X hours worth of content but really you could complete it in much less if it didn't keep making you repeat parts then we'd judge it much more harshly. Obviously not entirely fair to judge a much older game the same way though!

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  • [–] 3 points 3 hours ago

    If a modern game tried to claim their game contained X hours worth of content

    Games back then typically didn't advertise hour counts that way though. That's a much more modern way of looking at games.

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  • [–] 6 points 7 hours ago

    By today's standards, yes. But back then, saving was the exception and they only included it in the games that were much too long to possibly complete in one sitting.

    Although, by the time we were in the SNES era, I remember thinking it was pretty annoying when devs didn't include some form of save or password system.

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