So I'm a Gen Z'er, a bit on the older end of the spectrum. Currently finishing my bachelor's degree, if that gives you some perspective on my age. My dad actually owned a PS2 when I was born, but by the time I started playing video games it was on an Xbox 360. We didn't get the first "new" console that I actually remembered setting up until the Xbox One back in 2013. Ever since then, every time we got a new console, even just regular console re-releases like the PS4 Slim and the Xbox One X, it was such a huge hassle setting those things up. I remember 2 years ago when we got a PS5 for the family room back at my parent's house, it was an entire day-long process to set that damn thing up. You gotta plug it in, wait for it to do its own set up for like an hour, sign into all these BS accounts, get a million setting set up, deal with parental restrictions if you need those.
Last week I bought a PS2 Slim from my coworker for $50 and I'm still in awe of how easy it was to set up. I decided to get up early so I could spend all of my day off doing what I expected to be the usual "new console" troubleshooting… but nope. I just plugged it into the wall, then plugged the A/V cables into a ADC (Analog-to-Digital Converter) I preemptively bought online. Then I plugged the controller in, turned it on, and voila! Literally just a working console. Only problem was that I forgot to get a memory card so I couldn't actually play the games that my coworker gave me, but hey it works!
It's just so incredible to me how modern technology is almost always such a major pain in the ass to set up. Every thing I own takes a million years and mind-numbing troubleshooting because there's always a problem. It feels like every time I use something old it might still have troubleshooting, (especially if it's from the 80s or 90s) but the set up process is 10 minutes at most. I remember the modem/router I bought a few months ago took two days of painful troubleshooting before I could even try to connect it to my internet plan.
P.S. It's also pretty amazing just how small this thing is. Even a PS4 Slim would dwarf this thing by a couple magnitudes. I set up tons of space on my side table expecting it to be as big as a PS4 was, but it's just sitting on there with a sizeable portion of empty space surrounding it
Edit: if you don't believe me then that's a you problem. I'm not sure why multiple people have seemed to think I'm making a generalization about millions of people because of my own experiences. This post is about my experiences and mine alone. You might have had better internet or never have run into problems with routers and that's wonderful. I'm so proud of you. But, this post is not talking about you, so save the ego.
I might have just turned to dust and blown away in the wind reading this!
Seriously though, it's nice how just simple they are. Even times I've fired up my PS3 it's got just a little bit of friction in ways you don't expect there to be. The trade off for all that simplicity though is you get what's on the disc/cartridge and that is it. No patches, no DLC or expansions, and you lose/break/give away that disc you're out of luck. It's weird even now feeling like those games could be "lesser versions" because they can't be updated in any way, but as a kid at the time that wasn't even an expectation.
Probably the hardest thing at this point is remembering you need that ADC to connect it to a modern TV!
Prior to dlc, games were released in what was considered a finished state though. Today games are released in effectively beta stages and some effectively alpha. They may claim to be finished but many are not.
But these "incomplete" releases are often still much more game than a finished ps2 game. And we don't really know how finished the devs considered their games at the time. We know based on found content that many of our "finished" classics had cut and canceled content that could have been completed and released/activated on the funds from initial sales if patching had been a technological possibility. They have bugs and glitches that are just part of the game because they couldn't be fixed after release. There are old games that are or can be legitimately impossible to complete on certain platforms because they have a glitch or potential hard lock if you make certain choices. And once printed they were permanently broken games. Games have been coming out incomplete for a long time. At least now they can be fixed.
I think it's intent. Many games are apparently rushed to release while knowingly unfinished as a money grab, and uses the paying customer base as beta testers. My opinion is that I don't like that trend and loved popping in that Nintendo cartridge knowing I had a complete game.
I play MMORPG s and have for more than 20 years. I'm not stuck in the past or anything, but I do believe what I'm saying and I do not like the trend.