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.
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That's the difference: an internet connection.
As soon as a console can connect to the internet, the complexities multiply. The 360 was a middle ground where it was equipped for the internet, but couldn't assume it would ever be available. So occasionally you'd buy a new game and it would also update the console.
Then with XB1 they assumed you had a decent wifi connection. Now they can ship OS/firmware updates regularly, advertise to you on the home screen, have a friends list, patch games, etc.
Without that internet connection, the user experience is very predictable and has to fit on a disk/cartridge.
I'm pretty sure 360 games were also limited in how much you could patch them because they had to assume you didn't have a hard drive.
Yeah, they were. I believe it was something crazy small like 8MB per game. So if the binaries that shipped on disk needed more than 8MB of changes post launch, you're screwed. That's why those "greatest hits" versions of games came out a year or two later.
Today, there's often nothing on the disk, or if there is it's barely functional, and then you just download the latest build over the internet.
It's also a little more functional than that though, because you just need the game to be installed to get decent loading performance. At most, the disc these days can only offer a fast initial "download" and a DRM check.
Hah, with gigabit internet, it's faster for me to download a game these days vs install from disk.
But yeah, the DRM on disk has a functional purpose, I meant the actual game would often not be functional. You'd have all the bugs from a month or two prior when they first went gold, and it may not even run for very long without crashing. The build from two months prior to the game's launch often looks nothing like the build people download on launch day these days.
By the end of its life, though, more than 3/4 of each page on the 360 Home Screen was advertisements, with the remaining 1/4 being buttons you could use to get to actual content.
I did.
Played SOCOM, and Tony Hawk…
…For like 10 minutes.
It was almost all garbage.
The ONLY PS2 game I ever really played online along with my friends at the time was Metal Gear Solid 3 : Substance's online mode.
But really… the PC was the best place for "online" until the late 2000s with the advent of the Xbox 360 and, a little later, the PS3.
I'd argue Xbox Live was better than PC online from the time it rolled out in ~2003 until PC online got better in the early 2010s. I remember StarCraft II feeling like the first time a PC game actually just had matchmaking where I could hit a button and get a match.
Xbox Live matchmaking was easy, sure, but before it became the norm on PC self-hosting servers was far more common, and there was something about the culture of a well-admined server that automatic matchmaking could never replicate – and in my opinion gaming as a whole is worse for losing that. Anonymous and unaccountable public lobbies give so much more leeway to assholes than you could get away with on a clan-hosted server.
I remember good matchmaking in Warcraft 3 for srandard matches.
And I also remember having lots of fun on custom servers for CS, Half-Life, D2 etc. and not at all feeling like matchmaking was a required feature.
from what I remember, the Ratchet and Clank online modes were fairly fun, but even when I played, they were fairly old and took like 20min to find a match
They streamlined everything so it's really hands off, but it's all just loading little updates and features that didn't come shipped with the console. If you got it on christmas of release year like we did with the Xbox One then it was only maybe 1 or 2 hours of updates, but if it's 3 years later like we did with our PS4 then that's like 6 hours. A commenter earlier mentioned I'm lying unless I have a slow internet connection, and they're right. Like, in 2013 gigabit internet was far from standard. We had comcast/xfinity, paying for 100 mb/s and getting 50 on a good day. I distinctly remember my dad took a day off work just to play our new PS4 (what a legend). I left for school when he was unboxing the thing and when I came back from school it was still loading.
And yeah, this isn't really the fault of Sony, but it's still really annoying that nowadays it's even a feature as opposed to just plug and play. Same goes for retail game discs. It's really annoying buying the thing, copying it, then having to wait for gigabytes and gigabytes of updates.
Perhaps my gap is larger as I last played a Sega Genesis console and then a little PC gaming in the mid 2000s for Diablo and NHL, while my GF is still playing a Switch which I often call a Wii when I find it laying around needing to be charged.
She had joy con drift that she was just living with. When I asked her if it affected her after reading an article about it, she showed me game play in the latest Zelda game. I couldn't not believe the number of load and dialog screens she needed to get through for regular game play. I was bored in the first 30 seconds as she had to keep stopping to get through them. Thankfully I only need to replace/fix her joy sticks and changed out the batteries in the remotes as one of them was pretty swollen.
I don't think I would be interested in sitting through so many load screens just to play a game these days. That said I still have a Xbox 360 left behind by a friend and a hacked Wii for Sega games sitting in my entertainment center I never play either so perhaps it's just a closed chapter for me as it is.
I tried Tears of the Kingdom for the first time yesterday. After what felt like half an hour of watching a movie with occasional very short samples of gameplay, I gave up and turned it off. I couldn't stick with it for any longer.
That sucks. Funny how the screens creeps in. The actual game play looks great but I suspect the hardware can't handle it?
I'm glad I'm not alone with this feeling of WTF?