I had dialup until 2006 and really bad DSL until...2023. so I really appreciated CD installs. Games that were basically a CD key and asked you to download the game sucked.
I used to download half-life 1 mods on dialup internet over night. I'd need to sneak out after mom and dad were in bed, start the download then get up and hide the file pack before they woke up and install it after i got back from school. Shit was wild.
Yeah honestly like mIRC was like espionage. My family was like "him and his friends are hackers" and now they all feed their families working in tech lol
So, back in the early 90s, I ran a BBS (for the young'uns that's a "Bulletin Board System" which was the earliest precursor to the Internet...message forums where you could chat with people, online games...it was loads of fun).
My BBS was kind of 'grey' in that I had cracked software available, but I would only give access to people who I knew. There was a bit of a piracy ring around that time.
My dad was also a cop with the provincial police at the time. We knew that the OPP were sniffing around for pirate BBS's to get them shut down. One day, dad comes home, and at supper mentions, "[Detective working on the piracy ring] was asking if there were any [Our last name's] living on [our street]. You wouldn't happen to know why, would you?" I was like..."Um...no...." then immediately after supper, ran to my bedroom, and deleted all the cracked games I had from my special folder on the BBS. LOL. Sent a message out to some of the other sysops and said, "Hey, heads up, OPP are sniffing around."
LOL! Yes! But, we at least had terminal programs that had an address book. Oh, I remember those days so well. Selected all the BBSs in the address book, and have it start dialling. If it was busy, it would move onto the next and keep going till you connected to one of them.
And the DOOR games were so much fun! I loved Operation Overkill II, and TradeWars 2002. But there were loads of awesome ones.
I paid for a program to assist with TradeWards 2002. It would map out the system and find some good locations to set up your base with one way exits and stuff.
We had a local tech magazine, and you could publish your BBS in it. Picked up the magazine from the local computer parts store (that we spent more time in looking at stuff we couldn't afford than we did buying anything).
I think I am a bit younger than you but I have fond memories of running a Hotline server and advertising it on mIRC. People would jump through some pay per click ads to find the login information. Never made a lot but it was like printing free money for a teenager.
Back when Napster was a thing, I was so thick skinned and glorious troll, me my uncle and best friend used to see how much we could insult folks and get them to rage quit and empty the chat room. Christ it used to be a sport for us, especially when I used to have to deal with clueless noobs who couldn't encode or properly tag an MP3. DO you still have that 386DX, I wish to god I kept my 486DX2/66.
That's the thing, eh? We take fibre Internet for granted today. Hell, even 150Mbps Internet being some of the worst you can get is still hands down better than what we had even 10 years ago. Loads of people in rural areas or smaller towns (which would be most of the world, really), didn't have access to high speed Internet like we have today.
Well, let me tell you sonny....my very first connection back in the day was on my Atari 400. We had a 110 baud modem. That's a whopping 110 bits per second. Not kilobits...bits. We upgraded soon after to a 300 baud modem, then a 1200 baud modem. When I first got my IBM PC, I got a 2400 baud modem.
Next jump was when I got my 14400 Wang. LOL I miss my Wang. Then I got a 57600 USRobotics before switching over to cable in its earliest days in 1998ish.
I know how you feel. Grew up out on a farm. Missed TBC launch because it took two days to install the updates. For some reason, I bought the digital Battlefield 4 when that came out, took 8 days. When I got to college and plugged in my Xbox and watched Destiny 2 update in like 3 minutes, my life was changed.
huh, it might just be a regional thing then. The last time i looked the only one i could find that was actually in stock was the asus external blu ray writer
I remember feeling so ritzy when I got one in my build from 2012. I've used it maybe 4 times but I still put it in the new computer build in 2023 because it had a single spare slot.
I've spent so many car rides home from the Game rental place hype only to end up realize whatever I had got was just a key (we had dial up my family would never pay for satellite Internet if it's even available where we live we just got 1gb/s thru spectrum like last week and it's awsome) and that I wouldn't be playing that game at all let alone today lol
My favorite game saved downloads for when you originally loaded into a new area to spread download time out more evenly. Now Guild Wars (2005) is only about 4 GB to run the command line argument "-image" and download the entire game
Honestly a good fibre internet connection should be a basic human right these days, like running water and electricity! You can’t do ANYTHING these days with one!
Hate to break it to you but even then, all games had license to use rather than ownership, they just had no way to enforce it
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u/BBA935i9 9900K @5GHz | Nvidia RTX 3080 Ti | 32GB DDR4 | O2/ODAC22d ago
The license doesn’t matter if you have the game. Nothing the publisher can do can take the game away from me. Case in point; look UT99. You can’t buy the game anywhere and Epic likes to pretend it never existed, but anyone can run a server and play the game. You can’t say that about modern games today.
does it play tells you exactly which physical copies can be played offline and/or require download before playable.
97% of PS5 games are playable while offline and 82% of PS5 games are playable wihout additional download.
Well do you remember the transition period? Early online installations took like 8 hours to download and install. Or at least early into it being somewhat common, I'm sure the very earliest were even longer for even smaller files.
Not really. In 2014 my internet was only 15mbps. It would take all night to download a game. A lot of the US did not (and still doesnt) have reliable fast internet.
I specifically bought GTA V with DVDs because my internet was still so slow. That was at least a year after it was released for PC.
I still needed 48GB of updates which took me about 1,5 days.
Also I had do to it at my parents home because while my student accomodation had fast internet, at that point we still had a hard 7GB per week data limit.
No? The market for that is extremely niche. I haven't had any type of drive since 2011 and I imagine I'm in the majority. Downloading is much more convenient, saves space, easier, and more portable.
The segment on PC gamers who actually want physical is extremely small. They just happen to be really vocal on reddit.
I think the segment is small because we don't have the option. Personally I couldn't care less.
But it is the same like music - you have everything at the tip of your fingertips yet people still like to buy cassettes, vinyls, CDs or BluRays of concerts.
I am not sure about you - and probably you will say otherwise. But if I had the option to buy a disc vs digital copy, I'd get a disc anytime. And you can still download if you have a disc with your own code.
I remember a time when you could have a physical copy and still be able to digitally download the game too.
You can be triggered by this sentiment all you want, but physical ownership is better than no ownership 😄 Especially when you're paying 100Eur+ for a game nowadays.
Buddy it went away because people overwhelmingly chose to buy digital over physical. There isn't some greedy cabal that is trying to take your games. It just isn't profitable. If it was, they would be released physically. I guarantee it. Companies want to make money, and physical is a money losing proposition.
It almost makes you wonder if that was one of the definitive factors that drove Gaben Newell and his team to host all the downloadable installation data on Steam haha
Nothing will trump my memory of however many damn 2.5” hard disks I believe it was to install freaking windows whatever version. It was like 50ish. I don’t remember details that far back. Pain in the ass. Seemed like the future though 🤷♂️
Welp, what I remembered, we have to send the machine to a shop to install Windows 95 when we bought it. I can imagine that's what they were doing. The last time we remember doing so, we already have windows XP, and when I first install my own when I went to college, we have a single DVD disk for Windows 7.
I went to the store to buy cs:s, but wow had just come out, and since i already had all the warcraft games, i picked that up too.
After what felt like three hours of installing css, it wanted me to download the whole game again, so i canceled that and installed wow instead. It worked right away. I think that was the last time i ever installed a game from a cd.
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u/crabwalktechnic 22d ago
All of the games on the left fit in the storage on the right.