What was being a gamer like back in the mid 2000s?

>mid 2000's

fuck off Zoomer. We had fucking FuncoLand back then. Not your garbage big box chains.

i can't remember the last time i didn't know a game was coming out in like a year
i remember walking into a choices (some now gone british rental shop) and seeing hitman contracts on the shelf
no idea a new hitman had released, shit was so fucking cash money, i rented it for the weekend and fucked off home
fantastic shit, played the fuck out of it with my dad, cousin and brother
games weren't just good back then, but people still cared about talking to each other, and hanging out
now people only leave their little isolation rooms if the internet goes down
even my fucking girlfriend sits there like a zombie on her mobile or tablet or pc, i'm trying to encourage people to have fun, go outside, do something social
nope
fuck i want to go back

>Gamestation in the UK was so much nicer than GAME
>CEX was still the creepy goth misfit store and not blasting trap music
>MCV and HMV had healthy competition
>Zavvi was still ass

Miss it

There was this thing called outside that wasn't extinct yet and when balanced out with vidya you'd have a 100% kino experience.

It was great.
I saved up mine for a year for that 100$ to buy a GBA.
Then I bought this shitty lord of the rings rpg and locked myself in my room to play it for days straight

It felt really good to buy a new game.

Miniclip

>Walking over to local blockbuster with friends to rent a game and buy snacks on a warm summer vacation night
>Staying up all night playing shit
>Ripping the disc to play on modchipped consoles and keeping your games in a big ass CD binder

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it felt like this.

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Circuit City still existed

I can’t remember the name of it but before we had blockbuster or GameStop there was this game store that had all sorts of games that let you rent a game for two weeks cheap. Man it was glorious, I think it is a medical clinic now.

Playing halo 2 over and over until halo 3 comes out

I was so hyped getting this shit hot FYE last-gen-clearance deal for $40, largely because the cashier forgot to scan GoW2, that I took a pic and saved it so I could post it in this thread.

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It was awesome.
Companies were more free to release interesting games. Everything didn't have to be a realistic military shooter and when you bought a game, you bought to full fucking game, often with cool unlockables.

Gaming has become too mainstream. Mass appeal sucks.

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shit man the feels
the GAME near me was always this dingy sterile shop that hired people who didn't know what the fuck they were doing, it just didn't have any soul, even the game displays were rigid and uninviting
Gamestation hired people who enjoyed games, you could stand in there for an hour talking to the staff, and they had all the cool shit, lighting, display stands, cardboard cut outs
HMV was there but i never really bothered with it except for buying posters
used to be a place called Entertainment Base in some back alley niche area up town that still handled older consoles, the kind that are now ancient relics, and the people in there were based as fuck, you could walk in looking for battle toads and you'd end up discussing the entire game and several others with the guy behind the counter
place is gone now, it became some shitty mobile phone store where they sell custom shitty cases and screens and whatever
i miss it

>literally went to Circuit city like every saturday just to play the display consoles that had shit like Madden and Crimson Skies on repeat
>After we were bored of playing vidya games we'd walk next door to Borders and read manga and shit
>then cross the street to Blockbuster to pick a game and a movie for the weekend

I WANT TO GO FUCKING BACK
EVERYTHING IS FUCKING GARBAGE NOW
TAKE ME BACK
FUCKING PLEASE

What the fuck are those prices? Aussie shit I'm guessing? Because at most was a new game like $49.99 in murrican back in the ps2 xbawks daze.

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Weird seeing all those games brand new again.

>when you bought a game, you bought a full fucking game
can you even imagine buying games that were flawless upon purchase, never needing a patch or hotfix again? its been so long
when you'd put a disc in and the first thing you saw wasn't a fucking update download

>getting demo discs from xbox magazine
>the sheer joy going to gamestop brought
>going out IN PERSON to rent stuff
>those asian kids who hogged playable consoles in any store

all gone, replaced with soulless nothingness. I really wish tech didn't advance as much as it did

What'd you think of Beyond Good and Evil user?

i wish it advanced, but just without the greed and shit behind it

Fuck I wish I wasnt a stupid asshole. I should've horded gen six games while gen 7 was being hyped up

Good atmosphere. Unfortunately I didn't get very far, I was so excited that I started 12 games and barely got anywhere in any of them. Is the remaster good?

It was pretty shit. Preordering was a must for popular games. The moment stuff like GameFly came out it was better to switch to them.

For me it was late 90s/ early 2000s.

>Get home from school on Friday
>Gather both of my friends across the street and walk up to the store
>Buy chips and candy
>Use rolls of quarters for outside soda machine that was 25 cents a soda
>Walk back home and play some Golden Eye while eating junk food
>Friend's parents bring Pizza
>Spend the rest of the night playing Smash Bros and watching cheesy 80s slasher movies.

God I miss those days.
Now everyone is so distracted by social media and has their eyes constantly glued to the phone.

>OXM demo discs
Those were so good, gave you free dlc for some titles and updated your games in the background without you knowing. Not to mention the demos. Member that spaceship builder thing they had going on? All that will be lost to time eventually.

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I hate to use buzzwords but it feels like the mid 2000s was the last time when games still had a semblance of soul in them. Aside from continuation of existing series, a new game was a passion project for that team. Now those successful studios have been sallowed up by the big fish to slave away making the same cookie cutter open world game.

>Jedi Knight 2 LAN multiplayer
>force pushing people off cliffs
>force gripping people then dropping them off the map works too
It made people more mad than simply shooting them to death

I bought far less games then

game sales were shit. something like 3 for $20 was considered a god send

you actually didn't care about what platform the game was on so long as you could play it

people listened quite feverishly to the gaming press. you lived and died by your review scores from IGN/Gamespot and magazines still had some influence

playing online was quite a shit experience in terms of connection.

digital was a thing but everyone laughed at the idea of having a central website/server hosting your vidya files. steam existed and people loathed it for being required to play HL2.

it was awful because parents and people frowned hugely upon it. trying to play videos in my house was like trying to do drugs. it was also very not cool to admit to playing games once you got to high school and most ppl who played them completely stopped to save face.

games were still not downloaded mainly so you had to drive down to Eb games or future shop to buy shit.

also online games were really iffy due to piss poor internet connections. like lag was a real thing all the time. also if you had to download a big patch, you had to wait hours to play

games themselves still had the feeling that you could trust a game would be good. and i feel like gamers were not as cynical or jaded. however alot of shitty games started to come out mid 2000's which basically started the downward spiral

thats my personal experience at least

t. born 1990, played video games all my life

This generation had the sheer largest amount of games then any other a far cry from this gen

I remember being an underage faggot here shitposting.

AND NOW MY BROTHER CALLS ME A BOOMER AHHHHH MAKE IT STOP TAKE ME BACK

>Born in the 1980s

Video games were cool for young male children but once you hit Jr. High and High School it was seen as just for nerds.

Funny how things have changed.....I liked it more when it was thought of a thing for nerds...

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You went to crummy gaming stores and bought games in boxes, or ordered them online if you were smart. You went home and played them without having to download 45gb patches. With no mobile internet you'd often just buy a game you found in the store without thinking of what 9000 assholes on YouTube or IGN or wherever thought of it, but magazines and website reviews were still a thing for people who planned ahead and knew what they wanted. More often than not you'd regret your purchase and immediately go back and trade it in, but sometimes you'd have a lot of fun.

Discs are completely irrelevant now, I live in rural Louisiana and the Internet is slow as hell out here takes hours just to download a game into the console. I miss biking to this electronics store with $60 cash and buying 3 new game.

This is true of every gen. Buy cheap when new consoles are being released.

Unless it was nba/madden/fifa you were thought of as nerdy and basement dwelling. On the flip side no one really cared enough to look past that surface level so you be as niche and weeb as you wanted without anyone giving you extra shit about it like you would these days

You believed that games would keep improving forever.

But user my stamina is maxed in generic 5 hero teambuilding gacha with 1% SSR rate, just let me set up autoplay we'll get back to netflix and chilling

this, also the videogame reviews on toonami.

Fuck off you dumb faggot. Video games were pretty mainstream so long as you didn't sperg out on em. Every guy I knew in middle school and high school had a current gen system and a handful of games.

>Friday after-school
>Get to pick out a game while my parents get groceries
>Fast food trip as well since we come back late from the store
>That good 2-3 hours of eating and exploring the new game before taking a break for Cartoon Network Fridays premiers.
>Two days of leisure time to play more of the game

I miss being able to play a game without worrying about the community. I didn't value life without internet enough.

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Just for the 6th gen? It was pretty cool, I guess. I was a PS2/GC kid. We had internet back then, so I guess it wasn't as mystical as 5th gen, if that makes sense. I remember getting news mostly from game magazines even at that point though. Also, word of mouth.

You mean the HD version? For sure. It's obviously dated and the gameplay isn't much, but like you likely already picked up on it's all about the atmosphere and characters.
I personally loved it, never have I experienced something so endearing. I tried to take pictures of all the critters I could, that includes giant whales.
Try it again if you want to get kinda lost in something innocent, take the time to explore the full world and talk with the characters and you just might find it's really amazing. It's so earnestly full of that childhood type of magic, really brought me back.
I'd also recommend Pyschonauts, probably even over BG&E but I love both. I'm very biased about these tho so just try it again n see if it sticks ya :)
The fucking soundtrack probably carried the entire game in retrospect but fuck it was a nice little ride.

What era are we talking about?
I am talking about the NES and SNES era.

At least where I lived in California it was thought as nerdy at the time.

better

I fucking hate this generation so much, take me the fuck back.

Back then everyone was wondering what would be the Halo Killer, Oh Boy did we get one alright.

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youtu.be/jTdcJWDNsao

Innocence

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We bought games at Babbage's

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Bought pokemon colosseum around noonish one day and didn't snap out of my trance til my mom called me for dinner
Now I have to worry about not being able to move my spine if I sit still for too long

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I was born in Los Angeles in 85. My first console was my older brother's nes. Like I said, it was only nerdy if you were a nerd. Everyone had some sort of video game console. Our generation is probably the first time games weren't flat out nerdy because they were so ubiquitous.

REPORTED FOR UNDERAGE

Everyone had Xbox live, everyone played shooters with their friends, shooters on console were at their peak

So many great games that were revolutionary at the time

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I remember downloading the MP Beta, taking my 360 hard drive off and then driving to my friends place so we could all play on his 55'' Plasma.

I remember games being like $10 cheaper on the first week it was out, and nothing was past $50.

>Zeus master of Olympus
Nice
>legend of dragoon
Yuck

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NES did grab attention but video games consoles were still thought as a thing for children at the time.

Arcades were more of the teen and adult crowd thing.

Maybe I just went to a shitty school.

EGM. Fuck all other magazines, EGM was the GOAT

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I miss the Circuit City vidya clearance sales.

there was a feeling of potential
not the reality of exploitation

Wtf you're forgetting halo, no one thought that shit was gay, so many great games came out in this time period

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youtu.be/UG1tTv4F62Q

camaraderie

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Fuck I forgot all about that. My friend and I picked up HL2 at Best Buy or some shit. Got home and started installing and then just watched this new Steam thing shit the bed. I don't remember if we even got to play it that day or a few after.

>renting dark cloud 2 with a friend from blockbuster and staying up all weekend playing it while eating pizza and drinking root beer
Absolutely fucking kino

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Lots of jorts
youtube.com/watch?v=kLJxXSlNdes

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When my father wasn’t in the Middle East we would play Jane’s WWII Fighters against each other. He is too old now but he is still fascinated with how modern flight sims are now today with VR and stick feedback.

BlockBusters GamePass was the shit. We had a BB right up the street so we would just go get a new game every other day.

memories of saving up pocket money and walking to town with my friend to buy a lan cable so we could play command and conquerer + red alert together by linking our ps1's
lugging the crt from my room to his house across the street felt like climbing a mountain, the fucking thing was bigger than me
staying awake the whole weekend playing smackdown, gta1, loaded and dino crisis, fueled by pizza and junk food
take me back
>they've classified nostalgia as a mental illness

It was pretty good they could churn out AAA PS2 games in less than 2 years there was a huge library by 2005

youtu.be/jaCYGkO1LoE

naivete

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>early lcd from the mid 00s
well there’s where you messed up, early lcds were shit

try that again with a modern oled

>buy the season pass
>buy the new skins
>buy the stuff we have already been working on as dlc, whoops just ignore it’s already on the disc.

>popping G4 on when episodes were posted ON DEMAND

Yep. Then we got Horse Armor.

Crazy how Pokémon is still hugely popular even when it got over the top after when they introduced a god Pokémon.

Kinda shit desu. EB/Gamestop were ripoff merchants and depending on where you lived, might be your only decent vidya retailer. The 7th gen was filled with aggressively mediocre games following trends, even more so then today. Just replace open world Ubi sandboxes with "cinematic" hallway shooters. Also mediocre GTA ripoffs so there were still plenty of bland open world games.

Also alot of the current problems plaguing vidya nowadays started in the mid 2000s like nickle and diming with DLC, forced online connectivity, dumbing down of games for mass appeal....

When Zoomers say the industry is dying, I just think that I prefer it now to say 2008. Atleast now we get some good indie games and some AAA devs atleast are starting to learn from their mistakes. Also Japanese game devs went full retard in the mid 2000s and are only now making a comeback.

2005-2015 was a rough fucking period and I don't understand anyone who wasn't a literal child could have nostalgia for it.

Ace Combat 7. Not holy trinity level, but exceedingly surprising.

>"MOM MOM MOM MOM ! PLEASE I GOTTA HAVE IT! ITS THE NEW GAME IN THE SERIES AND I NEED IT! PLEASE! I PROMISE TO GET BETTER GRADES AND BATHE BUT PLEASE BUY IT! OH MY GOD THANK YOU MOM! YES! THANK YOU!"
said Andrew, the 17 year old boy to his mom at GameStop, circa 2006

>2005-2015 was a rough fucking period
Wow. What the fuck were you playing during those years?

The majority of players never knew what was the best meta strategy and their wasn't spreadsheets upon spreadsheets of what items/weapons/characters were the best

Driving home from high school in your Saturn listening to limp bizkit and smoking cigs you got from your friends older brother, get home boot up the compaq PC with windows 98se and download some jay z from napster over dialup then play some gta 3 on ps2 while catdog plays on your 13 inch crt.

them early 00s was a different time.

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>Grocery store down the street had a small movie/game rental section
>Cashiers gave no fucks about the ESRB ratings
>Friday after school
>Dig through the laundry and find a few bucks
>Ride scooter down to store
>Get bag of chips and store-brand soda
>Rent any game I wanted with no questions asked
>Chill out for the weekend

It was a simpler time

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youtu.be/4tJV4urcUN0

jazzy Rayman

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I FELT THE HATE RISE UP IN ME

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I was in high school in 2002 and everyone was getting Vice City there was certain games like GTA that were acceptable to normies the nerds played JRPGs

>Bought pokemon colosseum around noonish one day and didn't snap out of my trance til my mom called me for dinner

Wow you must have fought 10 battles

enjoy your burn in

I remember when i bought this game because i wanted to see what the fuss was about, (i had just turned 18 and could buy rated M games) the clerk told me her younger brother played it all the time. I didn't really enjoy it as much as other people did, i was way more into Oblivion.

I enjoyed the fuck out of gaming magazines
That's how I learned about bioshock infinite

I don’t sit home and play vidya for 10 hours a day, so won’t happen.

My buddy used to pick me up for school and he would show up at like 5AM so he could play Vice City until I woke up.

> early 2000's
It was the beginning of the end by then, when the EBs, Funcolands and mom n' pop shops started to get replaced en masse by Gamespots, and every other game was a Halo or Call of Doody clone, and web-shit scams like DLC started to slowly infect the standard offerings.
Late 90s was the last chance for true gaming bliss. 2000's started to stink very early on, and by 2010, the rot was complete.
t. boomer nostalgiafag
The quarterback of my high school's football team loved ps1-era JRPGs. Games have been mainstream for a long time

we were extremely oppressed.

Didn't they try and bring that back a while ago and it failed miserably?

doesn't matter, areas like the taskbar, HUD, or windows will get burned in

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Alot of shit games, really I find it hard to think of more than a handful of great 7th gen games.

ME1, Portal 1-2, Witcher 1-2, Deadspace 1-2, DAO, FO:NV, DaS1, DX: HR.

Maybe I'm just being negative, but mid-late 2000s, early 2010s is my least favourite period of gaming, despite being the period I was a teen and therefore the one I should be nostalgic for. Honestly I feel like I've played more great games in the last 2 years than I did in that 10 year period.

Even with commercials, you get burn in on TV channels where the talking heads are (let alone the Chyrons/bugs).

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33 year old boomer here, the weirdest thing to me is the culture change of video games in late 2007. As soon as CoD 4 Modern Warfare hit the video game insanitary went into a downwards spiral. Over night games went from being " dorky " to Bro-tastic. It's extremely strange looking back on this

I most agree with you man. It's weird how anyone (looking back) can think of these years fondly

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reading game manuals on the shitter

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>mid-late 2000s, early 2010s is my least favourite period of gaming,
Agreed.
Thankfully early-mid 2000s (2000-2006/07) was the peak of gaming.

I remember downloading games on Steam and trying to join HLDM servers with custom sounds and shit with my 250kb/s internet. I thought that if i scrolled my mouse wheel up and down like i was fingering a girl it would make the download go quicker.

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>comfy friday night nostalgia thread before I hit the hay

Ah...

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When did Slipknot peak?

Mid 00's just the like rest of the Nu metal.
youtu.be/4cgZfQPIojU
youtu.be/WefnMe3LT7A

With this
youtube.com/watch?v=Tmr5mGf1OQI

Heaven. It’s so hard to find motivation to play now a days. Back then as a kid, I could play aaaaaaaaall day without getting tired or bored, and felt like time well spent

>Over night games went from being " dorky " to Bro-tastic. It's extremely strange looking back on this

I blame the power of mass marketing and the fact that gaming did gain some mainstream popularity naturally over the 6th gen. Stuff like the BBT made entry level pop culture cool and opened the floodgates for companies to market the hobby to normies.

Of course this lead to animosity between more mainstream pop culture fans and the more hardcore niche fanbase. Which is essentially created a divide and laid the groundwork for why this place even exists.

I kind of enjoyed the vol. 3 album back then in the edgy teen phase
youtube.com/watch?v=6fVE8kSM43I

I’d use IGN for any game news, and some of the first games I bought digitally were Bioshock (which I bought more or less on a whim) and Neverwinter Nights 2 from g2direct or something.

I also got into one of those early “access all these games” services where you’d pay monthly to play hundreds of different fucking games. It was ridiculous; it introduced me to Worms and Silent Hill 2 and 3, it was a crazy random ass assortment.

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G4 started sucking in 2004/5. As soon as they merged with Tech TV.

Not as good as now.

Lots of broken PS2 disc drives, waiting months between game releases, and praying that your local blockbuser still had copies of rhe newest game for rent.

>tfw remember renting Bioshock, Fallout 3, and Destroy All Humans from blockbuster just because they had cool boxart
I want to go back.

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Typical middle school day for me, 7/8th grade in the 2000's:

>wake up, shower, head to school, get there 45 minutes before the first bell so I and the group of kids who played Yu-Gi-Oh! had time to duel eachother
>once school's done for the day, play GBA outside with my friends
>go back to someone's house to play Yu-Gi-Oh!, and if that didn't happen, I'd just chill and play vidya til bedtime

Other feels"
>grew up poor so I didn't have a ton of newest PS2 games, buy still enjoyed them all
>found MMORPG to play
>start playing more on PC
>learn about Yea Forums (Yea Forums, of course) via the forums (2006)
>think where the fuck am I. what is this shit? these pictures and inside jokes are pretty funny
>find out there's a video game section

And I've been here ever since.

It sucked

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Piracy, piracy and more piracy. Now I'm a consumerist cuck because I pay for my games, although I resell them and make profit. I miss physical piracy, going to the local store on weekends to buy a bunch of PS1 and PS2 games as fun, or sometimes I had to ask a friend to lend me one of his pirated games to copy them with my computer.

>used to be able to find retail game stores all over the place selling and accepting trade ins for games as early as the fucking NES
>most old games were around 5 to 20 bucks
>Now these days you have to look for old games in used goods stores and thrift shops
>you're lucky if gamestop will even take last gen games
>a lot of old games can go up to hundreds of dollars now
I want to go back

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It's harder to find, but soul still exists if you know where to look. There are some pretty soulful indies and AA games that have come out recently.

If I were to lay out my top 20 games, I feel like a good 50% would be from the 6th, 10% from the 7th and another 40% from the 8th. It was just a dead gen.

>when you bought a game, you bought to full fucking game, often with cool unlockables.

When DLC first became a thing, even back then I must have been early teens and I was crying from the rooftops about how this'll be a bad thing in the future because it'll lead to games becoming piecemeal & cheats won't exist etc.

Lo and behold, its here. No game exists without DLC or extreme patches or quality assurance, shit cheat codes are a thing of the fucking past man, so are cool unlockables & skins

Its over man. It'll never be the same again.
The next frontier of shit is consumer rights and owning your games at all with streaming becoming the next thing.

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BGE and Wind Waker are the only games that made me want to write fanfics about back then. They really marked my imagination.

what fucking opened it up to mainstream was
>hats
seriously the shit wouldnt be worht nothing if they didnt give the fuckign shit away for nothing but just idling in the fucking game. and they stole it from the buyers, its a game of gambling with the original purchasers as the ante. valves relying on the government shutting down free speech and turning everything into gambling so they can call them fucking godamn useless bullshit things, claiming they have value. nope

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cringy old man, get over materialism and just emulate the shit you want to play.

Hell yeah. Great mag. I was poor as fuck and still my mom was able to get me a subscription for this. I used to read it up to freshman year in high school. This girl thought it was a math magazine at first glance. I unsubscribed come Sophomore year, though

There were so many fucking games that had bobble head modes after GTA did it.

86 and LA as well here, and yeah, pretty much the same situation. One thing I'll say, though, is that playing a Game Boy at school was a pretty nerdy thing, especially once I got to HS, not like home consoles that everybody played.

Based. 7th gen was a massive, wet, steaming turd. Dark Souls and early indie games like Hotline Miami were the only positive things to come out of it. As much as people bitch about the current gen, it's far superior to last gen. 6th is still king though. Maybe that's just my nostalgia talking, but there was just something special about the Gamecube.

>Lived in a third-world shithole
>grew up poor
>still really enthusiastic about games
>A lady next door opened a gaming shop. just a small, ramshacked shop that sell bootleg GBC/GBA, carts and SNES
>spent afternoons and summers there, helping her recommending games to customers (shes clueless about gaming in general, somehow), dumping ROMs and making carts
>in return i could play whatever i want there in down-times
life's better and i've moved away, but i still miss that kind lady sometimes

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How often do you think back to your life in the late 90s/early 00s and realize you should've valued it more and taken advantage of more opportunities?

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I miss big head mode.
I miss rainbow blood mode
I miss voice changing modes.
I miss low gravity mode
I miss infinite health & ammo
I miss nailgun mode
etc.

....sigh.

No fuck off. Fucking kids these days can't understand the satisfaction of owning a physical copy with a fuck huge manual.

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Which was also a huge issue on CRTs, hence the existence of screensavers, so it's not really a factor in comparing the two. Forget OLEDs though, virtually any modern LCD monitor can easily beat CRTs in most ways.

WIGGER

You zoomers won't understand the value of physical games until you lose entire libraries you paid for because a company goes under or some license expires or if Nintendo cracks down on roms which they've done.

I do that when I think about the past year.

miss this so much, blonde girl got fat and the hood looking wigger to the far left is poor and works in a scrap yard

nerd looking guy just got laid off from Toshiba ahahahah

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guys stop you are making me depressed

What country, I'm guessing somewhere in Latin America?

DRM-free digital like GOG is superior to physical in pretty much every way. Proprietary disk formats like the consoles use are basically a form of DRM in and of themselves.

>ywn look up an IGN review of a game and go to Funcoland to find a used copy and up spending $20 on 30+ SNES games.

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>Now I have to worry about not being able to move my spine if I sit still for too long
Medical condition or is it just old age?

None of this digital crap. Single player games. Nearly no DLC or micro transactions. That pic you posted looks like fucking heaven compared to what we have now. Everybody in this thread agrees

You're fucking retarded.

this thread

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everyday

>....sigh.

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Yes idk what happened, but I subscribed and only received like two issues over the course of a year.

I DID IT ALL FOR THE NOOKIE
YEAH
THE NOOKIE
CMON
SO YOU CAN TAKE THAT COOKIE
AND STICK IT UP YOUR
YEAH
STICK IT UP TOUR
YEAH

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No you. If you think an encrypted proprietary disk is more consumer friendly than a drm free installer you're legitimately retarded

The "NXE" launch is where gaming stopped being amazing to me. I wasnt primarily an Xbox guy or anything it just seems like that month is where the magic died and the iconic blades interface changing into this horrible tile abomination is just so fitting of a representation.

What, is that like a Funko Pop?

gaming was this fucking good. we all had fun playing games
we had BOOTH BABES at E3, E3 was all dark and there was no feminist screaming left and right.

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Being an early 2000's gamer was better. Going inside a game store to see the latest ps1 games/going to the video store to rent some was the shit. Internet wasn't popular so you had to bu magazines with demo discs and cheat codes.

Good times.

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>early 00's
>go to the arcade to play some gaymes
>waste all my money on this shit instead

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Well the thing with the 6th gen is that devs had sorta worked out the kinks of 3d development, so there was alot of room for innovation.

In the 7th gen game budgets skyrocketed and no one wanted to take chances, also the advent of DLC led to abuse by greedy publishers.

8th gen still isn't amazing, but I've been finding that devs are going back to what worked in the past and polishing them. Taking current ideas and reworking them enough to make them fresh. Also DLC has become a little less oppressive with free DLC and updates being more of a trend and devs releasing more substantial DLCs expansions more often. Of course garbage anti consumer bullshit like lootboxes are still a concern, but honestly I find the worst offenders exist in annual trash that already exploits whoever buys it.

FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK these things.

It’s bringing up a lot of old memories that feel like they happened just yesterday, but the important thing to do is to create new ones.

Gamestation was a god send. They did these 2 for 1 and 3 for 1 deals on a lot of their second hand stock so I never felt like games were too expensive. You could walk out the shop with 3 quality PC titles and not feel robbed. GAME started to do that but it faded away after Gamestation did.

e3 at its peak before the feminist started to attack gaming and all gaming companies bent over and took in the ass

gaming will never be this good again. i am sorry to all of you

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Oh yeah, the only people I ever saw playing handhelds in public were kids and turbo autists.

It was pretty nice. I used to abuse Gamestop/Babbage’s return policy to the point where I probably owned 70% of the Dreamcast library at one point or another despite never owning more than 4-5 games at a time, so that worked out pretty well for me.

>lan parties in high school
>tibia, counter strike, madden and mario kart
it seemed like everyone cared about the games and nobody gave a shit about politics or whatever feigned outrage issue of the day

social media ruined the world

WHICH ONE OF YOU is that guy!!! I know it is someone on this board ahahah

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More convenient but not safer. Physical games are the one thing that can preserve video games as long as one copy remains, an insurance policy against digital mishaps.

>GAME
started pulling this shit where you traded in games you got in-store only money
including if you bought a game with cash in the morning, played it and took it back by the evening with a receipt
>Gamestation
they'd always give you money back, and if you bought a used game the disc was always going to be fucking flawless quality
and they didn't jew you if you wanted to sell something either
they also had a bargain basket where you could pick up old treasures for like £1 each
GAME just didn't give a fuck, at least not the one where I lived

SNES games? That I doubt. But Genesis games yes. I randomly went to funcoland on my lunch break back in 2000 and walked out with $70 in PSX and Genesis games. Mostly Genesis, I got like 15 games for nothing. But they never had shit for SNES even when SNES was current. One of the reasons SNES games are so much even today

The PSX game was Xenogears. Disc 2 was very scratched but still playable. Plus that part of the game was shit anyways

>Gamer
Well, first off you little shit; we fucking hated that phrase and actively shit on anyone who tried to label us with it.

Identifying with your leasers is the faggiest shit you can do and one of the main reasons furries were such insufferable pieces of shit that were openly shat on this website.

NOW GET THE FUCK OFF MY LAWN.

>walk into Blockbuster to rent Luigi's Mansion for the fifth time
>smells fucking amazing in there, idk what they did but Blockbuster always smelt so good
>get some good ass gummies at checkout
>get home and mom's ordered pizza
>play Luigi's Mansion all night and watch Toonami

Bear with me; my heart is in the coffin there with Caesar...

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ultra comfy

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>Discovered video game websites.
>Learn about Steel Battalion.
>Get really excited at the idea of being a mech pilot.
>Start saving up money, recycling bottles, doing yard work for chump change, etc.
>Get the money on time, manage to buy a one of the first-release limited run boxes.
>Brother trades it to his dealer for weed 3 weeks later.

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literally definition of a fridge

Fuck man unlockables that you had to grind or explore for. No DLC. LAN parties and split screen play. I remember my friend group dropped COD after they dropped split screen support in MW.

I’m 29 and was born in 90. Some nights when the air is warm and a soft, summer breeze blows through. The sounds of some teens laughing at some stupid joke. I almost feel like I’m there again it’s a weird feeling and then it’s gone. I miss those days like any old fool. Games were creative and didn’t have to be ultra 4K five billion pixels. There weren’t games as services where they expect you to grind for days to stay up with the game. Fuck I miss just lanning up until the sun came up. Drinking soda and eating chips, playing warhammer and smash Bros. Making up fun mini games; only use Mario and up B attack, or certain guns or fucking playing halo zombies and making all kinds of weird maps. We made a game mode called underground rail round which was like zombies but differant. We built a maze and teleported and all this crazy shit and the browns had to get to point while the whites hunted them. I think the browns could only use melee but had more health while the whites had almost no health but could use shotguns and snipers. Fuck man now we all over the country with real jobs and wives and houses. I’m fucking proud of all we have accomplished and become but fuck. It would be nice to have one night, a case of jones green apple, a shitload of popcorn, some warhammer and a game cube and some sleeping bags.

Modability was a huge deal. Simpler graphics and code meant that more people could get into creating custom content for games, and they did. Hell, even shit like Freedom Fighters had literally thousands of custom models.

Nowadays you have more complexity PLUS the fact that game companies don't want you to mod their games - After all, why have fans release content for free when you can make your own outfits behind a paywall?

Remember battlefields 1942? There was a WW1 mod, a Vietnam mod, Star Wars, fucking desert combat talking politics and whether Iraq was gonna be worth it

Fun.

Netcode was fucking insane.

I can remember having smooth matches with minimal to no lag on Tribes 2. We lived in the deep south with only dial-up.

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>renting Bioshock and Fallout 3 because it had cool boxart
Literally me.

>Go to non-franchise entertainment stores in the 90s
>Find weirder, smaller release titles from barely existing publishers along with import stuff like anime
>The only details you can glean from all of it is the content you can find: mainstream magazines don't talk about them except for maybe a paragraph in one of the back pages of a single issue, much less ever expecting to see the stuff mentioned on TV or Radio
>Go to flea markets and second-hand stores
>Finding a new piece of some series you've been chasing after is like finding the fucking Ark of the Covenant
>Hours spent flipping through a RightStuf catalog, hoping you picked something good based on the text only description
>Waiting weeks to months for a fansubbed VHS to make it to your door that you ordered from an IRC group or shitty website because it takes that long for the money order to be received

There was a fun, exciting thrill to the hunt back in the day where you only had your imagination at first and then sparsely detailed websites to fill in the gaps.

What?

Mid 2000's
>all games are so moody now, can we get more color and variety?
Mid 2010's
>all games are now clown vomit

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This is the only place where people are jaded and cynical.

Good but not as good as the late 90s to early 2000s

6000 games were released on Steam last year. More than in 1990 - 2005 combined.

remember when the gameplay wasn't overloaded with information and with every event being logged and tracked?
games were so clean back then, often you didn't even need an account or profile, you just jumped in, no one was following your shit, tracking your shit, recording it to market later
no one was selling you shit either
you bought the product, you played the product

I only found out about new games via TV or going to the shop and looking
I didnt have a PC or by extension emulation so I treasured all my games much more, shit I fucking 100% madagascar the game 3 times even though I never saw the movie
Snazzy rechargeable batteries with the GBASP was the best thing ever
Squaresoft still had good games but they just fucked up with spirits within

>Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door
>$5
Man I wish I could find a copy for that price.

Death.

I still remember how I passed up multiple copies of the GBC Shantae for less than ten dollars. All because the only review I ever saw for it was a Game Informer one that utterly shit on it because it was a GBC game in the era of GBA games.

Golden age of MMOs. Ragnarok and EverQuest we're winding down but World of Warcraft was just getting started.

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Welp that took me back. I started playing during 1.5 at Netcafes. Made sure to buy it for my home computer. I got real fucking good at CS and DoD to the point people were trying to fight me at the netcafes. I remember when Steam first came out. Got all of the HL expansions for free(at least that's how I remember it).

Original CS used to be a shit ton of fun. Almost zero little kids, people talked on their mics all the time. It feels like gaming was way more social. Whenever I've gone back to play a lot of PC games that have voice, it seems like no one uses it because they're in their own discord or whatever.

Discord really fucked up the social dynamic of gaming as well. Back when you had to buy a ventrilo or teamspeak server, it forced people to get along and stick together. Now with a free alternative, it seems people get booty blasted and will splinter groups.

I still play with some people I met playing planetside 1 like a decade ago. That game was a blast.

My local mall had
>Suncoast Video
>A good local comics shop
>Sanrio store
>Games Workshop
>Arcade
THAT was a good place to hang out

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Man. We must've really had it good then before Gamestop swallowed everything up and big box retailers expanded their offerings. We had Funcoland, The Video Game Exchange, Blockbuster, Gamestop, The Electronics Boutique, and a ton of other mom-and-pop stores to compete. I remember the Funcoland specifically before they were the only store that still gave cash for games. They had like 2 tables of SNES games and a wall of NES games because people were just giving them away at the time. Retro gaming wasn't a thing yet and people were finally getting rid of their old carts for whatever Sony was shitting out.

Back then I could play for hours on end without stopping. Nowadays I can't play at all without getting bored unless I'm watching a video on the side

>find sea dogs in game store bargain bin
>spend weeks playing it with my friend trying to figure out how to progress
God games without guides. That was a thing. We never figured out how to sack a town either so we got stuck on the main story and just went full pirate instead

Every day. I should've listened to my mom when she told me to get off the computer.

Seek help for your depression.

This

It was pretty fun desu. It was when video games started to converge from nerdy hobby to a more normal hobby.

Gonna be a :YIKES: from me buddy.

>clear high heels

Why do I instinctively think I’m about to watch two girls sucking gum balls out of each others assholes when I see these.

My little brother went through a phase while I was away at college, pawned the entire N64 game collection. Had a shit ton of games, really wish I had them back being that I have my old working n64.

Unless you're 10 you should know.

>all those cheetos commercials
I miss it

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Constantly.
>have anxiety attacks when I was little where it would feel like the room was moving around
>stop going to normal school and get homeschooled because doctor thought it was stress or something that was causing it
>thought it would sweet because I hated going to school
>every day I think back to how much I missed out on
>socially retarded because of no real world experience with people I'm not related to
>closest thing to a friend is an apathetic weeb I met on youtube ages ago (the only remaining person from the small circle of people we had way back then)
>literally have no idea how to interact with people now that I'm in college

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Same.

>borrowing my moms credit card and downloading any game i want via steam
>logging back into fortnie anyways
>ordering a pizza with said card while browsing nudes
>couldnt stop my self so i splurged on some retarded fortnite skins
god i wish it was 2019 again, growing up before the war was a blessing

We are all slowly becoming part of the Cloud.Ready player one predicted the future.

>tfw born in 1992

FFFFFFFUUUCK WHEN/HOW DID WE GET SO OLD THAT MID 2000s ARE ACTUALLY A GENRE TO TALK ABOUT BY ZOOMERS?

please I need to go back. I didnt want to get old

I see the same game atleast 10 times in the picture.

I just played video games all day at my local Game Crazy. I could play any game they had available because the employees were cool people. Game Crazy doesn't exist anymore because it was part of Hollywood Video. Now I'm sad.

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That gif made me kek.Thx user.

Pretty meh in the mid 2000s considering how the PS3 and 360 started the race for realistic graphics in games which more or less made everything look so much the same that it spawned indies, but in the late 90s and early 2000s, it gave off a sense of awe and wonder the likes of which you'd probably never experience again as an adult, at least not through conventional means.

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What was the last soulful era here?

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We did have it good. It’s surprising that their businesses were even viable. I remember being in a funcoland in Pontiac, MI (which is a GameStop that is still there today despite everything around it including a mall and toys r us both closing) in about 1993 when I witnessed some kid trade Zelda LTTP, Mario Kart, and Starfox for $30 off of their $60 above-retail price for fucking SNES Mortal Kombat; an objectively garbage game even in the arcade with all the blood. That’s how that business survived for so long. GameStop is the same entity. And thinkgeek. Not as greedy but still the same. Shame they tossed all those PS2 and Xbox games only to start selling them again a few short years later. We are too old for this shit. I’m going to play my switch until I fall asleep (next to my sleeping waifu)

>didn't have great access to the internet
>all the gems that passed me by because I was instead getting shovelware licensed games
The sheer value of information we can get today to make better informed decisions is alone worth it.

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Steam had Linux support in 2004?

Late Millenial/Gen Y. Soul was written all over it.

why is he doing it wrong

PC gaming was just getting to the point that you'd be familiar with.

I'm gonna dig up some repressed memories for a lot of people.

>Want to patch game
>www.fileplanet.com
>(game)
>patch 1.01
>2 megabytes
>takes a few minutes to download
>patch 1.05 (requires 1.01 installed to work)
>server is offline please use mirror
>50 megabytes
>mirror available isn't on yout continent unless you're a premium member
>takes the better part of a day, if you don't get DC'd.

Games like Tribes 2 still allowed you to make accounts though.

Shit, that thing had an in-game browser AND customizable clanpages.

>You will never fuck off to the game kiosks in Wal-Mart while your parents bought groceries ever again

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Weren't the COD clones and DLC more LATE 2000s than early 2000s

This meme was so stupid. First of all the pixels weren't 1:1, so text look like shit. You also had a ghosting effect that took place. The only good thing is the 600hz refresh rate, which nothing seems to beat. But outside of that CRTs are garbage and take up an insane amount of space.

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>go to blockbuster
>rent Area 51

>All those years you spent as a kid imagining all the crazy things video games would be in the future never knowing it peaked with the PS2 era

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i fucking miss when websites weren't jewgle spyware garbage. it's such a shame Yea Forums is becoming this way too. the web just werked back then, why the fuck did we have to make it worse?

At the time adventure games at the time felt like a actually adventure was happening in a game instead muh open world garbage. Semi hub worlds were decent.

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I'll never forget how the employees literally refused to buy my "broken" SNES after hooking it up with new cables. They also straight up told me what carts I should keep and what I should trade in. Still have Smash 64, DKR, SMW and both Pokemon Stadiums to this day because they were the few games that went up in price back then. When the fuck did gaming get so cynical? Why do I literally hate paying for games at retailers and distrust devs now?

>zoomers will never understand the joy of reading a huge game manual on the toilet

>The sore neck after playing on something like this for just 5 minutes

This is wrong. You were way more likely to get some sort of virus or malware when just browsing even innocent websites that had been hijacked

What do zoomies and gen alpha even have nostalgia for?

Generation z started in 1995 you fucking retard. You’re likely a zoomer yourself.

Whoo boy, yep definitely early Millenial

Actually it started in 1997 according to pew research

Well now Early Zoomers are posting childhood nostalgia on social media for the Late 00s-Early 10s things like Minecraft, MW2, iCarly, Johnny test, Chowder, flapjack, Adventure time, etc.

Feels kinda weird; I distinctly remember years ago when people ranted on the Late 00s-early 10s as being the downfall shit era.

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I would fuck that fridge, robocop agrees with me

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It was maximum comfy

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you should have killed your brother and his dealer

I'm a '94-95fag and it's definitely after 97'. I distinctly remember in my senior year the juniors and sophmores just seemed like younger versions of us and the older people before us, however, the freshmen by that point were like a completely different specimen compared to everyone else it was so bizarre.

>defining your childhood with consumerism

This feeling still exists somewhat in the retro game stores of Akihabara, and in Japan’s multimedia stores Yodobashi Camera.

videogames were more impressive, we actually had genuine excitement over new releases

nowadays every game is the same third person shooter with RPG mechanics, lootboxes and microtransactions

Because retailers just want your money and devs are shoveling out garbage for a quick buck while shoving political agendas into their games.

>get a bad cough that forces me to stay home from school in middle school
>enjoy being able to stay home and sleep and play games all day
>the cough sticks around for a long time and I have to see the doctor, have a bronchoscopy, doctors find nothing and say it's a habit cough
>in denial about it being a habit cough because it feels real, and school is boring and I want to stay home
>by now I've missed so much school that my parents have to testify in court about why I'm not going to school while I sit outside the courtroom coughing
>end up being home schooled for the rest of middle school
>high school was a chance to start fresh but I started getting bad migraines so I'd need to go home early / not go to school
>start faking them from time to time because I didn't want to go to school
>social workers start coming to my house to try and get me to go to school
>end up being sent to a remedial "special kids" school for kids who can't go to school
>worst time of my life, stay home as much as possible because I hated going to this place
>drop out at 17 and get my GED so I don't have to deal with it anymore
>end up socially retarded with no friends
>fuck up and take longer in community college than I should have because I wasn't used to going to school anymore
Not a day goes by where I don't think about how different my life would've been if kid me hadn't been such a fucking retard that they valued sleeping at home over going to school. Now a giant chunk of my life is missing and I only just sort of recovered from social retardation after transferring to university.

>mfw finding a "get well soon" card the friends I used to have in middle school made for me

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Cope more zoomer

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I printed out this picture of Morgan Webb on one of those iron on papers for t-shirts and stuff because I thought she was really hot. I got an old white t-shirt and ironed the design on it.

I did this right before my class was supposed to go to some amusement park, I think it was Hersheypark.

I hid it from everyone except for a few people I showed it off too. Looking back on it, that's really cringey and I don't know why I did this or thought it was cool.

>Don't look at my chest.
With a chest as flat as that, don't worry, I'm not.

It's difficult to pin down. Millennials are such a broad generation since they experienced such rapid shifts in social and technological dynamics. Someone posed it this way way. If there had to be a definitive age bracket: It would be Chris Hemsworth to Tom Holland.

explaink are you just stupid?

This x100

Taking your your tome of knowledge to bed and reading it by the light of the silvery moon.

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that cleavage is misogynistic and it objectifies women. all the copies of that game will be destroyed
FOR WOMAN
-modern game journos, game devs and 25 percent of gamers

Here's some Yea Forums feels

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...

they don't make games and they just shove political agendas into it because theyre paid for that. and the idiot suckers who buys that shit are waiting for the internet to become a 900 dialer so they can call their shit worth value and, well its just all gambling. there the dumbasses dumb enough to think this shit matters or that anyone cares.

>people arguing where the cutoff between gens Y and Z is so they can fit in or gatekeep with the "cool kids" group
>again
As fucking if someone being born 2 years later dramatically alters their childhood experience.

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yeah, that actually looks like shit on LCD. Not sure what your argument is here

>kids these days

I think the sadest point this thread pointed out is definitely the new video games. In the 90s and 2000 it was amazing seeing a new game from one team and a clear vision. One solid project from start to finish with soul. What’s the point of taking a risk now when you can just copy and follow trends. Or just worry about all the social bullshit surrounding games now. Maybe technology truly did advanced too fast.

youtube

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Do you mean people after 1997 or during 1997? I was born in 1997 and from the years to 2002 to 2006 I watched the same shows, watched the same movies and played the same consoles as my brother who was born in late 1994

dude you need to kill yourself

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I've often thought about it.
If it wasn't for a group of online friends I've had for 12 years I probably would have.

What is that purple icon next to Adium?

youtube.com/watch?v=4ddJ1OKV63Q

What started all the e3 hype every year

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What was /z/ again?

A board about bees in a uncircumsized dude's penis.

>That feel when buying a game and opening it at home for the first time
>or even better, opening it on the drive home, reading the manual and getting stoked about all the cool monsters in the game
>LAN parties
>Reading properly-researched game reviews in magazines
>geocities webpages with cheats
>freaking the fuck out because your dad splurged out and bought a quad-speed cdrom drive, which meant you could watch cinematics stutter-free

I guess those were the 90s, but still .. good old days.

BECAUSE devs have twitter or facebook and they can tell gamers they are racist/misogynist and explain how much they hate them and the sexist game industry

so gamers hate most of the people that make games

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The current video game climate started on November 15th, 2001. People don’t see because it was a slow decline, the original Halo trilogy has had the biggest impact on gaming in the 21st century. It successfully brought a lot of mainstream attention to gaming, it was one of those games where it was okay to play at a time when video games were still considered nerdy. It made online play on consoles a thing, Xbox Live and the success of the Xbox brand were built in the back of this franchise. Was the first game to have successful DLC on console during the Halo 2 era. The series was such a juggernaut that rival companies were looking for a “Halo Killer”. It also led to the rise in console FPS. Sure COD took it to another level in the late 2000s but if I can name two games which changed the industry in the long run I would say it’s the original Super Mario Bros. and Halo Combat Evolved.

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>broadcast yourself
Youtube doesn't have that anymore.

god I fucking hate those glowing borders when everything is dark

The same as it is now. If you want to talk major differences, you're going to have to go back to the early 90s. The internet changed everything in the world, including gaming, for the worse. The only thing that really changed from 2005 to now is better technology and digital distrobutions/dlc/mtx/using updates as a crutch for rush-jobs.

>Going to the nearest EBGames/Gamestop bi-monthly to get the latest games
>Not giving a crap about digital downloads or PC Gaming
>Relying on G4tv to show me the latest games and cheats while also enjoying their silly skits
>Staying up every weekend and holidays doing nothing but playing my Sega Dreamcast because no school
>Getting excited to go to a relatives house whenever I get the chance to play his Gamecube
>Taking my GBA to school to show it off and play it when I'm bored

I miss being a kid sometimes.

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>can someone explain what this is supposed to be?

After 97', so the 98' kids and down.

Great. No SJWs wanting to censor my games. Everyone is kind and understanding, and we have forums upon forums of discussion about hentai games without some roastie getting salty.

Disc rot is a thing, ISOs of CD based games will still exist long after most physical copies of these games have become unplayable.

Russian here. I remember downloading 2 Gb of mods for Morrowind on a 50.6k dial up internet. Something like 90% of all the games sold were bootlegs which sometimes didn't even work. Everyone played Counter Strike and Heroes of Might and Magic 3. Some guys had PS2 but PS1 and Sega Genesis were still going strong. Nintendo games and consoles were literally unknown. While some things changed, outside of NES Nintendo still has barely any presence here.

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bretty good. shame i was a poorfag who couldn't run the newest games decently on my celeron pc

My old man would get the (PS1) OPM magazine with the demo disc every couple of months. Such a mixed bag of games, some would feature half of the game, others would be 90 second demos, you'd play over and over again to see how far you could get. We had a huge stack of them but they came in shitty carboard sleeves that eventually got lost and our older disks got scratched to shit. So I'd have to keep wiping (which was probably destroying them further) and re-trying the discs with my favorites to get them to work.

Those were the fucking days.

It's called getting old. Whenever an old person says "If only I knew then what I know now", there is a enormous weight behind it. And you don't understand that weight until you're over 40. I am 42 and the amount of things I'd change is mind-boggling. The people who say "I wouldn't change a thing!" are absolutely lying. Even if it meant they didn't have their kids. (especially if it meant they didn't have their kids)

do you russians like to play the wii or Nintendo switch???

>All that soul

What went wrong bros? Youtube doesn't even let us have our soulless like/dislike bar have color.

I remember trading in like 4 games at Funcoland to get DKC on gameboy advance. Didn't even make it to 30 dollars trade in value, but my dad paid the rest. I was 10 so I was ignorant to the fact that my dad covered what I didn't have.
I also bought DKC2 SNES from Funcoland...and then traded it back in like a year later. I'm positive I still own whatever game I bought, because I stopped trading in games for the most part when I got a paper route.

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It is either Wine or highly customized XP.

youtube.com/watch?v=oJOPmEckDdo

i remember when the source code got leaked, and you could play part of the game or some demo of it. and it had the orange squares on some parts

Jesus. I wish there was a game dev that didn't have a social media presence, but it's kinda required at this point. Could you imagine the devs of Custer's Revenge retweeting a Native American rape scene with a bunch of laughing emojis? Shit. Even Nintendo, who is championed as pioneers for queers and women in video games, initially created Birdo as a joke about overtly feminine men.

The days before clients that could resume downloads were brutal. It's amazing it took so long for that very basic technology to catch on. I think proprietary patchers like Everquest's and AOL's were the first ones to utilize it years and years before it caught on for file sharing.

>Get digital game
>Put it on USB hard drive
>Or Flash Drive
>Or burn to disc

Boom, the same thing has been achieved.

The pre cocaine days were the best.

buy not shit discs. i have some over 10year old fujistus and i dont think i have 1 of the 50 spindle i bought that isnt readable. ive never found one

>'00s era games are already reaching '90s game levels of reminiscence
Where has the time gone?

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I remember having a Nintendo Power and Game Informer subscription to get information. Also just talking to people at school and relatives.

>When the fuck did gaming get so cynical?
The boom of social at the end of 2012.

its pretty much how old were you when cell phones became common, if u were a little kid, you are a zoomer, if it was when you were in middle school or high school, you are a millennial. if you were over 18 when cell phones became common, you are a boomer

kys

Microsoft Entourage

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>That deformable terrain

I'm sad it wasn't used in the actual release. Wonder why they kept it in for so long before dropping it entirely

>using DK64's battle mode to pretend that it was a Yu-Gi-Oh match
>Banjo-Tooie was my first FPS
>thought Hey You, Pikachu! was the best thing
>traded in all of my N64 games for a DS Phat when I get older

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Back then the coolest cover art meant a great game jak 2 ratchet and clank god of war yakuza

We didn't know how good we had it.

Less trannies

fuck that faggot dont kill yourself. there's most likely nothing on the other side so even now our shitty existence is better than nothing.

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It was nice that I didn't need to play a game right away in order to avoid spoilers. I remember not playing Silent Hill 2 until 2003 and went in without knowing anything about the plot or twists. I can't see that happening today.

not much, PS3 and 4 are the most popular consoles but PC is the default gaming platform. Most people pirate their games, so console gaming is a niche.

i remember being at the lan arcade and a group from the varsity football team came in to play cs 1.6.

i was gonna write a big blog post but nevermind

Thanks. At least things have gotten better for me once I got my shit together.

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damn gamer's taste in 3DPD was really abysmal

Variety and surprise are two words that come to mind. You just don't find those mid tier games that either would be meh, pretty good or a hidden gem. I heard once or twice indies fills that void but it's not the same.

here meet some naughty dog dev

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>ever so gingerly taking the CD out of the case and holding it by the edges while slowly inserting it into the CD drive to start installation because you just knew you may have to reinstall because PCs were shit and knew Mom just wouldn't understand/couldn't afford buying a new copy.
This also applied to how I read manga

There was these two kids that graduated from my high school when I was in middle school and opened up their own video game store. They also made it like a gaming cafe you pay $5 entry and $3/hr or something and you can play on any one of the number of PS3s, 360s, or PCs or Wiis they had there and they had like every single game in stock. Kids would often skip school (me included) and go hang out there so a judge told them they are obligated to say whether there are any kids skipping school whenever they call so a cop would pick us up and bring us back to school lol

Now it's still the same but they sell a lot of retro games. When I got back into pokemon after like a decade I got my heart gold copy there.

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Game informer was the shit, midnight releases were still exciting events, streamers didn't exist, every single corporation wasn't trying to make a buck off our hobby, nobody pretended to like games because it wasn't quite trendy yet. It was a better time

>rapidshare still works
>multiple parts dl links

It was great. A lot less women.

I trusted this man as a kid when he spoke about games....................only for his true colors to come out as a c.u.c.k gamer hating feminist bitch. hope he dies from all that coke

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There was variety, not every game was trying to be the same thing.
Budgets were smaller and games were less intensive so we got more games more quickly.
New IPs were being consistently developed.
If you wanted to try a game you had to go to a friend's house, get a demo disc, or play on a store display.
Not so many games tried to be movies.
eSports hadn't taken off in full effect so we didn't have games focusing on the competitive aspect right out the gate.
Games weren't being ran as services.
Games came with all kinds of secrets and cheat codes, things that are often locked behind real world monetary purchases.
G4TechTV was still alive.
I actually posted on niche video game forums, made video game related artwork in gimp, and enjoyed myself.
I didn't focus on only playing the best quality games, just went for what I thought was fun.
I basically only played games for fun.
It felt like developers cared more about the end user.
Games didn't take themselves as seriously as they do today.

It was a good time. I still love video games today but I can't say I don't miss how things were two decades ago.

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I used to love these suggestive video game ads!!!!
gaming had balls back in the day up until 2011 or whenever that cunt anita made her videos

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>gameinformer shit all over mw3
thats when i knew we would no longer get honest reviews from gameinformer from that point onward

>Even Nintendo, who is championed as pioneers for queers and women in video games, initially created Birdo as a joke about overtly feminine men.
Are they really? Remember the whole thing about gay marriage not being possible in Tomodachi Life? And gay options being removed from Fire Emblem? Not to mention fags still seething that their games ask them if they want to be a boy or a girl.

Even if they sometimes have "trans" characters it's only to make fun of them, like Birdo as you mentioned or the cross dressing guy in BotW. Even Vivian who is the one they actually tout as their champion was made fun of by being called a man.

it just shows exactly what them idiots want to do too anyway. no men thoughts. what is it then? do women have thoughts? no. they bitch about men. and thats what youve got.

I remember it mostly as the time Ubisoft didn't fucking suck. Splinter Cell, Prince of Persia, Rayman. They became so different once Assassin's Creed became a thing

stop for a second and realize that this user saved this pic on his HDD willingly before posting it looool

Just imagine if Assassin's Creed would have remained a PoP game. The world would be different right now.

Though to be fair, I give Ubisoft more credit than their peers Activision and especially EA. They still come out with new IPs and try to experiment a bit with existing franchises more than the other guys.

Picking games because the cover looked interesting

It's how I chose Ratchet and Clank and Gladius and they were fucking amazing games

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Spike TV game show, paperback game guides, internet still wasn't prevailent so a lot of word of mouth and going to stores to look at things and decide on the spot when browsing what to buy. One of the reasons Blockbuster was great, it was always a new adventure to buy/rent games and movies. Less internet focused games so going over to friends to play was a big thing,

Expensive, I remember seeing medal of honour frontlines go for €70 on the PlayStation 2 new. The average price back then was €60 for a new game. Adjusted for inflation, your looking at nearly €75 for a game. And there wasn't really any collectors editions or anything back then.

>circuit city
>2000's

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>CompUSA

kino mobile

>Gamestation

Those were the days

I watched the Megadrive and Snes lose the war for shelve space against the N64 and PlayStation then fade away entirely. Then seen it happen again with the PlayStation 2, Xbox and Gamecube.

God that pic is comfy. I miss it bros

No, there was EB Games which GameStop already bought out by 2007.

The mid 2000s wasn't very different, or any better really, than now.

The internet was WAY more forum centric and YouTube had just started.
Myspace wasn't anything worth missing.

The best thing about the internet was pages about neat stuff people were working on and fan projects.
Google either has a way of hiding those now or they're just not there now.

Fuko was popular fap material by late 2006.
You couldn't just bring up most songs until 2007 as YouTube hadn't gotten quite that extensive.
People were stealing songs from YouTube like fucking crazy by 2008.

Pixiv wasn't around in the mid 2000s but DeviantArt was.
The fapart didn't tend to be as good and though some was most was drawn cruder.

Watched x-play, attack of the shows and cheat also read game informer before it became shit

I miss cody monkeys

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In the early 2000s I couldn't afford anything so I played on a Genesis and windows 98 up until the mid 2000s then my uncle gave me his used original Xbox and I found a cheap GBA at a garage sale.

You're a weird case.

i used to have copies of all of their 1st and i think only season i had ripped from a shoutcast stream channel. i deleted them sometime or something tho, idk why

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I always think quitting the internet would bring back some of the (rose tinted) magic from the past, but that probably wouldn't do much. Anyone else think anything like that?

I always envied my cousin who had a Nintendo DS and then he lost it at a mall and didn't care.
Many years later (last year I think) I finally got to buy a copy of the game he had showed me on it, which was Rocket Slime, and it's one of the most fun games I've ever played in my life. I wonder how many things I missed on DS, but I read a lot of Nintendo Power magazines.

Nobody felt any magic from the 2000s because there was none to feel.

I microwaved my (christmas 2004) DS a few weeks ago.

I recommend The World Ends With You, Rhythm Heaven, and maybe Contact.

There's two seasons.

I know; a lot of the times I reminisce fondly of, I didn't actually feel that great about when I was living it, so I don't really know what I am looking for.

yall just like mid 00s stuff because you boomers were still teenagers and you hadn't thrown your lives down the drains yet and nobody realized how much of a fuckup you are

what would you change user

Idk what that's supposed to mean, is that supposed to be some sort of special edition?
I'll look for some of those next time I visit the small game shop down the road, it's where I got my Rocket Slime.

I like you. Tribes 2 was (is) amazing and not just for the time. I think games like Tribes and Quake genuinely had ultra-responsive frametimes and movement and the gameplay to exploit that perfectly. I'll never understand why Ascend opted for a loadout system completely unlike classic, where it was like a puzzle to choose just the right tools for whatever role, roal or purpose at any given time during a match.

*role, goal or purpose

This was how I learned about Morrowind.

Going from age 8-18 again with the knowledge I have now would basically be like a superpower. It's not about knowledge of the future, just wisdom in general. Knowing the importance of managing my health and taking school more seriously. Also, with so much more understanding of how women work and what tools they use to manipulate men, I would have saved years and years of time and hundreds of thousands of dollars from ages 15-25. Speaking of, financial responsibility is a big one.

This desu. I began thinking games were really going downhill starting in the mid or late 00’s. Only started thinking it was getting better around ‘15 or ‘16. While everything to do with monetization has gotten strictly worse, most other stuff has gotten better in the last few years.

And ubi sandboxes were definitely a thing since at least 2008. FC2 was a repetitive as fuck checklist simulator. Still kinda cool, but not at all what I’d been hoping for at the time. Basically didn’t bother with open world games after that for years.

I just feel bad for all the kids growing up in this Fortnite-saturated hellscape.

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I regularly spent hours in game stores and there were often great deals in the clearance bins so I blindly picked up some games which turned out to be great.
Now most game stores are gone. I know of at least 4 chains that went down. And the few that are left became a bunch of jews without competition.

How many of these do you reckon are asset flips?

If such a thing were possible id like to live life all over again with what I learned from the first run. A new game plus kinda thing.

timesplitters future perfect and mgs3 right next to each other on shelf.

someone at that store know what they're doing

but seriously, that's it, look at it, variety of games for sale on shelf, plus older games, it felt like there was more of a variety of releases.

Photo must have been taken in 2005. I remember buying both then. The excitement for mgs3 was pretty flat compared to mgs2, which I recall was pretty incredible.

I had to wait days for a 700MB game to download through eMule.

Your parents are supposed to do that, but, well...

The mid-2000s was precisely the time when games stopped being good.
I don't think I felt the divide quite as strongly as today back then.

Every week you could discover a whole new game you knew nothing about and didn't even know existed.

Yes, because all children are mindless obedient robots who listen to everything their parents say and understand what's best for them.

fucking discord faggot

>Robotech: Battlecry

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>those terrible games
Wtf, of all the fantastic games on the DC at launch, why would you pick that shit

If you don't know, you're too young.

dubya jokes
nazis being extreme and edgy in a non-funny way
actual cheese pizza being posted on Yea Forums
videogames still being a thing you had to buy rather than everything being an MMO
videogames that weren't looter shooters
having to call someone on a landline or using a flip phone
jeff being fired from gamespot

overall the 00s were shit though, since IRL everyone was either afraid of terrorism, afraid of the economic collapse, or both. I suspect trump's second term will go down the same way.

you trusted gamespot, and ign. You looked at magazines for games.
You bought the guides, you went to gamestop,or eb games just to read the guides.

I miss the times when we had no phones.
Fuck every nigger that constantly hangs on their phone when you try to talk to them. Fuck all of you shallow fucks that read twitter and tumblr and use tranny dicsord servers. Fuck every girl (even ugly ones) having 10 guys trying to get in their pants on some social account.

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Do you think those who grew up with Commodore 64 felt bad for us? When we were playing games in the 90's?

It wasn't much better and games weren't particularly polished either, people just have rose tinted glasses.
What there was is more variety because publishers were experimental and hadn't grasped which trends could generate the most profit.
No political autists shitting up everywhere they go because they feel video game tits aren't big enough or whatever.
But overall games today are everything we dreamed about in the 00s and then some.

Mid 2000s was PS3, Wii, 360 and DS era. Surely you remember that otherwise you’re too fucking young to be here.

>Video games were cool for young male children but once you hit Jr. High and High School it was seen as just for nerds.
LARP

I was born in 1984 and you're full of shit.

>mechassault
good game

A pedophile wrote this commercial.

If you were a slav child you would go to a place where they sold 2$ games and just point to a random one on a list hoping that its good.

Going off the ratings off the boxarts, could be.