5 Pieces of 90s Gaming Nostalgia

With the recent release of not one, but two brand new consoles that push home gaming and entertainment technology to their limits, it's easy to forget some of the things about yesteryear gaming that are now redundant, lost in the annals of new technologies and advancements in gaming. Here are five of my most revered memories of gaming in the halcyon days of the 90s that are now all but defunct memories.

 

Blowing into things to make them work

The persistent refusal to let one's game die on them is a fond memory for many of us, I'm sure. When one day you put your cartridge in the console and hit the power button to see nothing on the screen, you have only one option. Performing some innate digital CPR skills and blowing into the cartridge, it goes back in the slot and bingo! It works... for now.

Each subsequent breath into the cartridge, each time it fails to load, breathes new life into this fragile contraption. But there's always a time in a cartridge's life when it just won't frigging work. For several minutes you're blowing, breaths become more forceful, more directed. Different techniques are employed, like the machine gun blow and altering the angle and direction of the blow. Maybe it's the console itself, let's blow into that. Your brain forgets logic and thinks it might be the controller port - sure, that gets a blow too. A few more rounds of this and then...

Success! It works. Just what hell will I have to endure to get it to work next time?

Easily piratable anti-piracy measures 

I'll admit it, I was no saint. I've perhaps copied a game or two in my youth. I was perfectly aware of the basics of copyright law at 8 years old, but when you have no sense of the value of money, and the intricacies of copying a game to floppy disc was simply a case of making sure the little hole in the corner was covered by that little bit of plastic – you're just going to. Particularly on a copied version of the (strangely legal) copying software.

Some companies, in their attempts at quashing the pirate menace, developed a plethora of devices and methods to ensure their games didn't become so freely and easily distributable. Devices like Premier Manager's code wheel. Like some MI5 cryptologist, you have to find the secret numbers revealed by one of several numbered holes obtained if you align the correct football kit top to the relevant shorts the game prompts on startup. An effort to simulate, but nothing a child armed with two pieces of paper, scissors and some colouring pens can't do.

Some games preferred the password method, which was simply to have you searching the game's instruction manual for the word on page 8, paragraph 4, line 3 and word 14. It's a hefty manual, that's a lot of words. No-one's going to photocopy all the pages, are they? Yes, yes they are.

 

Cheat codes

Aside from the Grand Theft Auto series, where have all the cheat codes gone? I guess in an age where infinite lives is standard, cheat codes have become massively redundant. Inputting the correct button sequence to enable level selects and and infinite lives, health or ammo, a new life is found for your frustratingly hard game.

Many developers had a lot of fun with cheat codes, allowing for massive heads, turbo and slow-mo modes, altering the game's colour pallette, etc. Some codes were there to help you through the game, some to give you a good laugh. Some were just plain silly. I'd bet each and every one of us who is 25 and over can remember at least one infinite lives, level select or Mortal Kombat fatality sequence.

There are a handful of games today that accept cheat codes, but they've now been re-badged as 'microtransactions'. Sparing you all that effort of getting good at a game, you can simply throw money through the TV screen and acquire those 'super gems', 'two thousand coins' or 'Super Sword' you think you need. Given the choice I think I'd still rather the agonising wait for next month's issue of Commodore Format (for example) to shower me with hints, tips and cheats. Better that than growing up with a belief that the manufactured inconvenience of time and skill can be bypassed with money.

 

Being excited about new technologies

Way back, when a new console or system was being released, the difference between the then current and next generations was astounding and instantly gratifying. The exponential increases in bits (8-bit to 16-bit, 16-bit to 32-bit, etc) was so revolutionary it really was a glimpse into the future. Gradually over the years we've seen the radical introductions of colour graphics; digitised music replacing 8-bit beat fests; parallax scrolling; speech; ambitious wire-framed 3D graphics replaced by polygonal 3D character models as standard... and the differences were so mind-bogglingly incredible.

Having the good fortune to own both of the next-gen consoles, it's fair to say the transition from 360 and 3 to One and 4 has been heroically underwhelming. Of course, graphics have been improved, that's pretty evident and expected, but amongst their innovations and features, there's nothing really new and exciting apart from a promise of future games being incredible and huge somewhere down the line. We've hit a plateau with gaming, where the only thing to improve is graphics, and they're pretty amazing and lifelike as it is, so what new gaming technologies can we get excited about?

The Occulus Rift is where it's at, even the much rumoured Sony rip off / innovation of this is getting me pumped for future gaming, but only when it's combined with a load of moving platforms and guns you can hold that can tell where you're pointing and shooting within the headset, I'll be in total gaming heaven. Basically, what I want is Star Trek: The Next Generation's Holodeck. In my living room. Frankly, I reckon within twenty years my wish will (sort of) come true.

 

The simplicity of it all

Once upon a time, people could be pleased and satisfied by such low tech arse gravy and it would keep them amused for hours. Simple distractions such as BASIC computer language, a system so eponymously accurate that even I could create entire games on a school lunch break. And I did. I look at computer coding nowadays and curl up into the foetal position and cry. If I wasn't feeling up to creating games, I could just type “10 PRINT”YOU MASSIVE WANKER” 20 GOTO 10 RUN and show it to my friends. Not exactly hilarious, but don't tell me you haven't done something similar.

An all-time favourite timewaster was to boot up Microsoft Paint, scribble one long, interweaving line and fill all the bits with colour. Modern Art - 90s style. Before apps all we had were chunky handhelds, tamagotchis, and those horrible single handheld LCD games. Now we have entire multi-menu sprawling RPGs and several hundred levels of Candy Crush Saga to fill whatever gaps in your day you have.

Today's gaming industry is in a brilliant position, don't get me wrong, but I miss the days when a games console was a games console and a phone was a phone. When you bought a game and that was it. The game, when put into your machine, was complete, ready to go. No day one updates, no DLC which should be there in the first place. It was just simple and you knew exactly what you were getting. Still, if that's all that's wrong when you get such great titles as we do today, then frankly I should just keep my nostalgia to myself. Gaming's just as good as it ever has been, just different.