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Makes me sad too
If anyone is old enough to remember Infocom games, they came with “feelies,” just random fun stuff related to the game they decided to include. It occasionally was needed to solve a game puzzle, but usually not.
I can still smell that box. They had a certain smell back then.
When people talk about games having heart, this is it. Little unnecessary goodies just because you’re excited that people are buying your game and you want them to be into it.
Getting a new game and having books and stickers to mess with on the ride home until you can play the game.
“Kids these days” will never know that feeling. Of course, they’ll have their ipads, so probably won’t care.
Myst and Riven had the greatest boxes! Then also The 11th Hour and Phantasmagoria.
They want you to feel that way, say “what’s the point” and buy digital…
Physical I can sell again! Big advantage right there.
They don’t like that part lol
Now you’re on Nintendos list.
I’m more let down that such a small thing is packaged in a big case. Made of plastic no less.
They need something that both looks good on a shelf and is harder to just slip into a pocket.
They could make it out of cardboard at the very least.
I was never a fan of the GBA cases, so yeah I’m pretty glad they didn’t go this way.
Same, I don’t get people who throw their plastic game cases away
Psychos.
Yeah, I find it particularly weird, because Nintendo already had smaller boxes with the Nintendo DS. Did they decide that the Switch was a big boy console, so it needed to have comically large boxes?
so it needed to have comically large boxes?
Man you would have had a field day with PC gaming in the 90’s!
In fairness though, even though some did skimp out and just launch a CD in, most had a manual and something of lore interest or a physical anti-piracy thing, and a fair few were stuffed full of trinkets or other world building material… just because.
Even my Atari ST edition of Zak McKracken had the floppy, manual, passport anti-piracy card, and a faux-magazine which was both hilarious and acted as a hint book too.
I’ve got a Depths of Doom Trilogy box set in the attic. Damn thing was enormous.
Now you’re talking my language!
Brilliant set that was, as was Quake: The Offering, Quake II Quad Damage, and the id Anthology. Absolute beasts of boxes!
Never got into PC gaming, but a friend convinced me to buy half life counter strike in high school. It was a chunker of a case.
PC game cases from 90s were amazing. I wish console games would do something cool like that. They were made of cardboard, typically had boxart with a bunch of high quality engraving, had manuals inside. They felt like collectibles and you didn’t have to pay extra for any of it. It was just part of the base game price.
PC games in he 90s were like cereal boxes filled with a few CDs and a the barest of a manual. In the 80s it was the same except it was floppy disks and the manual was needed to get through the copy protection. Sometimes you’d even get a decoder ring of some sorts to decode something for the copy protection.
Good times.
deleted by creator
I remember the Kings Quest VI manual came with a red film thingy that you could use to read hints to avoid spoilers. Pretty rad.
I think QFG3 did that too, or maybe QFG4?
Copy protection was a thing well into the 00s and early 2010s. Had to read the code on the manual to install.
Yeah but it wasn’t as fun as in the 80s and 90s when they’d be sending you on a treasure hunt through the manual to find specific words and letters like you were in the DaVinci Code.
I miss cardboard game boxes
Aluminum cases need to become standard for physical copies. Not plastic with an aluminum veneer, all aluminum.
They can be cool and do aluminum tubes holding a flash drive with the game on it if they want so they can laser engrave the sides and screw on top with the title and art.
So your take on an environmentally unfriendly and resource-intensive way to package games would be to make it worse?
It’s a tough one. You’re not wrong by any means, but equally the environmentally unfriendly bit is why people buy physical media. The memory card holding the game is mostly superfluous because of day 1 DLC or patches, but it’s the box; art; manual; and physical tangibility that matter to a collector of the media.
Ideally there would be a middle ground - sack-off the normal physical edition and purchase the memory cards themselves - and push up the price and pay for a premium edition of the copy made from better materials.
I suspect we’d only get the worst of both worlds though, the cynic in me thinks.
There’s also the ability to lend or re-sell physical game-card editions of Switch games.
Ah yes, there is that. Is that still a thing these days? I remember EA’s Project Ten Dollar a few years back gating a lot of extra features or multiplayer behind a single use code being fairly widely adopted.
I’ll admit to being a bit behind the curve now, I still predominantly use my Xbox Series S, One, and 360 just to play Doom in different rooms so maybe I’m not on the cutting edge of news!
edit: it wasn’t five dollars at all, more like ten!
Aluminum is highly recyclable. Digital media can never be owned.
You recycle your game cases?
Yes?
No, I hoard them.
I haven’t thrown away a game case since Playstation 1. My Super Nintendo ones were cardboard and got destroyed, so I did throw them away because that is what we did in the 90s.
I remember getting Prince of Persia 2008 in a steel case for a birthday or maybe Xmas and loved the design of it. I haven’t seen my steel case editions recently.
But without those big-ass cases, there wouldn’t be a market for these.
The original Gameboy just had form fitting plastic containers for the cartridge and cardboard boxes. id love a return to that…
Well, aren’t these supposed to be collected? They are there to help your sort through your phisical games
I’d rather use a case with something to hold all my carts in personally for sorting. Better if it’s small and easily portable.
And my collection would do well with more GameBoy-size cases
is this real? no way right?
Sadly, yes. Got a switch for Xmas this year. Went and bought a mario game, and was completely taken aback when the inside of the case looked just like this. I sat there totally feeling this exact post.
For like a decade yes
Those booklets were more joy to little me on the car ride home than the game itself many a time.
I the lack of game manuals in game cases still makes me sad.
Are they trying to sell digital manuals? Or was it just about the $.10 per copy savings?
conpanies usually either bake it into the game as tutorials or have digital manuals nowadays. it was always about cutting physical sales cost (as the physical media itself has a cost attached to it)
IDK how it works on the current console devices, but on the yhe previous generation, the wiiu for example would give the player the option to open the digital manual when the game is launched by pressing the home button and selecting the manual. one of yhe pros is that the manuals digitally tend to be more complete and not rushed to save on cost. take for example, the Xenoblade Chronicle X manual is 142 pages long, something that would basically never exist physically.
it’s penny pinching, some have soulless digital manuals.
Still better than just a code 😅
weird take ngl
- Buy cheap microsd
- Copy game from pc to chip
???
Tell me what console or system or even game manufacturer that lets you buy their game, download it to a portable micro SD and then lets you play it from there.
Not even steam lets you do that and you don’t even have a direct way of knowing what’s on the micro SD card without making a label for it which good luck.
Kerbal Space Programm - and I guess most non-DRM-games on Steam, as long as they keep all their stuff in the game dir.
No steam is definitely not the bastion to use as they really aren’t gonna work. They like games tied to accounts.
You could say GOG games but it really still defeats the point of it not being even close to similar to a physical game you could resell and having a nicely labeled piece of physical media.
I know you aren’t the person originally with the really bad argument btw, but yeah the list is super small this would work for.
There’s quite a lot, actually. Definitely not the norm, but not extremely rare either.
First, you can totally make a steam library on a portable device like a microsd or an external drive (I do and I play on different places with the same drive), and play it on any device running steam.
And don’t start the “oh but you need steam installed”, since with the proprietary sd, you gotta have the propriety device as well.
Second, sure I can just lavel it, a 3 seconds job. Don’t you need the proprietary sd to come labeled as well? Also, I don’t need to label anything, I have dozens of games there and select which one I want to play.
Your first take was weird and your second comment was weirder but that’s okay, we all are always learning.
Each format of game has its own merits ans they are only better than another on an objective comparison, as for subjective, just use whatever you want.
as for subjective, just use whatever you want.
That’s like, your opinion, man.
Sounds like a shitty way to play games ngl
At least sometimes they double-side print the cover, this is just lazy.
Even better if it’s one of the games that can’t even fit on the cartridge.
Technical Support: Your Mom
Harrasment Hotline: Her sisters
Return policy: Come to the swap meet and try to find me, Bitch!
… and cloth maps. And developer notes. And figurines. And trinkets from the lore. And the game costing under $20. And…
Or a piece of cardboard with a code inside.
Untitled goose game was surprisingly the last game I bought that had a case full of swag.
So much plastic. We need to go digital only already
Yes, because who wants to own their shit when they can just perpetually lease it with the unending dread of losing it all at any moment (digital platform of choice) shuts down or just says fuck you, we’re taking the games away and you cant do shit about it.
DRM-free digital copies that can be backed up to personal storage so access cannot be revoked.
I didn’t say you don’t get to own it. Stop defending plastic which just ends up in the environment, slaughtering innocent animals.
Just back up your games to a HDD
and imagine how much pollution was created just for you to be a stupid cunt on the internet.
between you and physical games, I know which one I could surely go without.
Stop being so attached to plastic nerd
