The Clip if you’ve never seen it before.
Recently I’ve been archive my PS3 library of games, and I just finished backing up MGS4. Normally a third party PS3 game is between 7-12GB, however MGS4 is 33GB. To play MGS4 on a 360 you’d need like 4-5 DVD’s depending on how they compressed it.
Didn’t realize how large games were back even a decade ago.
The original Baldur’s Gate was 5 cds and an additional cd for Tales from the Sword Coast. With all the open world travel that meant a lot of disc switching.
The most obnoxious bit about all that was that you had 6 cds to potentially scratch that might prevent you from playing the whole game.
Final fantasy 7 for pc was also 4 cds in 1998.
I scratched one of them and had to beg a friend to lend me their disc so I could get through the story.
Japanese games primarily designed for use with NEC PC-88 and PC-98 computers that came on floppy disks had an even worse problem:
In order to save your game, you have to write to the floppy disk, usually wash disk needed to write somesort of data. Unfortunately, this means that the disk cannot be read-only protected. You probably see where this is going, but this sadly led to some players having uncompletable copies of games because they wrote to the wrong disk and accidentally ended up overwriting game data with save data.
Some games came with manuals that warned of this, and some games spent the cost of disk space to store actual in-game warning screens to try to prevent this.
EDIT: It has come to my attention that most people reading this probably don’t know this because they are too young, but these games that came on more than one floppy disk usually required you to insert at least 2 disks at the same time, one into both of the available drive slots. Then you would swap one or both out, depending on where in the game you were and if you needed to save or not. Each drive only appeared as a letter to save (usually A: and B:, which is why computer harddrives often start at C:, fun fact), and sometimes it didn’t prompt you to make sure after you selected one of the drive letters from the ingame menu that showed you nothing but the letter of the drive. So if you selected the wrong one, that sucks for you because they sometimes didn’t bother to check if there was already data on that disk or not before writing, which could cause data corruption, usually towards the end of the game.
When I was getting into PC gaming, I bought Wolfenstein the new Order as a DVD. What it turned out to be was Wolfenstein the new order… on steam, with several DVDs (4-8) that had the games data. I installed it this way once and never again.
MGS4 on the retro gaming community makes me feel old. That game felt like stepping into the future of gaming. Snake has a fucking iPod?!
I fully expect that iPod to be removed over licensing BS if we ever get a remaster, because Apple has only gotten worse since Steve Jobs and Jonathan Ive are no longer with the company.
As an aside, a modern rerelease of the iPod Classic with WiFi and Bluetooth would be so cool. Sort of like those SNES mini consoles Nintendo etc used to make a decade ago. Never gonna happen, but it’d be nice to keep the form factor alive for enthusiasts.
Haven’t seen one with wifi, but enthusiasts are for sure building out old ipods and bluetooth/flash memory are probably the two most common mods
I mean it can’t be that old, it was only released in 2008. That’s what 17 years ago. oh… it was 17 years ago.
MGS4 felt like it was a whole console generation ahead at the time. Even in retrospect it could pass as a PS4 game.
I played MGS for the first time recently, and it felt like a PS2 game with older graphics. Would’ve blown my mind as a kid if I had it back then…with a guide, too. Otherwise, I never would’ve figured a bunch of that stuff out, haha
I had the luck of having it when I was a kid. It did blow my mind.
Two of the parts that come to mind that need a guide are contacting Meryl for the first time, and the Psycho Mantis fight.
Tap for spoiler
Meryl was tedious because her codec frequency was printed “on the back of the CD case”, not an item in-game, but literally the case where the game came in. Due to rampant piracy in my country, it was hard to get it in a case with the back cover, so my solution was to try every frequency.
Mantis has two ways to kill him. You either have to swap the controller to port 2, or shoot at a bust of him. Which one you can use depend on difficulty IIRC.
This is also why the Arcade* version of the 360 flopped so hard.
* Back in the early-ish days of the 360 it didn’t have an HDMI port and it had memory card slots. They also sold one with an HDMI port called the 360 Elite and a cheaper one with no HDMI and no HDD (though one could be purchased separately and added later) designed to be used with memory cards exclusively called the 360 Arcade. The no HDMI boards were the ones most susceptible to the Red Ring of Death.
I wish this game was re-released. It feels weirdly isolated being only available on PS3.
That’s one of the reasons on why I still collect PS3 retail games, they are cheap to buy (mostly) and in a durable format (bluray).
While the Discs are more scratch proof the data side of the disc is more fragile sadly. Just lost my copy of blops due to 2 pin holes in the label.
Most Wii games used single layer DVDs, but it had a couple Dual-Layer DVD games, obviously still a lot smaller than Blu-ray. Including Smash, Xenoblade, Metroid Prime Trilogy, and also that Metroid game that shall not be named.
It was not as transparent because it required a system update to support those… and because some Wiis with faulty disc drives had to be replaced because they couldn’t read them at all. I had to send mine to support.
