VideoGameCritic wrote:VicViper - your assertion that games were buggy in the 80s/90s is false. Maybe a minor glitch on rare occasion, but nothing even in the same BALLPARK as the software being released today. And really, wouldn't I know, of all people??
And as someone who had to go through the nightmare that were the SNES port of Prince of Persia 2, Micronics' NES games and their piss poor arcade conversions (such as Athena), the plethora of terribly programmed Bandai games in the 80s (especially the manga/anime adaptations like Dragon Ball & Saint Seiya on NES), and saw cases of games that were broken on purpose by their own developers so you wouldn't see the end of them, I know that my assertion isn't false.
Even good games were subjected to weird glitches, for example, Final Fantasy 1 on NES, in ProJared's words:
"Half the game doesn't work."
The luck & intelligence stats don't work, a bunch of spells don't work, some even doing the opposite effect than intended (like raising your opponent's evasion instead of decreasing it), and all weapons dubbed "effective" against certain monsters are actually just "normal" weapons, none of them work at all, making the game way harder than intended. That'd be like if in Pokémon the type effectiveness wouldn't exist. Yeah, the game is playable, much like how playing Castlevania without/with only the secondary weapons is feasible, just not intended and forced onto you.
Some older games you can even softlock yourself because of design oversights or glitches.
Prince Of Persia 2 SNES version: Aside from the hot mess that it is (the collision detection is out of this world), they changed how traps worked from the PC version but not the level design (and seeing how they "work", it can be considered as a bug), and as such the first level of the last zone is impossible to complete as intended, you have to take a pretty hidden passage designed from the PC version that used to be only optional, it makes the level barely 30 seconds to complete. That said, knowing that the game has a time limit, and already acts extremely unpredictably, it's very likely you'd give up before noticing the hidden passage. (and it involves a suicidal jump)
Super Hydlide: You can softlock your game by throwing away a specific warp item. (sounds stupid that way, but there's a weight system in this game, so throwing away items is something that has to be done, and you can accidentally throw something important away)
Digimon World: American & Japanese versions are fine. European version has a major glitch though; there's an NPC to talk to that then directs you automatically to a new zone. In the European version, that talk is impossible to trigger, so you can't complete the game, unless you glitch your way through (which involves opening & closing repeatedly the PS1 CD tray IIRC and clipping through the NPC, extremely obscure to say the least, I could never finish the game as a kid I was running around not knowing what to do, that sucked).
King's Quest V: You can softlock by using a certain item to solve a specific puzzle... but that's also supposed to be the only solution available for a later puzzle.
TMNT on MS-DOS: It's the same game as the NES version, except they changed a specific layout and made a jump in a sewer completely impossible to achieve, making the game impossible to complete without glitching through.
I Have No Mouth Yet I Must Scream: Content is censored in some countries; it removes a certain scenario. However, it renders the game impossible to finish, since all initial scenarios must be completed before reaching the final one. Whoops?
Battletoads NES: In multiplayer, the 2nd player's controls in Clinger Winger (stage 11) stop working, so it's impossible to finish the game in 2 Player mode. The 2nd player has to lose all their continues to let the 1st player proceed, rendering the 2 player mode ending impossible to reach.
Am sorry, but saying that there were only minor glitches on rare occasion in retro games is very hyperbolic. I'm not saying there aren't buggy games nowadays, and yeah you could say that these are specific examples there, I could mention more games from that era to show I'm not cherry-picking (even though these examples were pretty much considered mainstream at the time, except maybe IHNMYIMS), or from the early 2000s like Spyro: Enter the Dragonfly (which was pretty much the Sonic 06 of Spyro games) or Tomb Raider Angel of Darkness (especially the PC version), but the point still stands: games in the 80s & 90s were far from pristine, and a glitch or an oversight that prevents you to finish the game is not a minor one.
And yeah, I count design oversights with the glitches too, cause both are mistakes that could have been noticed & solved by both the QA team and the team of developers.
Also, even with technological advances, or because of those, bugs in modern games are to be expected, Breath of the Wild has glitches and you gave it an A+, modern big budget games are just too big of projects nowadays to be glitchless, you are bound to find at least a couple of them even in Nintendo games. Every modern EA and UbiSoft game might range from "moderately bugged" to "glitched up the arse", but at least I can complete them, while I'll never be able to complete Digimon World, and I've yet to encounter that kind of situation in today's games.
Am not saying in general that older games are glitchier than modern games, neither the opposite. Saying however that older games only had minor bugs and were rare at that, is fighting an uphill battle.