Young people won't remember this, but there was a time when you could just play the Sims by clicking the icon with 'the Sims' on your desktop and it just booted up, without making you log in past three or four different EA players.
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I miss the OG sims launcher that was designed like the rest of the game's UI and had a shortened jingle version of the game's theme play when it popped up
I used to walk around in a dia de los muertos outfit and host parties as Manny. I remember my older brothers shock when I broke the top ten most popular players on our server :D
3 options:
1. Only use the launcher when you wanted an update, you could run the game directly all the other times
2. Manually update it.
3. The game released complete and didn't need or get updates until an expansion came out, on its own disc
I choose 1, it’s nice having updates, but I don’t want to launch the game only to have it tell me to launch the launcher for an update. So I guess it’s more work for the devs to ensure multiple version can coexist.
A lot of people have followed me on the back of this, and I should warn you, you have to endure a LOT of skeets about UK politics, links to FT journalism and my banal inner monologue for the occasional post about gaming.
Around this same time, you could go into a Pizza Hut and sit down with your family (assuming they had stopped fighting long enough to do so) and let me tell you. Not once have I ever considered a salad, especially not with my greasy fast pizza. But my little heart would eat that salad station out
Along the same lines: I hugely massively resent Steam for forcing me to have constantly open a massive bloated storefront/review site/social media app in order to play the game I paid for
Synthesis of these: my mind is still blown at the person *our age* whose review of the classic Sims reissue was 'I am aggrieved that this doesn't come with achievements'.
it’s fun how steam went from being the most egregious example of this to one of the least frustrating examples of this simply bc everyone else got worse around them
And it really didn't take long for that to happen! Games For Windows Live, for example, which is still causing problems to this day despite being discontinued more then a decade ago.
Actually, everything but the library is just a webpage that loads as needed, if you don’t want all of that steam allows you to load up just a small library or you can go to offline mode which prevents all of this from loading at all
It also has almost no performance impact because it’s just html
Yeah, gog is great. Another thing you can do is open a steam game from the folder with the exe, I don't remember if the steam app needs to be running in the background but Im pretty sure doing this bypasses the other steam stuff
Steam does need to be running, and you can get the same effect by opening the desktop shortcut that steam automatically creates (unless you turned that off like I did)
Feeling oddly nostalgic for the fact that the original Sims would even take 30 minutes, or more to start up on our old computer. It sucked waiting, but it felt so worth it. Now logging in just to play the game, somehow feels worse.
EA has one of the worst launchers I have ever used, Ubisoft and Rockstar close behind. It signs me out every restart and takes up crazy memory for such a barebones app
We talking about Origin, the SOB that would launch itself unprompted on top of my active program so often that I rage-uninstalled it? Hadn't played Sims/City in ages at that point.
nope a few years ago they killed Origin and switched it out for an even worse "EA app". i do remember origin though, it permabanned me from Apex Legends the first time i tried to pirate the sims expansion packs, and i had to make a new account 😭
Sure wish I wasn’t permanently locked out of my sims account after purchasing $500 worth of extra content over the years. It’d be really cool if it was just on my computer, ready to go since I bought and downloaded the content already lol.
Back in those times I also couldn't afford video games, so instead of EA launcher I had to go through an installer that blasted crunchy 8bit music and then installed malware that bricked the family computer and I got yelled at, AND IT STILL was better than the launchers they make these days.
You still can
Cracked games are better
Cracked software runs smoother
(Example, Cubase Pro 13 without protection checking frees up memory and CPU cycles)
I'm old enough to remember:
1. Actually owning my games. A platform couldn't decide to just pull my license and disappear a game from my collection
2. Starting a new game and playing it from jump. Not needing to download 30GB even with the disc
3. Publishers shipping complete, finished games
Unfortunately games like that almost never exist outside of GOG, and not alot of people buy from GOG.
I wish more Games were also on GOG so we can get rid of that DRM crap...
Ha ha I don't remember that either. But not for the same reason (full disclosure...R plays the sims. I think it's quite an old version. Lots of plant aliens. It seems bonkers and wonderful and if it was a film I'd watch).
Just finished Cyberpunk 2077. After installing I opened GOG only once to update the game. The feeling when you click the icon and the game opens instantly without any “press shift+tab to show overlay” is pure bliss
Reminds me of the article which proclaimed that a significant number of young people don't know how file structures work, or how to make their own custom structures, rather just putting files wherever the OS defaults to.
Apparently that's because so many schools only allow them to use Chrome books and ipads with limited permissions so they couldn't change it even if they wanted to
Urgh. Tell me about it. Last time I played seriously was on the OG PlayStation (GT) and a PC (Civ 2). Bought my son an Xbox for Christmas and I’m forever signing him into the Xbox but then every single developer too. Why isn’t a single sign in an option? Tiresome!
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1. Only use the launcher when you wanted an update, you could run the game directly all the other times
2. Manually update it.
3. The game released complete and didn't need or get updates until an expansion came out, on its own disc
It’s awesome.
Winnieberry20
It also has almost no performance impact because it’s just html
I don’t want to play with other people.
The insistence that I do so was the end of computer games for me
The original Sims was crazy
We were poor and had an old computer, my mom and I played all four Sims games. Sims 2 is my all-time favorite
Am I old :(
Sounds like heaven imma be honest
Re-reticulating Splines
And to this day, I have no idea what splines are or why they needed reticulating.
Cracked games are better
Cracked software runs smoother
(Example, Cubase Pro 13 without protection checking frees up memory and CPU cycles)
1. Actually owning my games. A platform couldn't decide to just pull my license and disappear a game from my collection
2. Starting a new game and playing it from jump. Not needing to download 30GB even with the disc
3. Publishers shipping complete, finished games
I wish more Games were also on GOG so we can get rid of that DRM crap...
Winnieberry20
That's why I play mostly indie games on Steam, because its basically that
The "game launcher era" has some advantages though, like auto updates and centralized management of all the games.
But some companies take it too far and abuse it to collect data and "retire" games people paid in full for.
My mom played every sims game religiously when I was younger. She had all the expansion packs for 1 and 2.
I hate that we lost the physical copies over time and such
I used to put in IT systems in school / colleges in the early 00's
The student desktops were locked down with a combination of poledit/group policy, mapped drives & folder redirection & restricted accounts
But to a point yes - Chromebooks / iPads have gone much further
We used to have to glue the roller balls in the mice as otherwise they would be launched across the classroom
Thank god when optical mice came out
Winnieberry20