5 Horrible Things Modern Games Have Saved Us From

Have you ever started up a brand new game featuring the latest cutting-edge technology, only to wish you were playing games that looked and acted like the ones you grew up with? Of course not! Forward thinking gamers eagerly embrace all of the awesome things that modern design brings with it.

Sadly, some people are stuck in the past and want features that used to be prominently featured in games without understanding why it’s better that the world has moved on. Things are obviously much better now, and it’s time to shut these weirdos down once and for all. Let’s take a look at just five of the most notable horrors that modern video games have saved us from. 

Custom Soundtracks

Developers are spending so much money on licensing soundtracks and hiring massive composers, why would you ever want to listen to your own tracks? The biggest hits from the radio are now played on repeat in the menus of your sports games – and pop music has a great shelf life! You should be grateful that you get to hear the latest song from Pharrell 30 times a day.

Why would you ever want to expand this hot music selection to include your favorite artists when you can be conditioned to love the music of labels the publishers strike deals with? The ability to import your favorite songs into the menus of Madden or during the frantic gameplay of Burnout is completely overrated.

Cheat Codes

I loved the way my Game Genie broke all of my favorite games, but that was a different time. We were so young and naïve, not understanding that there were repercussions for turning into Super Sonic without collecting all of the Chaos Emeralds. Nowadays, the appeal of this rudimentary way of hacking my favorite console games is far more limited when the option exists to just pay money to the developers for an official way to boost my experience.

Look, we’re all super impressed that you can get through Contra with 30 lives, but have you ever considered putting on your adult pants and blasting through it the way nature intended? And by that, I mean, pay $2.50 for those extra lives. At least your hand won’t be cramping from entering all those button combinations at the menus.

On the next page: more horrors that we don't have to face thanks to modern technology.

Limited Lives

I don’t know about you, but when I play games, I want it to be a relaxing escape from my stressful day, with situations like ducking behind a waist-high to avoid incoming sniper fire. I don’t see any reason why a game that wants to simulate a real-life scenario such as that would ever want to try and integrate a feeling of tension or consequence permanence. Getting rid of the infinite respawns and regenerating health would totally take you out of the experience in my opinion.

Losing all of your progress from dying one too many times sounds totally awesome if you don’t like fun in your games. I’d much rather be in the middle of a consequence-free firefight that allows me to approach a situation where I’m outnumbered, outgunned, and outmatched with reckless abandon and the worst that can happen is I’ll need to replay the last three minutes. That’s the definition of cinematic immersion. That’s all the rage these days, right?

Instruction Booklets

At long last, the video game industry’s war on trees finally came to a close last generation, as nearly every publisher dropped its useless companion booklets. With the unbelievable impact on nature – I’m talking rainforests and rainforests worth of trees left in the wake of the instruction booklet phase of the industry – it’s curious as to why they even lasted so long in the first place.

Now, we have the undeniable convenience of reading on-screen instructions, and playing tutorials that are so lengthy we are awarded meaningful achievement points for completing them. Clearly, shuffling through some screens on your television that somewhat resemble the nostalgic experience of flipping through an instruction manual is much better. Do you really want to have some awful pamphlet telling you how to play your game?

Working At Launch

Video games are now living, breathing creatures. This is what we always hear, but I remember a time when they weren’t. It used to be a game would launch, and that was it. Your experience didn’t evolve beyond the moment you put the game into your Super Nintendo.  Now, we’re treated to patches, server maintenance, and subscription services that undeniably make our games infinitely better. If we’re lucky, we even get to log into the publisher’s proprietary service to play online.

Could you imagine if Halo: Master Chief Collection or Assassin’s Creed: Unity couldn’t receive patches? In this outlandish scenario, we’d probably have to wait for developers to finish these games before they released them. Then, once they finally did release, we wouldn’t have the exhilarating minigame of waiting for a patch to arrive so we could enjoy them the way they were supposed to be in the first place.