People ask me all the time what the best era of gaming was, expecting me to start rabbiting on about how great things were when we all had Commodore Amigas or Super Nintendos and how modern gaming sucks blah blah blah.

But it’s just not true. Yes, there are lots of awesome games that came out years ago. But there’s awesome stuff today, too. And, just as importantly, there was a lot of crap we had to put up back then that we conveniently forget when we start talking about retrogaming.

Just like bell-bottom trousers, Reebok Pumps and hypercolor t-shirts are no longer considered acceptable fashion items in today’s society, most old games feature old-fashioned design aspects that would be laughed out of the room in a modern game. SUCH AS:

Configuring: Remember CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT? These were arcane text files that controlled how your PC works, before the days of Windows handling everything for you, and when being able to extract an extra ten kilobytes of RAM out of your PC’s extended memory (oh God, extended memory, that’s another thing that sucked) was the difference between being able to play your new game or not. And good luck figuring it out without any help!

No online: Did you know that back in the day, if you had a problem getting a game working, you couldn’t just Google yourself a solution? You had to learn how to fix computers yourself, or take it into the local computer repair shop and wait a few weeks, or bribe a mate with a case of beer to fix it for you. IT WAS TERRIBLE. I HATE SHARING BEER.

Saving: Do you remember having to play through Castle of Illusion right from the start every time you wanted to play because save files or even passwords weren’t a thing? We thought this was normal! We were idiots! I’m spoiled by insta-save now. If a newly-released game doesn’t let you save your progress at any moment it might as well go straight in the trash can.

Loading: I dare you to come up to me and complain about your Xbox game taking two minutes to get through the intro and loading screens before you’re able to play. TRY LOADING A COMMODORE 64 GAME FROM TAPE YOU POOR BABIES. That’s serious “go outside and kick the ball around for half an hour while The Last Ninja loads” commitment there. It’s beyond me these days.

Weird controls: Since classic video game developers were pioneers, they tended to experiment a lot with things we just assume a set of standards for now. There’s a lot of games that have control systems that, frankly, look like the work of a paranoid schizophrenic with severe anger issues. Even back when it was released the tank controls of Resident Evil were considered archaic, and they’re downright ludicrous today. Yeah, I said it.

Frustration: Compounding the anger generated by games that don’t let you save anywhere are games that kill you the second you make one mistake. Case in point: Dragon’s Lair is not a well designed video game. I kind of get the need for this kind of punishing difficulty in an arcade environment, but even the home versions suffered horrendously broken collision detection and punishing controls that made playing it a real chore and time has not been kind to it at all.

Waiting: Oh man, the waiting. You waited until your birthday or Christmas to get new games. You waited a month for a new magazine to come out which previewed games that weren’t coming out for months. You heard about games that came out overseas that didn’t come out locally until years later. You waited ages for a sequel to your favorite game to be announced, and then more waiting for it to actually come out. It seems barbaric now but back then it was just part of being a gamer.

Expense: I paid $130 for Street Fighter 2 on the SNES. Good grief! I can’t ever imagine spending that much money on a video game ever again. Heck, there’s consoles out now that cost less than that, and that’s without converting for inflation. $130 these days can buy you an entire library of games on pretty much every system going.

Rumors: One of the reasons this article took so long to write was that I spent the morning trying to get the Lara Croft Nude Code working, and I think I’ve almost got the timing right, because my cousin’s best friend’s neighbor’s dad works at Nintendo and he said they snuck a nude code into the game to get Sony into trouble. Etc. Good Lord, did we have to put up with so much of this nonsense before the internet came along. (Actually, we still do, but it’s easier to filter it out)

Crap Closets: Let’s be honest here – our tastes in games when we were kids were pretty much uniformly terrible. Most game purchases were made on the basis of a cool-looking cover or completely fictitious screenshots on the back of the box. Before too long we have entire closets full of games that suck but damn it we spent good pocket money on them, so they keep getting played over and over again as we stubbornly refuse to admit they were terrible. Then again, this kind of thinking led me to Super G-Man so it’s not all bad.

OK, now that I’ve done my best to smash everyone’s proverbial rose-coloured glasses – am I being too harsh?