7 Things All Gamers From the Nineties Will Remember

we could talk for hours about gaming in the 90s or at least we could if we weren't still getting our breath back from a whole decade spent blowing into game cartridges but who can blame us when this particular era of gaming produced so many incredible games and bizarre trends whole new genres and bitter rivalries and enough tons of weird plastic peripherals and free cover disc CDs to fill many landfills which they undoubtedly currently are doing here are the things every 90s gamer will remember he was born in the naughties just try and relax and don't strain your liver or kidneys we have first dibs on those only if you get new Super Nintendo now you're playing with power super power educators researching mathematical skill over the twentieth century would surely notice a weird spike in the 1990s when everyone suddenly got really good at their eight-times multiplication table the reason of course will be familiar to anyone who is playing games in the 90s when the enormous surge in home computer technology meant that consoles were doubling in power every few years an increase that we measured exclusively in bits brand-new 16-bit Super Nintendo was at the start of the decade that lousy 8-bit consoles of the 80s were being supplanted by ones rockin 16-bit processors such as the Super Nez or Mega Drive aka Sega Genesis [Music] which in just a few years got bested again by the likes of the 32-bit Sega Saturn and PlayStation which in turn looked like pathetic baby consoles next to the Nintendo 64 in 1996 so named for its unconquerable 64-bit CPU capable of rendering the most realistic Sean Bean yet but what actually are bits well off the top of my head in computing bits refers to word size a word is a fixed sized piece of data handled as a unit by the instruction set or the hardware of the processor I'd love to go into more detail better I'd have to look it up okay fine we didn't know what bits were but in fairness neither did anyone else so that's the new Super Nintendo Entertainment System good about it they say it has 16-bit technology whatever that means it was just the easiest metric by which to measure the state of the console wars that consume the hearts and minds of every young gamer in the 90s in retrospect this system rivalry was a fairly cynical ploy by console makers with big advertising budgets to whip kids into a fervor of blind loyalty that frankly has taken to further decades to unlearn but today I a 90s PlayStation fan I'm able to shake the hand of Luke here who owned a Super Nintendo and find common ground yeah like hating an old Mega Drive mic how an idiot didn't even have mode 7 Sonic the Hedgehog plays that don't stop there and back to pizza buy another stuffed crust pizza you'll get another demo disc filled with more the best PlayStation games including Gran Turismo 2 spyro 2 riptos rage 2 brain poor sled storm in the next Tetris it's so sad that physical media is dying sure Spotify is good but as any music sound as sweet as the analog click that queues up a favorite mixtape Oh nuts does anyone have a pencil one thing we really do miss about the 90s though if the reckless abandon with which software makers would put demo versions of their games on CDs which make their way to you via countless ways for instance being tapes on the front of magazines or given to you in exchange for buying one of the other great innovations of the mid-90s stuffed crust pizza crust pizza and leap into action once you get a taste of these games you'll have them on your holiday gift list the fact that you could get so many free game demos in exchange for buying a pizza is indicative of the extreme cominis of demo discs in the 90s and the inexplicable lack of confidence that Peter Hutt had in stuffed crust that it thought it needed to lure you in with free Tony Hawk's you put cheese inside the crust Pizza Hut you made the sale of course with freebie console and home computer demo discs flying at you from every angle it wasn't long before your game collection included more demo compilations than actual games [Music] but what the makers of those games didn't count on was that once we had the demo version of their game in our greasy pizza hands there was often no need to shell out for the full thing I mean yet Daytona is great but is it better than playing the demo over and over the answer was yes of course but 50 bucks better which maybe you forgot is how much games cost in the 90s about $85 today adjusting for inflation that's roughly five stuffed cross pizzas in today's money economics that simply could not last besides while the overabundance of free games on demo discs meant you could more or less play your way through the entire 90s without ever paying for a single game it did mean your house was and quite possibly still is absolutely stacked with freebie CDs with no way of shifting them unless you can convince a collector your copy of free 1999 Kellogg's cereal game mission nutrition is very rare and valuable well I would take a penny under 400 what I have a very interested buyer in Paris on the other line right now so Pat it though he's gone [Music] these days you don't need a manual to learn how to play a game you just need experience gut instinct and the patience to sit through it to our tutorial start back in the boring 90s every game I knew that boning up on a new game by leaping through the enclosed manual was part of the adventure for a number of reasons [Music] first in the front half of the decade many console games didn't have the processing power to spare on any kind of story or cinematic so usually the backstory to whatever game you were playing was contained entirely in the manual itself shedding much-needed light on one of her slim bits of storytelling were kept on the actual cartridge or disk so if you wanted to know who your hero was or why they were marching so determinedly left-to-right you have to consult the manual plus the game's manual had a very special role to play in 19 games just passing the time you wouldn't think it would be possible to be bored in the 90s bearing in mind how busy we all were cowering in fear from Furbies but manuals were crucial fulfilling the time between getting hold of a new game on Christmas morning for instance and getting to actually play the damn thing frequently this meant waiting until nobody else you lived with was using the TV and in these agonizing hours leafing through a brand new manual was a way to get a glimpse of the game to come it seems weird now but hey it made the time go by but if you want the really really good stuff flights in the manuals for those things are enormous they work perfectly well as door stops but if you fancy reading them as well they had all the kind of technical details of how to fly the plane it's all educational pretty sure by the end of it you could you could pretty pilot laughs nineteen stealth bomber all by yourself if you can drop it on your toe first and completely remove the use of your right foot so yeah it was either that or finally try drinking my sea monkeys and I didn't get bored enough to do that until 2002 [Music] today the arcade is a large empty room where you can win minions in a claw machine and find out if you still remember the steps to cotton-eye Joe on Dance Dance Revolution spoiler alert you do but your knees can't handle it but back in the first half the 90s the arcade was on the bleeding edge of video games for one simple reason the games you could play in exchange for a steady stream of coins were way better than anything you could play at home [Music] this was an era when many of the hottest games you got on home console were ported over from their chunky five foot high arcade counterparts and often looked absolutely rubbish in comparison [Music] short killer instinct on the Super NES was tolerable but only in the arcade could you get the full graphical spectacle of a defeated philosoraptor being forced to dance you can do it put your ass into it because the games just looked so good you can resist pumping all your loose change into the arcades hammering buttons with the jealous rage of a 90's gamer who knew they could never afford the only home console that looked as good as a full-sized cabinet namely the ludicrously expensive Neo Geo AES which cost six hundred and fifty dollars at launch that's nearly thirteen hundred dollars in today's money in the second half of the decade of course home consoles could match arcade graphics and 90's gamers got to be right there as interesting these brightly lit cathedrals of joystick twiddling declined arcades kept drawing you back throughout the 90s though with one thing home consoles have never got quite right to this day increasingly ridiculous recoil enabled plastic light gun games take a bow house of the deads 1 & 2 silent scope Virtua cop and the rapid-fire gun blade which rattled our hand bones from 1995 onwards and it never did us any harm king of the wall was Time Crisis which upped the stakes with a stamp herbal foot pedal that's when pushed caused you to spring out of cover which never felt right to me surely you should press the pedal to take cover I could never make that make sense in my head now you know how I feel about inverting controls I wouldn't go that far deviant forget real soon rather be playing video games you can run them from Blockbuster they've got more of the quills new Nintendo Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis games for rent than anyone in the world 19th century anarchist Pierre Joseph Prudhomme famously said the property is theft so were he alive in the 90s he definitely would have had a blockbuster card because you'll doubtless records throughout the 90s blockbuster was the biggest rental chain on the planet a place where you could pay a small fee to borrow movies on VHS instead of owning them for a lot more money back in the 1980s blockbuster won a court battle against Nintendo that meant it could continue renting out video games alongside movies this meant that in the night 90s video game rentals were still going strong and you were merrily tripping down to Blockbuster or your local equivalents for borrowed electronic entertainment oh they have all kinds of video games for the kids especially handy when you suspected a game might be how could I put this trash garbage back then if you'd heard on the grapevine already the monthly games Magna the game was total bobbins it didn't mean you wouldn't play it just that it was what reviews generally called quote a rental this is brilliant there is no way to play bad games now without paying full price for them no one makes demos anymore because they know that they're more likely to make people not buy the game than buy the game and everything else is full price rentals don't exist so I remember going to Blockbuster and and getting rise of the robots on this Ness I knew it was bad I knew it was legendarily awful I'd read about it in video game magazines but I had to know for myself just how awful [Music] the only good thing about rising the robots was the handful of power cords that Brian May was brought into play during the intro and occasionally uh let's be fair occasionally you've went a game and it was really good and then you gotta buy it anyway like i did with NBA Jam tournament edition which I I had no interest in basketball which is why I rented it but then it turned out to be a really good arcade game so I bought it what Buster got so big that there were even some exclusive games that for a while you could only get there including the Western release of a final fight spin-off for the Super NES on the focused on orange suited brawler guy and was titled final fight guy [Music] confusing because final fight guy is how I refer to everyone in final fight and Double Dragon and most of Streets of Rage game over no way cuz we got game genie we tell you when it's over game genie I decide how many lives I get I use what I want to live forever liddie yen maybe I want to start on level 15 no problemo makes cool games like Street Fighter 2 there's one thing we loved about games in the 90s it was the incredible box art but if there were two things it was finding new and creative ways to break our games luckily this was made simple by the abundance of cheating devices on sale in the 90s from game genie to game shark 2 action replay and several more just plug the replay into your police station Nintendo 64 or Sega Saturn and load your favorite game on cartridge-based consoles this chunky bit of code injecting plastic would squat between your system and the actual game from there it would make tweaks to the game code to for instance give you infinite lives or ammo and these tweaks could be a godsend in the heyday of hard-as-nails 90s videogames game genie the radical videogame enhancer and when that got boring sheet cartridges could be used to really fudge with your precious software that mysterious inaccessible barely visible island in the dam level of Goldeneye what secrets does it hold use a cheap cartridge to enable no clipping mode and uncover the dramatic truth but there's nothing there whatsoever but now we know for many these code exploding cheat cartridges we're a first glimpse at how games were put together but always came with a free saw of danger - who knew what unwanted consequences could come of messin with your favorite games like when I was halfway through ocarina of time and took my cartridge around a friend's house where someone combined it with an action replay cartridge to see what cheats could be enabled it made the game skip ahead to one of the final cutscenes and when I panicked and turned off the power poor friend it destroyed my safe data entirely but hey did I cry about it yes god yes in the analog days many tech problems could genuinely be solved by smacking the broken device really hard that's what engineers call the Fonzie resolution probably but you a gamer of the 90s don't need to be told how broken objects could be made to magically work with a little physical exertion because you like everyone else with lungs and a games console spend the decade blowing into the business end of your game cartridges to make them work again [Music] what's truly spooky about taking a Teutonia games to fix them is how somehow everyone on the planet knew to do it years and years before the internet became widespread watching a sibling or friend blow into their cartridges before starting up a game no problem with all it tilts you've cement it in your mind as the ultimate fix except in the fact that it wasn't today the prevailing wisdom is that blowing on cartridges didn't do anything after all and it was simply that plugging in your games over and over gave them another chance as a solid connection which is what made them work regardless of your huffing and puffing [Music] what's worse all that superstitious blowing into your games made them more likely to corrode thanks to the moisture in your breath tests have shown it and Nintendo's advices never to try it which leaves blowing into your cartridges a sobering reminder from the 90s of how fast misinformation can spread and how convincing it can feel I wish I hadn't blown into this one now maybe I can suck the damage out 90s dust 16 there are kids what Nintendo clearly Roku as well is worth it this clearly works I can't wait to tell everyone I know don't do that folks sushi Tetris if you enjoyed this video and you can think of other things that every 90 gamer will remember then why not pop them in the comments for a massive nostalgia blast for everyone who is checking under the video and if you did like this then oh boy do we have more videos for you the answer is yes here's another video from us it's all about the dumbest things you've got seriously attached to it and down here from outside Xbox it's the three ways to play on hit man in sagale it's pretty cool and if you did enjoy this then why not subscribe thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: Outside Xtra

Views: 816,410

Keywords: Ellen Rose, Luke Westaway, Outside Xtra, outsidextra, outsidexbox, 90s, nostalgia, funny, lists, game lists, gaming lists, nineties, snes, genesis, mini, mega drive, sonic, gameplay, arcade gameplay, time crisis, andy farrant, mike channell, rise of the robots, blockbuster, rental, review, flight sim, manual, pokemon, n64, goldeneye, pc, doom, box art, cinematics

Id: sXWrmHX2ki8

Length: 17min 46sec (1066 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 27 2019