MGS4 on the retro gaming community makes me feel old. That game felt like stepping into the future of gaming. Snake has a fucking iPod?!
this post was submitted on 29 Dec 2025
75 points (98.7% liked)
RetroGaming
26373 readers
129 users here now
Vintage gaming community.
Rules:
- Be kind.
- No spam, AI slop, or soliciting for money.
- No racism or other bigotry allowed.
- Obviously nothing illegal.
If you see these please report them.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
I mean it can't be that old, it was only released in 2008. That's what 17 years ago. oh... it was 17 years ago.
Still the only MGS that hasn't been re-released :(
Also, the video is 17 years old. Ouch.
I wish this game was re-released. It feels weirdly isolated being only available on PS3.
The original Baldur's Gate was 5 cds and an additional cd for Tales from the Sword Coast. With all the open world travel that meant a lot of disc switching.
The most obnoxious bit about all that was that you had 6 cds to potentially scratch that might prevent you from playing the whole game.
Japanese games primarily designed for use with NEC PC-88 and PC-98 computers that came on floppy disks had an even worse problem:
In order to save your game, you have to write to the floppy disk, usually wash disk needed to write somesort of data. Unfortunately, this means that the disk cannot be read-only protected. You probably see where this is going, but this sadly led to some players having uncompletable copies of games because they wrote to the wrong disk and accidentally ended up overwriting game data with save data.
Some games came with manuals that warned of this, and some games spent the cost of disk space to store actual in-game warning screens to try to prevent this.
EDIT: It has come to my attention that most people reading this probably don't know this because they are too young, but these games that came on more than one floppy disk usually required you to insert at least 2 disks at the same time, one into both of the available drive slots. Then you would swap one or both out, depending on where in the game you were and if you needed to save or not. Each drive only appeared as a letter to save (usually A: and B:, which is why computer harddrives often start at C:, fun fact), and sometimes it didn't prompt you to make sure after you selected one of the drive letters from the ingame menu that showed you nothing but the letter of the drive. So if you selected the wrong one, that sucks for you because they sometimes didn't bother to check if there was already data on that disk or not before writing, which could cause data corruption, usually towards the end of the game.
Basement Brothers' videos on Youtube shows the amount of different floppy disks that some PC88/98 would come in. 5+ was common. Some games would also ask the player to create a user disk, which was essentially a personal copy of some stuff from the main disk plus space for save data, which lowered the risk of messing one of them
When I was getting into PC gaming, I bought Wolfenstein the new Order as a DVD. What it turned out to be was Wolfenstein the new order.... on steam, with several DVDs (4-8) that had the games data. I installed it this way once and never again.
Final fantasy 7 for pc was also 4 cds in 1998.
I scratched one of them and had to beg a friend to lend me their disc so I could get through the story.
I had those. I am pretty sure they were huge because everything was mostly uncompressed.
I remember using a program to extract game data. Every environment was a literal bitmap image the size of the area, and there were additional bitmaps of the same size for each, where pixel colours were used by the engine to check where characters could walk, what part of the scenery is overhead, etc.
It was cool looking into the adaptive music though. Every track was split in multiple bits of a couple seconds, so for example if the battle theme needed to end it could branch into a specific ending variation seamlessly. I don't think a lot of games did that back then.
That's one of the reasons on why I still collect PS3 retail games, they are cheap to buy (mostly) and in a durable format (bluray).
While the Discs are more scratch proof the data side of the disc is more fragile sadly. Just lost my copy of blops due to 2 pin holes in the label.
How durable is the PS3 blu-ray reader?
I don't know but most PS3 issues are related to the fat version, slim and superslim are suggested.
This is also why the Arcade* version of the 360 flopped so hard.
* Back in the early-ish days of the 360 it didn’t have an HDMI port and it had memory card slots. They also sold one with an HDMI port called the 360 Elite and a cheaper one with no HDMI and no HDD (though one could be purchased separately and added later) designed to be used with memory cards exclusively called the 360 Arcade. The no HDMI boards were the ones most susceptible to the Red Ring of Death.
Most Wii games used single layer DVDs, but it had a couple Dual-Layer DVD games, obviously still a lot smaller than Blu-ray. Including Smash, Xenoblade, Metroid Prime Trilogy, and also that Metroid game that shall not be named.
It was not as transparent because it required a system update to support those... and because some Wiis with faulty disc drives had to be replaced because they couldn't read them at all. I had to send mine to support.