Yep, that was it. The manual for that game is like a book (I still have it) but it's written in such a way that by the time I finished it man I wanted to not just play that game but BE that game.

And it was fun. Horrible graphics (by today's standards). Heck the UI was tough. But man.. the immersion, helped along by very good writing in the manual and your mind was just thinking of the world and how to train better and what schools to attend and how long instead of the graphics or UI. Fun game.

ADDED: LOL, here I sit at almost 3:00 AM in the morning installing it now. Done talked myself into another game of Darklands. This is one game I would love to see an enhanced version for so long as it only updated the graphics and UI but left the game play the EXACT same. (Betrayal at Krondor is another... those graphics are tough on the eyes today.. but again so long as they changed NOTHING in terms of game play. And the UI for that game was just fine IMO.)

Agreed. The only good censorship is when the user chooses it. In other words, when it's an option in the game.

For example, the HD remake of Serious Sam lets you chose to show blood or to have confetti and candy pop out of enemies when shot, like pinatas. I like to play with that mode on because it makes it easier to tell when I've hit them.

No automapping and quest logs in RPGs. You had to draw maps on graph paper, and write down notes. Meh, I always hated it.

Particularly in PC games and many Amiga games, unclear and complicated controls and user interfaces. I guess this was less of a problem on old consoles (NES, SNES, Sega etc.).

The idea that you'd have to read a manual by heart in order to learn playing the game. I never really enjoyed that, I've always preferred to learn the game by playing, or if the game is hard to learn, offer a tutorial. Nowadays I especially like games like Starcraft (which is an old game, but I still consider it as a modern game) where there is not even specific tutorial, but you learn by playing, every mission in the beginning teaches you something new, by giving first simple objectives and less units etc.

In many old strategy games (Warlords games etc.), there is no actual campaign. It is just skirmish, like "You have four enemy kings on this map. Try to defeat them. Rinse and repeat.". I prefer actual campaigns with missions.

That reminds me. I hate the font they have used in Darklands. I presume the weird blocky font is supposed to look medieval or something, but for me, it just makes the text in the game slower and harder to read. It is irritating.

This. But looking back I can see how oftentimes developers had to stretch the duration of what otherwise would be a 20-30 minute long game, which you would realize after mastering the perfect run or seeing somebody else finish the game years later.

There was only so much you could cram into those 48-128k of pre-PC systems (Spectrum, Amstrad, Commodore, MSX, etc) and later into 256k-1MB of early PC's... Remember, after all 640k should be enough for everybody, right? :-D

So developers would artificially ramp up difficulty, and what were days and weeks of memorizing and executing pixel-perfect jumps and pointless backtracking (with pixel-perfect jumping the opposite way), you can find now as 20 minute "longplays" on Youtube.

But I forgive them. They had their reasons and I had the time. Best time of my life, actually.

Menu-ing mostly. Nowadays it's much less annoying to sort your stuff, sell, buy, equip etc.
Lack of auto-mapping? Not that bad, in my opinion.

I played some older FPS several months ago. I would say it's just different but not really annoying. You have to put yourself in a different mindset when playing them because you need to press some buttons or look out for "markers" which you need to shoot etc.

I get your point, but truthfully those pixels are often very easy to see. They have slightly different colour scheme or maybe they are a bit out of proportion or whatever, but there's almost always some small hints there.

When you go back with a walkthrough, you really feel stupid thinking, how could I miss that.

A while back I played some older adventure with no hotspots. First, it felt very painful, but very soon that way of playing was very natural, as I got into that mindset. Same thing with parsers.

1. DRM. Not just having to source "No-CD" cracks to prolong the life of the disc, but even worse those older games that detect certain boot-loaders on floppy disks

2. Manually editing config.sys and autoexec.bat to get the "right" amount of memory (Extended vs Expanded) on 1-4MB systems, which always seemed to differ from one game to the next

3. 3min load times from cassette tape (ZX Spectrum / Commodore 64)

4. "Experimental" controls in games that came AFTER other games that got it right. Eg, no matter how many times I try, I just cannot get into Sanitarium without extreme frustration at those bizarre controls which for a 1998 game felt hugely backwards compared to to older 1989-1994 LucasArts titles.

5. Hard-coded 4:3 resolutions (320x240 / 640x480, 800x600, etc). A very big thank you to www.wsgf.org and the many talented modders that have created widescreen patches, tweaks & source ports over the years.

6. Clunky UI. Those 5 years that separated System Shock 1 (1994) vs System Shock 2 (1999) feel like 100x more progress than SS2 vs today's FPS's.

I tend to agree, but I also find that indie games are weirdly priced in general. Many shouldn't really cost more than £5 considering their length, graphics etc. While some that you might willing pay £15 - £20 or more for sell for peanuts..
I'm not opposed to paying a lot of money for games, I just like the fact there are options as if all games cost £50 still I'd rarely buy any at all.

The problem with a lot of indie devs is they are not business people and don't think like business people, they don't know about margins and marketing and just slap any old price on their game. I feel that's why so many Kickstarter games end up expensive. If your backers paid £50 for a basic copy then everyone else should pay at least that much, if not more. So you end up with ultimate editions costing £90+

The fact you do go back with a walkthrough means they are not easy enough to see :P Most of them - sure, but it only takes one to make for a shitload of backtraking or, even worse, having to resort to a walkthrough. And the worst part - even if you found everything, you can never know for sure that you did. So when you get stuck, you're not just trying to figure out a solution to a puzzle, you also have that nagging suspicion that maybe you're stuck because you haven't found everything. And then you go looking for something that isn't even there :D

I'm not saying that old adventure games without a hotspot indicator are unplayable because of it, nothing of the sort, but like the thread title says, I defiantely don't miss that aspect of them.

Having to have custom config.sys and autoexec.bat files for different games so that my AdLib sound card would work properly at the expense of anything outside of the game I made them for.

There are probably heaps, but that's definitely the one thing I don't miss.

Interface stuff:
* Tank controls
* Lack of mouse in FPSs
* Interface overload

Graphics stuff:
* Pre-2002 3D: This is the arbitrary point I've set, before which 3D was rubbish and really shouldn't have been used in games
* Pre-EGA 2D: You found the occasional very well made 2D art before EGA, but as a general rule it looks poo, especially now

Gameplay stuff:
* Walking deads in adventure games
* Obscure and stupid puzzles in adventure games

Ha! I remember this very clearly.
We copied the floppies, but of course the copy protected sector didn't get copied too, but you could use the copied sierra floppies most of the time after the very first game start-up. At the worst, you learned when to insert the genuine disk before it tried to read the copy protected section...oh, what memories!

I lucked into getting a non copy-protected Quest for Glory (cutout-bin special) set of floppies, so the copies never failed :)

To be fair, if the disk came damaged when you bought it and only a short time had passed from the date on the reciept, you were allowed to mail in the damaged disk together with a photocopy of your reciept to the publisher and they sent a new disk back.

juggling disks and cds...