Level drain (in games where it changes XP) is an automatic reload for me (including the use of save states if the game is designed to try and prevent this).

There are a few exceptions to this:
* When level draining is the result of a specific action I choose to do (HAMAN/MAHAMAN in Wizardry)
* Where there is some trick/exploit where you can use level draining to your advantage (like being able to manipulate stat growth (Final Fantay Tactics comes to mind) or re-syncing a character's level and XP (like using an item to change classes in Wizardry)).
* *possibly* if the battle is a major boss and is nearly impossible to win without being level drained.
* Some more modern games (like Baldur's Gate 2 and apparently the remaster of Bard's Tale 1) reworked level draining into a status ailment rather than a permanent loss of XP; there I am more likely to accept a level drain as a temporary, rather than permanent, penalty.

But that is still a problem today. Especially since games get bigger and bigger (like GTA V/Online taking up nearly 90 gigabytes)
I mean i have 3 terrabytes and that's not even enough....



- Copy Protection. Especially the stupid "look up page 110, line 16, word 7 in the manual" crap or when the code was on a piece of dark brown paper in black print so you couldn't even see it properly.

- German only. German overdubs always sucked (doesn't matter if it's a game, a movie, a tv show, i really don't know why that shit even got started), will always suck and i'm glad, when i buy a game now, i can change to english. Back in the day, you got the german shit, i still think back in horror to Metal Gear Solid and it's atrocious german overdub.

- Joystick Caibration. Every damn time you start up the game you had to do it.

- PC Speaker noise, which was a thing well into the 90's for things like Apogee's shareware games. Ugh, that noise!

- Having to fuck around with the config.sys and autoexec.bat just because every game wanted something else. "Give me EMS", "Disable EMS if you want to play me", "I want more conventional memory" or really absurd stuff like Mad News wanting a stacks=9,256 entry for...reasons.

- Big Boxes. I generally like physical things, hence why i still buy movies and music on disc but the big giant cardboard boxes were just a massive waste of space. Especially when all there was in it where maybe 2 floppys and a small 10 page manual (or better yet, just a CD Case with the manual inside it)

- Licensed games that were bad because they were just a quick cash grab produced in minutes. From Lego Batman to Telltales games or even just license fantasy pinball tables in PFX3 or WWE 2K, it seems the quality for licensed games is a billiong times higher than when shitty companies like Acclaim, Ocean or US Gold would puke out games based on a license.

Yea. So what? Then you just go back to an older save. Only an idiot would only keep one savegame. And only complete morons would program a game in a way that allows only one savegame!

Or if the game only lets you save in the same slot, and has no means to copy saves.

(Also, players who are new to gaming won't understand that keeping multiple saves is a good idea. If a game is going to have save anywhere, it really should have some sort of emergency escape feature to get out of softlocks.)

Like others who mentioned in this post, messing about with memory management in DOS.

My second PC game I owned was Aces of the Pacific - Talk about being thrown in at the deep end, never played (or owned a PC) previously. Back in the early nineties, no Internet, just a door stop DOS manual to gen up. When I finally figured it out - I got to say it was one of my proudest youthful achievements.

Having recently built a recent retro rig, I completely forgot the ballache of hunting and installation of drivers.

Would I like to repeat the same experience for both, nowadays - nope.

I do miss physical boxes, proper doorstep manuals, big time. Its like paperback books vs Kindle or MP3 versus CD/vinyl. I used to love picking up a PC boxed game and a tomb of a manual, you always felt you got your money's worth and a sign that the developers cared and took their product seriously.

switching out disks, pain if you had to go back in game for something, then back to where you were.... on and on.

no auto map

no auto looting

no ability to move your interface around

obscure game mechanics that you had to pore over a badly written manual to find out

no online patches, walkthrus, tips and hints

Pre-mouse controls. Just too spoiled by that little device that it's tough to go back to something like the Gold Box games.

Boot disks with special config.sys and autoexec.bat files. Though there is a certain sense of a accomplishment when you get those files tweaked just right and the game finally runs.

More of a hardware problem: not enough hard drive space to have more than 4 or 5 games installed.

Like Tauto mentioned: insert Disk 3. And hope it picks up where it's supposed to. On my Baldur's Gate package, the cardboard disk folder thingy wasn't assembled properly and my disk 3 or 4 had a glue line across it. Got to that part of the game and the disk couldn't be read. GAH!

Related, disks wearing out.

Sounds coming from the motherboard piezo 'speaker', with no volume control. "Can you turn that damn thing down?" Um, no actually. Soooorry!

But that happened. There were games then which only autosaved and only in one slot and only at specific points in the game. So sometimes you had the great joy to find out that this dumb game saved you (better said: your character) in a condition where it`s impossible to carry on, for example because you`ve only minimal health left or ammo.
This always resulted either in a restart or in throwing the diskette/CD-ROM out of the window. Not seldom I choosed the second way!

I remember a time when hard drives were not standard, so you never installed the games (nowhere to install them to). Instead, the way it usually worked was this:
* Computer: Insert floppy disk, turn on computer, wait for the game to load (this might take a while, I remember Dungeon Master on the 2gs, in particular, taking a long time to boot), and then play, occasionally having to wait for mid-game loads.
* Console: Insert cartridge, turn on game, start playing right away with no load times.

(In other words, back then, consoles had a huge advantage. Of course, in the 32-bit era, Sega and Sony threw away that advantage by switching to slower media, and PC games, once installed, could load faster.)

This sounds like, in part, a problem with the game saving too much. If a game is going to have forced check points like that, it should not save your health and ammo, and instead reaload you with full health and enough ammo.

Also, in that case it doesn't make sense to save the position of enemies; instead, if the developer knows where the check point is, they can ensure that there are no enemies nearby that can kill the player before they have a chance to do anything.

(Note that these options won't work so well in "save anywhere" games.)

Insert Diskette.
Type:
Load "$",8
List
Load "Game",8,1

Then wait about 20 minutes for the game to load and start.

So, I just recalled: Even if you get the sound working, it sounds like garbage, because you didn't actually have the sound card installed and ingratiated chips sucked!

So enjoy that crisp, warm kghrhghhbnlr, and every computer having a distinctly different and bad MIDI sound.

- Pixel graphics (which is why the current craze for ‘retro’ graphics drives me up the wall).
- UIs lacking all sorts of QoL features such as tooltips.
- Disk-swapping.

Disk swapping (Phantasmagoria? Riven anyone?)

Disk in-drive requirement, even for fully installed games.

Lack of pre-configured game-pad controls (I love my Xbox Controller)

PC games that required patches before the internet was a common thing.
Didn't some companies offer a mail order setup for patches on 3.5 inch floppy disks?

Going to the PC game store to find that the game you're looking for is out of stock.
I remember having my dad drive me all over the place looking for Omikron after the one copy I saw at OnCue (anyone remember OnCue?) went out of stock. Same for Messiah, except I never saw a single copy of that anywhere.

Reinserting NES cartridges.

Videogame systems that required overpriced memory cards.

Sometimes, this can be absolutely rage inducing to someone who is colourblind.

There was one puzzle in Neverwinter Nights where you had to activate 3 coloured beacons in a certain order, I think the colours were blue, bright green and yellow. I could not tell the difference between the green and yellow. The hint for the puzzle had those 2 colours next to each other too and I couldn't see the difference. To make it worse, those beacons could only be accessed by teleporting from platform to platform which made this puzzle time consuming too.

Edit: On topic

I don't miss the term "Doom killer". There were no shortage of FPSs that were advertised as the Doom killer