Oh Yeah another good one. I remember installing KQ4 off of 4 5 1/4 in drives. Yeah I remember watching a YT video where the creator installed Win95 off of 14 floppies or something like that. Also another user installed MS office in the same manner. My 1st HDD that I used was a 40MB drive in a Tandy 1000 PC.

I recommend checking out the Quest for Glory series if you haven't done so, if you want more genre mixing games! And Hero-U.

For some games, having check point saves makes sense, as it divides the game into specific challenges to overcome; it's just that the check points need to be frequent enough for the player to not feel too frustrated. Celeste is, perhaps, a good example of this; most of the rooms are very short.

Save anywhere does have the problem of the player saving themself into a corner, something that *has* happened to me (in the SNES version of Ys 3, actually, though I managed to escape by poenting the menu and equipping the Shield Ring), which frequent checkpoints do not have an issue with.

One other advantage of checkpoints is that the game doesn't need to save as much of its state. Things like player health and the locations of enemies and in-flight projectiles, for example, can be omitted from the save file, and having less information in the save file reduces the chance of a game-breaking bug making a save file unusuable or softlocked. (In some games, saving and reloading can fix a softlock situation; funny enough, Wizardry 4 has a part where this can happen early in the game.) Saving less of the game state also helps, particularly in simpler games, or in games that consist of discrete levels (why save the stat of level 1 when the player has already moved on to level 2)?

LOL, it was pretty ridiculous. I once had a system that had a Matrox Millennium II, Matrox m3d, dual Voodoo 2s, MPEG2 decoder and a video capture card. That was six cards, all for various video/visual functionality. The mass of daisy chained cables attached to the back of that PC was quite unsightly.

True (platformers come to mind where checkpoints don't feel too out of place). Quick / multiple / manual save slots still have many other advantages (walkthrough creation assistance, freedom of branching (sometimes it's fun to do something completely out of character in an RPG without messing up your main game), a "bookmark" to save a particularly funny / cool scene you want to show someone else later on, hardware benchmarking (because "official" pre-scripted benchmarks are rarely done at the most demanding part of a game), etc.

Yea, Storage space in general. On my vintage machines (win98/xp) I have all my game cd's ripped to a folder to be mounted to a virtual disk drive because old games required so little space I could install everything I wanted once they got a modern hard drive(500gb+). On the other hand a modern game I just installed took up 60 Gigs.

Also copy right and DRM. I had a game as a kid and the first time it ran it would ask you to make sure you were playing on a backup disk because use in the old drives and handling by uncareful kids would destroy the disk, and using the backup meant the original would be there to make another when the first is destroyed. These days the moment you type the word "backup" the companies look at you like you're wearing an eye patch and a parrot, while ridding a 12lb canon.

Game saving. Not even any specific type of saving, just the concept of being able to turn off the game, boot it back up later, and continue where you left off. Try to imagine beating Morrowind your first time through in one sitting without dying.

Solution: Only allow saving on the world map. That's how Ultima 3-5 did that, anyway.

Custom maps like DOTA that lead to the creation of MOBAs. LOL and DOTA 2 now attract millions in viewers and are still growing.

I don't personally watch, but this genre put esports on the map.

Yeah, what happened with all those western style SHMUP's - like Xevius, Gradius, TwinBee, R-Type, 1942, Raiden and so forth.... damd those Japanese!

Hot spot indicator.

Pixel hunting is not fun. One of the most irritating gaming experiences you can have is getting stuck because you didn't place the mouse cursor over the exact pixel that recognizes a new item to interact with. For adventure and role-playing games (especially for low-resolution ones or if, for design reasons, items blend easily into thr background), hot spot indicators are a godsend.

And the best part is that if someone enjoys the hardcore artificial difficulty, or just doesn't want to use them, they can ignore it. I don't even use the hot spot indicator in most rooms, at least not the first times I visit them. But when I want to, I welcome those little lights/stars/whatever that guide me to the next key.

Good puzzles should be about using logic to interact with objects and the environment, not finding a needle in a haystack.

Neither of them are new. Copyright is far older than computers, and DRM, called "copy protection" back then, existed even as far back as the days that computer programs were stored on cassette tape (yes, really).

That sounds allot like the Level Passwords that sometimes include armor, weapons, or power ups, but were usualy just stage selection. Again was there a legitimate reason for doing that by the time of 32bit consoles and windows XP computers? I doubt it.

I know copyright goes back at least as far as mass producible text/images, but the extent to which the user is limited to enforce it has changed. As I said, I had a win98 pc game that actively demanded that I create a back up, when now most consoles are designed to detect backups and refuse them. One of the early Prince of Persia games had a code in the manual to get past a level as a early DRM, passive, offline, and indefinite, that as long as you had both you could install it forever no matter how many times you reinstall your os, or upgrade your pc. Some companies today have made it so that you can only use the activation codes a limited number of times, and many unlike daemon tools don't let you suspend a licence on one pc/instal to use on another, If win10 updated two days later and breaks itself forcing a reinstall, that is one activation wasted.

I bought a game from the company that produced the game, instead of waiting for the disk I accepted the code to turn the trial into the full version. two or three years later and a half dozen installs, and I wanted to play it again, and found Amazon bought it's publisher, and subsequently it, so they could make their own original games. Imaging trying to tell a company you bought a key to their game from a company that has a different name but is also them and so now they have to honor it because their programming team is the same team who sold me the key in the first place. No prizes for guessing how well that works. I buy it again from Amazon who is now the new copyright owner, it is only available as a download but they promise it will be in my library for future downloads forever even if they remove it from their store, sounds like the xbox360 doesn't, or GoG? Hard drive fails unexpectedly, turns out they lied and I can not redownload the game because they decided to not offer it any more, So I go to eBay and buy a used disk installer made by the original creator/publisher, works like a charm.
With 98 I just had to copy the disk before the original was unreadable as is caused by classic tower optical drives, but I had a favorite PS2 game that had a cracked center spindle getting worse from the springs despite super glue reinforcement, but unscratched, can I just copy it with my pc that doesn't have a spring holder and run the back up as long as both disks are always together in possession of only one owner at a time ust like some of the old Win98 conditions? Nope, have to buy the game again, so two cases are made for twice the smog, and I don't even get a discount for returning the husk like a core charge.(last part is a joke)
I read that American McGee Scrapland has such invasive DRM that it would interfere authentic Scrapland installs, interfere with non-Scrapland programs, slow the computer, and generally act like a Trojan Horse.

Copy right isn't new, but the new way it is now enforced has become a new standards, affecting games across most genres and platforms. How much the new corporate legal stances and DRM enforcement types limits the user has changed greatly from windows 98 to present. We "buy" DRM free GoG games like any classic cd game, but we are not allowed to sell them like classic CD's even the ones with the same game. I'm not trying to argue that GoG isn't DRM free(i know its legally complicated), just the effect DRM has had on the market. Consider the simple fact that GoG advertises itself as DRM free as a sign of how important that has be come when it used to be a given with much of Windows 98 and to a diminishing extent XP.

I'd argue that the PC platform and Microsoft Windows was a tremendous innovation.

It has a platform with decades of life. Games from 20 years ago are still playable - 30 years ago with Dosbox. and other emulators. with no involvement of the original developer needed.

Before the PC platform, games died when the hardware they ran on were discontinued and obsolete. Your cherished game collection is worthless when your console dies and you can't source another.

Microsoft's willingess to mantain compatibility over the long term was crucial to GOGs success.

- flexible save system
- the computer mouse (for everything that needs aiming or management of some kind)
- 8+ Button game-pads with digital and analogue controls
- getting rid of mandatory physical media (although that meant massive increase of online authentication before the DRM-free movement)
- split screen (which sadly went away again in most cases)