Cheats in older games that no longer work

Summary

• Modern consoles lack the screen-shattering effects seen in older games like Batman: Arkham Asylum.

• Older consoles used controller port switching as a gameplay mechanism, a feature that is no longer practical.

• Early games masked small game worlds with fog to hide loadout limitations, a technique that is no longer relevant in modern, expansive worlds.

Games have changed a lot over the years. The graphics command top billing, millions of polygons and vertices thrown at us by machines that are more powerful in many ways than we ever thought possible. Gaming has come a long way from its Ascii art-driven adventure beginnings to where we are now.

It's natural, but I also lost some things along the way. A lot of the smoke and mirrors in the early games just can't be done anymore. Many of these tricks were done to hide the limitations of the consoles of the time or became obsolete with the advancement of monitors and TVs. That's not inherently a bad thing, but it's interesting to see a lot of gimmicks in these games that just don't have the same effect anymore

8

Screen breaking effects

Before the advent of pixel-perfect TVs, 4K resolutions and plasma screens, we relied on massive TVs that were full of white noise when not connected to a source. For the most part, you wouldn't notice this, but if any of the RCA connectors looked to come loose, you'd start getting distorted sound, crackling images, and so on. Modern TVs don't really have this, which makes one of Arkham Asylum's most famous effects much less impactful.

Some distance into Batman: Arkham Aslyum, you're following the Scarecrow when all of a sudden, the screen starts to crack, with graphical artifacts starting to cover the screen. You could still control your Batman, which made it seem like it was your TV or console, rather than an intentional act of the game itself. But the same parallels cannot be drawn with modern flat screens.

7

Changing ports for the controller

Back in the day, before the PS3, consoles were much more tactile. The controllers had to be plugged in directly, all the buttons were physical on the console itself, and there were countless wires to connect and connect it. And while it wasn't extremely common, some games took advantage of these many ports for a game ending.

In the original MGS, there is the Pyscho Mantis boss that can read all your inputs. So how are you meant to beat him? You need to physically change the port the controller is connected to. The Master Collection does a commendable job of trying to recreate the moment, but there's no way to fully replicate it with a wireless controller.

6

Fog to mask small worlds

When the game was young, every new game felt like a massive leap. 2D became 3D, sharp polygonal faces were suddenly animated, and so on. But with those massive leaps came other areas of a game that had to be hidden to hide the shortcomings. Something like GTA: San Andreas probably felt massive at the time, but remove that fog and you can see the entire map from almost anywhere.

The GTA trilogy is a great example of this, with the ports complementing the fog removal and showing how small the world is.

Silent Hill is another great example of this. While the fog that covers the city is fondly remembered for the atmosphere, it was used entirely to hide that the city only loaded in small pieces before you. However, consoles are too powerful now and the worlds are expected to be massive. The fog just wouldn't serve the same purpose if the world is already massive.

5

Character duplication for reflections

Reflections are one of the great debates in gaming, from ray-traced reflections to the more common and less graphically intensive subspace reflections. With modern, though still expensive, ray-tracing, reflections can be made to look more natural and realistic.

Older games didn't have this luxury and found a rather inventive solution – just duplicate everything. Nothing is a better reflection than the same. Given how detailed character models are now, duplicating them wholesale would result in a noticeable performance drop. It's a big part of why you don't see functional mirrors in many games, new or old.

Today, everything is displayed in pixel perfection. This was the form on PCs for decades, but didn't become common on TVs until around 2010 with HD screens. Until then, CRTs dominated the domestic market, with their distinctive appearance and refresh effect, something that had to be taken into account when creating games.

Nowadays, this has led to a rather unfortunate problem. Ports of older games look rough and pixelated, which for many is attributed to nostalgia, which makes you think they looked better. But on a CRT screen, they literally did. The effect of these screens is that the pixels flow together, forming a smoother image. The PS1 Final Fantasy games show exactly what happens to those pre-rendered backgrounds when they're upscaled to a pixel-perfect, high-resolution screen.

3

Pre-rendered backgrounds that look 3D

When games started moving to 3D, creating full 3D environments was difficult. The cameras had to be changed to fit them as well as the movement. And in many ways they were generally less detailed. The solution to this? Pre-rendered backgrounds. They were already incredible artists and they didn't have to give that up to create new 3D games.

The original Resident Evil, and especially its Gamecube remake, are stellar examples of how amazing a pre-rendered background can fit into a scene. And while it's not strictly impossible to create now, that impression of depth on a pre-rendered background is much harder to present on modern systems.

2

Proprietary technology that just breaks

Games made today are most of the time designed to be made on as many systems as possible. As such, they use technologies and systems that work across the board rather than proprietary ones. Overall, this is a good thing, allowing more people to experience more games, though sometimes it results in a game that can't quite reach its potential.

This is most clearly seen in games that are ported to modern consoles. Some, like the Prince of Persia trilogy, lose a bunch of smaller details like lighting, sound, and visual effects. Others, like Final Fantasy 8 Remastered, lose the ability to run at separate frame rates for different elements simultaneously. This is probably a major reason why Metal Gear Solid 4 is already so hard to copy and port modern.

1

Save file detection

It's not impossible to do these days by any means, but the function and intent of the system is completely different. With many early games, especially around the creation of memory cards, many games implemented the ability to detect save data from other games and import it, giving you unique cutscenes and transfer options and such.

However, games take a long time to make now. Dragon Age is a great example, with two supports for directly importing save files, and then Inquisition having to rely on an online service, and then Veilguard having to ditch it entirely. It's hard to import a save file when the distance between games is so great, and different systems might save data completely differently.