conpanies usually either bake it into the game as tutorials or have digital manuals nowadays. it was always about cutting physical sales cost (as the physical media itself has a cost attached to it)
IDK how it works on the current console devices, but on the yhe previous generation, the wiiu for example would give the player the option to open the digital manual when the game is launched by pressing the home button and selecting the manual. one of yhe pros is that the manuals digitally tend to be more complete and not rushed to save on cost. take for example, the Xenoblade Chronicle X manual is 142 pages long, something that would basically never exist physically.
Google n64 emulator and n64 roms? Pretty easy. I torrented all the games for nes,sega,snes,n64 few years ago and still have it somewhere. Havent played anything in some time
39 yrs here. I got my kid a gaming laptop for Christmas, but then I bought all the old Halo games for it for myself. I just got an Xbox controller for it this weekend and it has been a wonderful experience.
The height of new game glory for me were the old school huge boxes PC games came in. It wasn’t uncommon to get a thick manual with wonderful art, sometimes spiral bound, maps, other neat add-ins. Even console games had nice manuals with useful information you may not otherwise know. I miss that stuff.
I wrote a similar reply to a higher comment without seeing yours, and I completely agree - I miss it.
I was a bit younger in the 90s and half the magic of the ride home was reading the manual so you could hit the ground running when you installed it/put the cartridge in/loaded the tape.
My wife got me a copy of Mass effect Andromeda as a gift once. She bought the physical copy (or so she thought) since that makes a better gift. When I opened the case, there was literally nothing in there but a code for EA Origin on a sticker.
Ea games are awful for this. I bought sims 4 when it first came out and had the same issue. It’s so cool that I can’t own games even if I try to buy the physical copy. I’m just glad that other companies haven’t been doing digital only hard copies.
I mean, do you even have a bluray drive on your PC? That’s why they do it, I remember having the option to buy San Andreas on one dvd or 8 cds or something, precisely because people don’t often replace their drives.
Sadly, yes. Got a switch for Xmas this year. Went and bought a mario game, and was completely taken aback when the inside of the case looked just like this. I sat there totally feeling this exact post.
Aluminum cases need to become standard for physical copies. Not plastic with an aluminum veneer, all aluminum.
They can be cool and do aluminum tubes holding a flash drive with the game on it if they want so they can laser engrave the sides and screw on top with the title and art.
I remember getting Prince of Persia 2008 in a steel case for a birthday or maybe Xmas and loved the design of it. I haven’t seen my steel case editions recently.
It’s a tough one. You’re not wrong by any means, but equally the environmentally unfriendly bit is why people buy physical media. The memory card holding the game is mostly superfluous because of day 1 DLC or patches, but it’s the box; art; manual; and physical tangibility that matter to a collector of the media.
Ideally there would be a middle ground - sack-off the normal physical edition and purchase the memory cards themselves - and push up the price and pay for a premium edition of the copy made from better materials.
I suspect we’d only get the worst of both worlds though, the cynic in me thinks.
Ah yes, there is that. Is that still a thing these days? I remember EA’s Project Ten Dollar a few years back gating a lot of extra features or multiplayer behind a single use code being fairly widely adopted.
I’ll admit to being a bit behind the curve now, I still predominantly use my Xbox Series S, One, and 360 just to play Doom in different rooms so maybe I’m not on the cutting edge of news!
edit: it wasn’t five dollars at all, more like ten!
I had to look up that ten-dollar thing. Thankfully I don’t think that’s a thing yet in the Nintendo world, aside from preorder bonuses.
There have been physical releases that are just a download code in a box, or a game card that contains only one of the two included games, with the second being provided as a paper download code. In those cases the redemption is tied to an individual’s Nintendo account. I wouldn’t buy any of those, though I’ll admit to buying another release (BioShock Trilogy) that was a physical game card with no games stored on it, just launchers for downloading the three games from Nintendo. But at least in that case nothing is account-locked and lending/resale is possible: pop the card in, download the games and play them for as long as the card is in your system.
I haven’t thrown away a game case since Playstation 1. My Super Nintendo ones were cardboard and got destroyed, so I did throw them away because that is what we did in the 90s.
Yeah, I find it particularly weird, because Nintendo already had smaller boxes with the Nintendo DS. Did they decide that the Switch was a big boy console, so it needed to have comically large boxes?
Man you would have had a field day with PC gaming in the 90’s!
In fairness though, even though some did skimp out and just launch a CD in, most had a manual and something of lore interest or a physical anti-piracy thing, and a fair few were stuffed full of trinkets or other world building material… just because.
Even my Atari ST edition of Zak McKracken had the floppy, manual, passport anti-piracy card, and a faux-magazine which was both hilarious and acted as a hint book too.
PC games in he 90s were like cereal boxes filled with a few CDs and a the barest of a manual. In the 80s it was the same except it was floppy disks and the manual was needed to get through the copy protection. Sometimes you’d even get a decoder ring of some sorts to decode something for the copy protection.
Yeah but it wasn’t as fun as in the 80s and 90s when they’d be sending you on a treasure hunt through the manual to find specific words and letters like you were in the DaVinci Code.
PC game cases from 90s were amazing. I wish console games would do something cool like that. They were made of cardboard, typically had boxart with a bunch of high quality engraving, had manuals inside. They felt like collectibles and you didn’t have to pay extra for any of it. It was just part of the base game price.
The total footprints of the two cases are virtually identical. The Switch game cases are taller but not as deep, and the DS cases are shorter and deeper. I believe the DS case is basically the same dimension as a cut-down DVD case. It’s the same depth, +/- a mm, with 65mm chopped off the top.
The NDS game case is 134x125mm, 167.5 square cm in total. The Switch game case is 105x170mm, 178.5 square cm in total. The Switch case is also thinner, 11mm vs 15mm. The amounts of plastic used in each is pretty similar.
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