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Lol those were the days. I remember Simcity 4 releasing back then and how quickly my mod folder blue up. Then by the time that game was old it was only 2.15gb and that was nothing. The jump from >10gb to 50gb games was insane. Now the jump to 100+ Gb hurts a lot. Any time a game is iN MB I do a little happy dance.
how quickly my mod folder blue up
Mine was green.
I remember clearing drive space on my first computer once, I went off of install size and anything other than a couple of key games that took up multiple hundreds of Mb got the boot and anything less than 100 Mb stayed installed for a bit longer. When you’ve only got a 40GB drive, thems the choices you have to make!
Meanwhile I’ve seen Fortnite literally fail to update with less than 100GB free because it needs to modify so many files in its gigantic install
So. 1 TB drives indeed were out before Half-Life 3.
But I’m nostalgic over a simpler time when 1 GB for a game was a lot.
Not many people these days understand that Steam used to suck bad.
I have heard that people used to be super PISSED that steam is required for valve games. I guess it makes sense now considering hdd sizes back then.
Now what sucks is that people are okay with underaged kids gambling because, come on, it’s Steam!
I might be hijacking conversations too much…
When I was young, I was not allowed to install anything on the family PC whatsoever. I had a 100MB Zip disk and was told anything that I wanted to keep, I could keep on there. That disk got a big workout. Had Duke 3D and the Half-Life Uplink demo on there, plus about 30MB to spare! Great days man.
Man I was jelly green over classmates that could afford zip drives. They’d bring it to school retiring computer class, whip it out, both showing off and fake-lamenting that oh they didn’t know the school didn’t have zip drives.
Zip drives filled such a small tech window between floppies & CD-Rs.
I was the ubernerd with the Zip 250, lol
Hah I was the same. Downloaded demos (happypuppy.com, gamesdomain.com), installed on a Jaz drive.
Those iomega devices had a pretty awesome design.
Oh, maaaan. HappyPuppy. I haven’t thought of that in ages.
Oh man I forgot about those site! Back in the day my mom couldn’t afford to get me many new video games, so I’d download tons of demos.
Looks at 500 gb New Vegas install
Yeah I don’t see the problem here.
How is that even possible? Even with 8k retextures of every single asset of the game I can’t imagine it being half that size.
Uncompressed audio and way too many mods with unique assets, also I think something duplicated a bunch of random assets. I’ve tried to fix it but noooo apparently duped ruble13 is load bearing. But hey at least it doesn’t CTD so there’s that, ignore NPCs just not spawning and some terrain just not appearing note this is not due to conflicts it fits when I restart the game and I don’t know if it’s the SSD or not.
Lol next thing you know they’ll sneak HL3 into a VR game
… oh
HL:A isn’t bad though
Gone are the days when a game delivered on seven floppy disks was considered “overblown”.
I installed HL2 from five CDs back in the day
I can’t be certain but I seem to recall installing Unreal Tournament 2004 from seven CDs
Saaaame
I still remember when I had to reinstall my WindowsXP from the 3GB HDD onto my 1.5GB HDD so I could install The Sims 2
And now 1.5GB RAM won’t even load Windows.
It will. I’ve tried. It’s not a pleasant experience though.
But 2GB on Fedora was pain as well, though definitely more usable.
Puppy linux works quite well with 2gb, on the other hand.
Not even close to loading it
Wait until they get to the end of level one and have to turn the tape over and press play.
The lack of any comment saying “Half life is not retro gaming” is concerning to me.
I feel like gaming generations are distinct from hardware generations, and we mostly haven’t moved on much from whatever gaming gen Half Life is in.
Half Life came out in 1998 (27 years ago) and this post is from 2003 (22 years ago). Half Life is retro gaming.
And I still haven’t gotten past the crabs suddenly showing up and eating your face. I got as far as the flooded corridor and could never find my way out.
Barely over quarter-century life by now
Please stop, you are hurting me with facts
I love you had this ready and/or knew exactly where to find it.
I think the first time I saw this meme was an edit posted on Chubbyemu’s channel where she says “I don’t know what -emia means”.
This world is too cruel
I bet they had a raptor hard drive, something about 160 GB ticked my mind.
Man, I remember lusting over getting a WD Raptor back in the day. They were so much more expensive and lower data density it I couldn’t justify for my low budget.
As was already said, 160 was pretty common, think increments of 20 or 40 is what i remember. Raptor drives had kinda odd size increments compared to other consumer drives. Looks like it would be 36Gb circa 2003.
I once got some retired scsi drives. Man 10,000rpm drives were loud and hot…
Thanks for bringing back some old memories
Increments of 80 GB were fairly common. My desktop had an 80 GB Maxtor and my laptop later had 320 GB.
In hindsight, I do not remember if the Maxtor was definitely 80 GB, or if Windows was showing it as 80-something GB. But the laptop was definitely 320. I googled it. Google AI of course said “Based on Ebay listings it seems to be 1 TB”, very useful. Spec sheet says 320 GB.
I hope 100 TB drives are out by the time HL3 comes out.
I hope SSDs and NVMes are cheaper by the time HL3 comes out
By the time H3 comes out your great great great grand children will be reminiscing about how games once were about gameplay and plot and not the 100th version of Call of Duty or Assassins Creed. I’d say Madden too but let’s face it no one will play it 150 years from now unless it’s VR.
Nah, I’m willing to bet HL3 will come out (at the latest) 5 years after Gaben’s death. Not because he’s witholding it, obviously, but because whoever comes next will probably try to make as much money as possible and that’s an easy first way to do it.
Forgot about Valve taking a giant 30% cut and making thousands of people gambling addicts?
It’s gonna suck when Steam immediately enshitifies to the max after he dies.
I’m still holding out hope that Valve becomes a worker-owned coop when Gaben goes. Internally they’ve been structured that way for years, without traditional “management,” everyone having moving desks where they work on whatever they feel motivated by and most useful at, etc.
Yeah, fully expecting that to happen. I wish that guy a long and healthy life and there isn’t an ounce of altruism in that statement.
Any containment plans for when Steam joins the club of shit eventually?
unless its VR
I thought the same thing about touchscreens when they first came out. I really did think they were the future of gaming. Seemingly limitless buttons in limitless combinations. Touch and drag game pieces directly, action and vision in the same place.
Turns out gaming on mobile is shit. So so shit.
Maybe VR will end up the same way. Its pretty neat now while its still new and shiny, but maybe it never actually reaches potential.
Its pretty neat now while its still new and shiny
The current crop of VR tech dates back to 2012, not exactly what I’d consider new and shiny
I hope not
I’m old enough that I got HL2 in a retail box, when it was new.
and the fucking disks installed the game encrypted, and I could not use my computer until the next day, due to it thrashing my HDD and CPU so hard to decrypt the files that my computer was functionally useless that evening, and overnight.
now THAT was some bullshit.
This was too, cause I remember steam games bloating with temp files back in the day and regularly having to clear out the folder so you had HDD space.
Me too. I still have it.
Edit:
HOLY SHIT!! I’ve been missing my civ II disc for 20 years. It was in my half life 2 box!!!
Congrats on finding your Civ2 disc! Do you have a drive to see if it still works?
Yeah I’ll have to hook it up soon. :) I’m just stoked that I found it haha.
I miss box games.
I miss feelies.
Same.
And this spurs me to bring up the lie of digital purchases… Which was sold to us on the promise of cheap games. We were promised that if we gave up on physical games, then the devs/publishers wouldnt have to pay for printing manuals/boxes, packaging of games, warehouses to store them, and the cost of shipping to get them to the stores/consumers… Which meant they could sell games for lower costs, that game prices would plumet to 25-30 dollars for brand new day 1 releases… and devs/publishers would still get a bigger chunk of revenue/more money from that, than from the old 50 dollar physical big box games with all the feelies, delicious manuals, disks that meant you can install the game however you want, whenever you want, etc etc.
Instead, what digital purchases have gotten us is… a total lack of ownership, that our games can be taken away from us at any time, for any reason, because buried in all the legalese we don’t “own” anything, we just have a “lease”…and for that, we’ve been given the right to pay 10-20 dollars more for games than what they cost during the physical game era, and the risk of the platform disappearing and taking our or games with it (which I’ve already ran afoul of and drastically altered how i buy games)
Few things more precious
Why does she look much more asian than in the game?
I remember when Steam came out and everyone hated it because of how slow and buggy it was. Crazy how times have changed.
I installed Steam during a Lan party back in 2007 (i think to play Left 4 Dead) and remember thinking “Damn, not another bloody useless account”. Little did i know :)
I had CS:Source Steam version, except I gifted it unopened (don’t remember why, probably had enough IL-2 and SW:Battlefront and SW:EAW to play) to a friend, so only saw Steam installation on that friend’s PC until much later.
My first Steam game was Empire: Total War, which is, eh, not too old.
BTW, it’s Russia and most disks you would buy in my childhood were pirate localized versions or just pirate versions, sold in underground crossings or in shabby-looking small stores. Nobody here understood what copyright is and how it’s connected to any right, like - really nobody. It’s baffling really when people who confidently and certainly thought of copyright this exact way then, just like everybody around, are today being judgemental and condemn digital piracy. While the new generation which wasn’t very conscious back then - doesn’t. Two-faced cowards. OK.
I’m really nostalgic over all those small stores, because back then not only they existed, but those ugly malls everywhere didn’t exist. Also in underground crossings everything was cleared (probably to make profit for malls ; of course it was illegal to sell there, but - I really feel more for those people than for the law), but now there are stores in them again, mostly coffee and snacks.
I’ve seen licensed localized versions by 1C on small racks in book stores, though, and those weren’t too expensive or bad, and the selection was usually good, but small, still - the people who decided which games were put there had consistently good taste, I’ve seen Thief various parts, Neverwinter Nights, Silent Hunter, various quests, maybe something else there.
I’ve had licensed WarCraft III: Reign of Chaos, my first non-pirate game, and later got The Frozen Throne.
The only place with really many-many official disks I’ve seen in my childhood was Soyuzmultfilm official store (a rare place, I mean, I live in Moscow, it’s huge and is still cool, and it was even cooler), and that place was kinda expensive (and looked expensive).
Though the games causing more nostalgic feelings for me were Dark Swords (an MMORPG much like MUDs) and Wizards’ World (a browser game much like MUDs with very cheerful global chat in a frame to the left) and Travian (still alive, but was better then). There was something called Wizards’ World II (not sure if it was by the same people), which I really liked (well, it was a plagiarism at HotMM, but a nice one, cool graphics and multiplayer). Unfortunately not around anymore.
Honestly I had more than many kids (born around 1996) did, and I’m really ashamed that my dad got depressed and didn’t see me get more useful before dying from Covid. Lots of it was due to his own idiocy, but he’s done a lot and deserved far better regardless.
Honestly rain is the only thing which always, without a single failure, makes me feel I’m in the same world as then and some things in it are genuinely noble and good. So - it’s raining and people are remembering the time of LAN parties and Steam being unknown. And I’m remembering first installing Settlers, not sure which part. Sorry for the mind dump.
The client is still rather resource intensive, it’s just that computers have gotten so much faster that you don’t notice it.
Now, if Valve would ever deal with the download and sync issues, that would be nice.
Steam is still slow and buggy.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Steam used to be slick and fast before it changed over to chromium and started trying to become a social media platform… also wish it had a simplified legacy version so people could still run it on older OSes to run the games they own that only run on older OSes. but apparently thats a super controversial topic that makes people unhinged
I still have my 3 disk box
I still have my original box/CDs too… i have no idea where they are, but I know i have them…somewhere.
Kinda miss waiting fucking forever for games with multiple CDs. I know I had a game that came retail with 5 discs, I just can’t remember which one. I remember KOTOR had 4.
I don’t personally remember any game retailing with 5 CDs, 4 was the limit, anything over that and they’d just go for a DVD instead
did counter-strike 2 come with half life? i vaguely remember half life but i remember counterstrike 2 being played a lot in the dorm floor in uni. i feel like i remember them being connected some how but i can’t recall.
No, Counterstrike 2 came out a couple years ago.
before that was global offensive.
the counter strike that came with HL2 was Counterstrike Source.
CS:S was such a phenominal game… So many years of nights spent staying up till 2am playing on the same server, with the same guys… and all of them gone now, like tears in the rain…
oooh that makes sense; yeah this would have been in 1999/2000ish. i remember a name similar to counterstrike but i wasn’t sure
i did a search and i think it was this one i was thinking of actually (source seems to be 2004 remake of it but i was out of uni at that time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counter-Strike_(video_game))
You probably played Counter Strike 1.5 or 1.6, or both at different times, these are the ones that were made off the original Half Life
I got a code with my 9600XT, it was delayed so long the card was pretty much outdated by the time it came out, but I still had the code that came with it!
Pretty sure I was able to pre load it on steam before release day, I remember I took the day off work just to play it.
That bridge level still, to this day, fires every one of my acrophobic neurons.
This is as much of a valid complaint now as it was back then.
There is absolutely no excuse for games now to be over 100GB in storage space. Unless you have the longest game ever that span across like 1 and a half “normal” game lengths. The biggest games now should be 60GB or less. So many developers refuse to compress things that could be compressed with zero noticeable loss in quality except for maybe a camera being really close to an object with an 8k display resolution.
At the absolute worst, do what games used to do for like 6 months before not caring: make the game for 1080p players, compression and all, then offer a free DLC with all the uncompressed stuff. At least make the storage feast optional.
A lot of that is shadows and lighting data, sometimes in unusual data structures without readily available compression methods. Compressing textures also impacts load times, obviously decompressing 10gb of jpgs could take a while. Still probably there are good compression methods and good tradeoffs to make, if any AAA studios actually cared about storage space (They do care a lot about GPU memory, just not storage space).
I wish games would release with low/medium, up to 1024x1024 textures and stuff by default and let people choose to download/install higher res stuff. If I’m not going to use the 4k pack, I don’t need it sitting on my hard drive
The most annoying thing is there is a trivial to implement way to close to halve these stupidly inflated sizes: make the highest resolution of textures a free DLC that you optionally install
/c/YourCommentButStroke
I mean, if the base game folder is .8 Gb, then aren’t their 3 mods the 1 Gig culprit? That’s a moddev issues and not many are concerned about optimizations.
Edit: I did misread the bit about the original game size.
You did misread but you’re probably also still correct. The modded game files are 1.82 total while the previous version of the game was 0.837, while I don’t know for sure what the newer version filesize was it was still an odd complaint for them to make.
Reminds of the those shitty Battlefront Remasters with upscaled 8 or 4k textures or whatever it was. Games went from being less than 5gbs to being 60 gb or something like that.
They are out… They are out before Half-Life 3…
Fun fact:
There was actually 4 games planned with the fourth one being an epic End Game style cross over finally of Portal, TF, Left for Dead, CS, and Half Life all coming together to fight the combine But unfortunately the series only had a Half Life and decayed down to 2 games in each series.
Narrator: Then while Casey sips his tea, dozen of lemmy users think for themselves “heh… stupid casey made me chucke…”. As he puts down his tea he winks, and everyone had a moment there…
I want this to be real
People getting whoosed by this is hilarious. Nicely done.
I think the TF2 crossover is just a little too ridiculous.
When I die, I’m gonna close my eyes and dream of this.
