The way they patched those games in the 90s was to call it a sequel. It came out about a year, sometimes sooner, after the last one. And in doing it that way, we got to keep every version. PC games used to give you installers for every patch. If patching is done sparingly, and focused on minor changes or bug fixes, this is manageable. I'm sure plenty of devs would argue that this doesn't work for their game, but the alternative is that we just lose it all to time.

MVC2 is preserved as long as you've got at least one other person to play it with. With a Discord server, you could fill out a lobby even for a game like MAG that has over 100 players in a match, provided they actually gave you the server to run it yourself.

[–] NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 1 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

Actually quite a lot of games had multiple revisions even as far back as cartridges. That is why you'll often hear a speedrunner say "This is done on the 1.01 North American version" and the like. Mostly my point was more to say that there is no question of "did every single patch get archived"

And as a huge Dawn of War fan: you can have every single patcher from Fileplanet and STILL not have a snowball's chance of getting the version you want. But that is more comedic than not.

Because:

MVC2 is preserved as long as you’ve got at least one other person to play it with.

You can play MVC2. You can't preserve the CULTURE of mvc2. Because, to switch gears to Third Strike: You and me probably aren't going to do the kind of insane crap that folk like Daigo are able to do.

But also, like I mentioned above: You can get a hotel room game going. You won't have anywhere near enough thoery crafting and experience to really run into cases where one character is noticeably better than another.

With a Discord server, you could fill out a lobby even for a game like MAG that has over 100 players in a match, provided they actually gave you the server to run it yourself.

Let me tell you something as a Tribes 2 player. I can basically get a full server most nights of the week. But all the folk who are still playing Tribes? They never stopped. So the experience of hopping into a game in 2024 is absolutely nothing like it was back in 2004. It is a completely different kind of amazing but it is not "Tribes 2" from a "cultural" standpoint

[–] ampersandrew@lemmy.world 2 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

The multiple cartridges is splitting hairs. Often they just output at different television standards or fixed a rare game breaking bug. They didn't add a new character or change how many are on a team, which is a fundamentally different game design.

If you sit two people in a room long enough with Third Strike, they will end up playing Yun and Chun-Li. If you sit two people in a room long enough with MVC2, they will end up playing Magneto, Storm, and Sentinel. No one had to tell me to play Fox in Melee before I had any idea that there was a Melee "scene"; the rules of the game steered me that way after hundreds or perhaps thousands of hours. That's what you preserve when the game can still be played.