10 Mind-Blowing Gaming Features Everybody Takes For Granted
It's time to stop and admire what made the eighth console generation so great.
We’ve come a long way since the woodgrain-riddled, nearly neolithic age of the original Atari home console, and while it’s easy to lament the flaws of the modern day gaming industry, it’s important to recognize all of the positive changes that have been made in recent years.
Gaming is now more accessible than ever, and today’s consoles make the act of sitting down and playing a game much easier than it used to be. Some may yearn for the simplicity of the old 8-bit consoles or the roughly hewn polygonal approximations of the first PlayStation, but we’re so much better off now that a lot of those growing pains have been ironed out.
Sure, unstable launches and toxic microtransactions plague the medium today, but we’re far removed from the mass hardware failures that ruined the early Xbox 360 era, the obnoxiously long loading times which marred the PlayStation 1 (and it’s successor), or a lack of onboard memory common with every system prior to the seventh console generation.
With the dawn of a new age in gaming approaching, it may be time to stop and appreciate some of the advancements in tech which we take for granted.
10. Suspend/Resume
This may seem like a very minor feature, but the advent of putting a console in stasis and then returning to it the next day is extremely underappreciated. Today, it isn’t necessary to exit out of an app in between play sessions, and things can usually be picked up exactly where they were left upon returning.
In the old days, consoles simply didn’t have the wherewithal to stay running for days at a time, and, if left for too long, hardware malfunctions were essentially inevitable. That is no longer that case, as both the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 can be put into sleep mode, suspending operations until the player returns.
For gamers who grew up constantly waiting for games to load and discs to spin up before playing, this is an awesome innovation. No longer do we have to wait for a console to ready itself before resuming our adventures.
Today, the only thing standing between us and the game is the simple press of a button. While it’s still a good idea to shut a console down every once and awhile, it makes the act of actually jumping into the digital action far less laborious.