We Should Bring Back Game Cartridges

A lot of my video game playing lately has been on portable consoles, mainly the 3DS, DS and Gameboy Advance SP. In playing these games, I’ve grown a greater appreciation for game cartridges. It’s beautiful when you think about it, the entire game and save in a removable and highly portable form factor. I’m also amazed by the amount of content they fit in some of these games. The tricks game developers used to show depth and detail in such “weak” systems, especially the GBA, are so cool.

I remember watching a video about the original Pokémon games and how part of the reason behind some Pokémon designs was their technical limitations. The developers had to get resourceful with the way they wanted to represent their designs. With modern games, developers take for granted how powerful gaming machines are and, with that, how much storage is available. Instead of a well-designed and optimized game, they can ship it incomplete or ineffective cause the user can make up for it. See Helldrivers 2, reducing their installation size by 85% to 23 Gbs. According to their post, the game was so large because they had duplicate assets that they believed made the game more accessible to players with HDDs. However, after testing, they learned that the difference between the storage mediums was less than they thought, so they were able to greatly reduce the game size. There’s a video by the channel DeltaSeeker (see below). They are attempting to demake Pokémon Mystery Dungeon for the 8-bit system, which introduces many limitations to the game, for example, how many pixels the game can load on the screen at one time. So he had to be creative with mixing sprites and game tiles to achieve the effect he wanted. The limitation increased creativity.

By bringing back game cartridges, I mean we should be asking for optimized games, not games that rely on the system’s power to make up for the game’s faults. By expecting complete games in their cartridges, developers would have to take more time to make sure their game is shippable. Also, bring back manuals with the game boxes again!