Free games, got these aplenty from friends or bday/xmas presents.:)

Multiplayer games with chat: we had these. The chat was real time, and rarely devolved into kids that recently discovered puberty throwing hateful insults at each other, although the occasional antagonistic remark was often made between friends.

download games: true, but not like downloading a game makes it any different than what's on the discs/carts.

patches to fix games: most games didn't have game breaking bugs and were released as a complete finished product. There were certainly bugs present, but it was extremely rare for a game to release in the state that many games do now on a regular basis.

From the article:

no hard drives or on console saves: true, but carts could accomadate saves in some cases. later, memory cards were used when CD's were introduced. Not as convienant, but served the same purpose, and in some ways were more convienant.

No social media, message boards, or comment sections:

BS. The internet is older than that. AOL and Compuserve say hi. AOL had a pretty vibrant gaming channel. I personally ran BBS boards before I hit my teens that discussed gaming on a regular basis. The information was more scattered than it is today, but it was there.

No online MP: Yeah, but we had real life MP(see comment at beginning of topic)

No DLC: yep, and it was glorious. We could get all those extras in our initial game purchase. Not that DLC isn't sometimes good, but too many examples of DLC abuse by publishers have taken a good thing and made it into something cringeworthy.

No YT or online Strat guides: I'll give the article this one. Without a purchased strat guide some game you would never be able to complete all the extras that devs put into it...particularly JRPG's. That to me was more a matter of poor game design that managed to obfuscate the fact that content existed elsewhere in games, but that's really another topic.

I think things are mostly better now, but the 80's were simpler, and less annoying.

* In the 90's you found out about a game from going to a friends house and playing their games, or maybe you saw a commercial two weeks before release.

* Also a lot of us found our games from game rental stories.

You could walk in and spend 30-40 minutes trying to decide what game or games you wanted.

* It was the best way to experience a game.

* You literally found out about it while searching the aisles....or at a friends, and you got to play it right then and there.

* There wasn't months and months of hype to ruing the experience for you.

* It was instant awesome gaming, and it helped a lot of us appreciate games that now a days probably would only get 4/10,5/10, or 6/10 ratings.

I know a played a ton of "bad" games, but we all found a way to have fun with them.

* Also in the 90's you had to rely on imagination and creativity a bit more so me and my friends a lot of the time would create our own games within the games.

We would just create rules on the fly and try it out and sometimes it was better than the actual game.

* I don't remember any of the hate there is now. Even the SNES vs Sega wars were pretty tame and mostly all in good fun.

SNES games still played Sega and Sega gamers still played SNES games and it was all good and we mostly all got along.

* The internet is amazing, but it allows the worst people in existence to have influence over those who aren't smart enough to know better.