Things that just don't happen in gaming anymore

While waiting for my 360 to set off on its holiday to Germany, it got my thinking about the good old days of gaming and what we did then that no longer happens due to technological changes that have advanced games and consoles to what we have got now.

1. Reliable consoles - Might as well start with the issue that has caused for this retrospective. When I get my 360 back from Germany, it will be my 3rd 360. My first died a death about a year and half after I bought it and now it's gone again.
The PS3 is also having issues, although nothing on the scale of the infamous RROD, before that the PS2 was also known to have reliability issues. The consoles I have owned before the 360 are the Master System, Mega Drive, PS1, N64 and a Gamecube, none of which ever broke down on me. Once you bought a console, you knew it was going to last until the next generation or until you got bored of it. None of these had to extend their warranties.

2. Games on tapes - Oh yes kids, there was a time that games came on tapes, hell there was a time when music came on tapes, actually thinking about it, some of you might not even know what a tape is!
You had a tape player that was connected to your system, in my case it was a Commodore 64, and you would wait for about half an hour for the game to load up. Some games were so long that you had to flip the tape over. Now if you were really lucky you had a disc drive, (floppy discs of course, ones that were actually floppy) and had next to no load time, but we never did. Seriously when people complain about load times these days, they have no idea how bad it was back in the day of tapes, or even the CDs on the PS1.

3. Blowing game cartridges to make them work - Oh yeah, back in the day of Master System, Mega Drives and then sometimes the N64, a game wouldn't work, the solution was simple, blowing down the connectors on the cartridge, put the game back in the console and it would normally work. Awesome.

4. Passwords - Back before hard drives on consoles, before memory cards or even saving on cartridges was the humble password. It would often be a random mixture letters and numbers, coupled with this was the fact it was the time when you had to scroll through every letter and number using just up and down on your control pad. It would waste gaming time and if you got just one letter wrong when you had wrote down your password you would have to start the game all over again (this was the days before the internet, so you couldn’t just look it up).