The replayability.

Shame on you, people who told EA it's okay to turn cheats into a DLC feature (though I recall Namco also being one of the earlier offenders with one of the Tales games).

I miss the way you used to buy videogames at Toys R Us. They still sell games of course, but it's just not the same. When I was a kid, you would pick out a game and bring a slip of paper over to the little stockroom where the guy would go and pull out your game. Just standing there at the counter waiting for your game to come out was so exciting.

They used to carry D&D at Toys Я Us too. Until Tom Hanks put a stop to that.

I remember that too in fact I was thinking about that the other day. I remember a few times when my brother and I would go to Toys R Us to buy TMNT figures we would go down the isle that had the pictures of the games with the tickets below them in plastic sleeves. If we came across a game that we really wanted but didnt have enough money for it we would grab all the tickets out of the sleeves thinking that will keep the store from selling out of the game lol.

Until the time you get your slip, pay for the game and go to the counter to be told they have none left in stock lol. I can laugh about it now

I actually never had that happen. I think they made sure that how many slips they had matched how many copies of the game they had in stock so that wouldnt happen.

Not having to install updates every time you turn on the system -_-
Also, not having to worry about online passes

The pure simplicity of the consoles and all the funky accessories like the light gun. Something about it just feel right.
The Zany creativeness that results in games like Earthworm Jim, ZAMN, and Tomba
The awesome but wrongfully overlooked genres like beat em ups and side-scrolling shooters, full blown retail ones.
That sense of care, passion, and I don't know how else to put it, soul. That little magical spark that tells you the developers put a lot of time and effort into their creation.

Its weird but while I'm a 90's kid i feel like I could have just as easily grew up in the 80's, I miss the Zany style and how everything was funky, hip, or rad. I'm with @Waveboy on this one, Hooray for Youtube.

It happened to me

I miss the fact that it would take you several hours instead of many days to finish them. It used to be an average of 1 to 2 hours. Now it's 40.

I miss back when there weren't any of these repetitive first person shooter games. There are way too many now, it's insane! I also loved back when people didn't care about the graphics. It was about the gameplay and pure fun, just like it should be. That was all true until Xbox came in and ruined everything

I was born playing today's consoles, but there is stuff that seemed so great back when I play the virtual console. Sure Nintendo is making the NSMB series where the classics are reborn, but why can't developers do it as well and blockbuster-y as it was in the past? The controllers were always interesting and simple back then too. Those games even had a lot of fun in stock. Super Metroid was so great, it felt like an alien gave mankind his technology! The classic Zelda games had a creative way to inject 3D in side-scrolling perspective! There is so many games that was missed.....

That time never existed.

Seems like graphics were actually a bigger deal in the 80s and 90s than they are now. Look at the best selling consoles in the last ten years. The PS2 and Wii were not known for stellar graphics.

The thing is graphics were the main way to judge a console's power back in the day, these days it seems to be all about specs. The still play a role but more along the lines of a fluid, pretty picture. Every time I see a console vs. console topic these days the first thing people bring up is one blowing the other out of the water spec-wise.

I have to say I do miss how the console wars back then were more like schoolyard rivalries or a cold war than an all-out frag fest . There was arguing over which was better but for the most part Nintendo had Mario, Final Fight, and Final Fantasy while Sega had Sonic, Streets of Rage, and Phantasy Star, kids just picked the one they liked best. Now you have Nintendo vs. Sony vs. Microsoft and all this nonsense like Nintendos for babies or or whos more "hardcore". What happened to actually playing games?

I miss the games treating me like a smart person instead of telling me how to do every single thing every single freaking time I have to do it like if i'm a really dumb person. I don't feel accomplished by doing a puzzle if the game tells me all the hints. I don't feel bass @$$ by pressing R1 to auto lock into an enemy to shoot. You get my point, I miss the learning by doing things in games. These days games are way to helpful....mind as well have a button for it to do it all by itself.

Quality. Simplicity. When the biggest arms race for video games was NOT having the most realistic graphics, it was more about gameplay. I miss when adventure games were more common than the FPS (N64 era), or when platformers were king (SNES). With sprites, we didn't have to worry about how well the graphics age. Unfortunately, N64 didn't have this advantage, but there are Super NES games that will never look bad. There's something 2D games capture that I never grow tired from and that's why, no matter how pretty it looks, New Super Mario Bros games well never become memorable to me, definitely not more than Super Mario Bros 3 or Super Mario World. Even a game like Yoshi's Island, torturing me with the wails of Baby Mario's tantrums, has such charm, such character. I want a new top down Zelda game. I want a new side scrolling Metroid. Today, games try to race to be the most advanced, forgetting how beautiful simplicity can be. I truly value the developer that chooses to remind us that games don't always need to push a system to be fun.

Back then we had to buy 32X and Sega CD if we wanted to update our console.

That's not really true. I recently looked through a bunch of old late 80's/early 90's video game magazines and the single thing I took away from it was that having better graphics than the next guy was a huge deal then as well. They were just constrained by the technology of the time as to how they could achieve that.