It's funny; I was thinking about making a video regarding the two handfuls of multi-disc PS2 games out there, but this is decently extensive stuff on the entire history.
I'm wondering how companies are doing releases for PS4, PS5, and PC, knowing people constantly update their hardware. When you buy a game on PC, are you really getting the full up-to-date version, with reworked assets and gameplay, when the company re-releases the same game on PS5? Or are you just getting the original release, some games even being almost a decade old by this point?
Why can't we wonder about Switch games so big that they need 2nd Cartridges? Sonic 3K is the most famous example of a game being too big to fit onto a single cartridge back on the Genesis or Mega Drive. Also it is shocking to learn that consoles don't read games from the discs anymore, I miss the way games used to be.
@@TheGoldenBolt Real talk man, loved the video. I've always had a huge appreciation for stuff like this, the little details in the industry some people might not think of often. It was a real treat to watch!
@@drewengel7073 There's data on both discs. It didn't fit on a single dual-layer Blu-ray. They designate one of the discs as a "play" disc because it makes sense considering the game is installed but needs a disc inserted to play.
A game that uses the PS1’s RAM storage really well is Vib Ribbon, a rhythm game. You can take the disc out, and put any music CD in, and it will load a level off of the music in it. The only thing being directly loaded from the game’s disc is it’s music.
@@CaptainApathetic exactly how it did before, you just put the CD into the system. To play the basic levels you just have no disc in there so it isn’t trying to read new data.
The practice of writing data on disk in a way that matches the actual order of playing the game continued long into even Xbox One and PS4. It's also usual for devs to have duplicates on disk for data that is used in several levels or areas, just so that it's locality is good. We still used to do this on the modern Tomb Raider trilogy. I worked on this and packing for disks was programmed like this, it's quite common in the industry but maybe it did not catch on until Crash.
Hey, idk if you knew this, but the difference between disk and disc is that a disc is a cd-type of disc, while a disk is usually more like a floppy disk. I’m not trying to be rude by typing this, but I thought you would think it’s awesome maybe. 😅
are modern games doing this less? cuz they seem to have more problems with hard drives now, like if i install a newer game onto a hard drive i get more popin and stuff like that
One he forgot to mention that did this was the initial 360 release of The Witcher 2. The game itself was so poorly optimized they thought it needed two discs (a little foreshadowing about Cyberpunk 2077 on consoles) and duplicated the game world and all logic between both with the only unique data being story and audio related. They later recognized this error and, when the enhanced Silver Box Edition later released, they later got the entire game on a single disc. There is also evidence that they noticed this sooner than that enhanced release as installing the original release from the disc takes up 14 gb of storage but buying the digital version from Xbox Live (or Microsoft Store on Xbox One) shows the game as taking up only 7 gb (Silver Box Edition is not available digitally on consoles for some reason despite having exclusive fixes, new exclusive content, and some updated visuals).
It probably helps as well that pre-rendered cutscenes got less common on the PS2, since they became less necessary. The system could handle more intense stuff in real time in-engine, so you didn't need to pre-render it.
Yeah that definitely helped out quite a bit, but a lot of PS2 games still stuck out with FMV's for big events like FFX's opening where they wanted it to look as good as it possibly could
@@deadair32101 often FMVs were used when there's a lot of different scenes swapping, which would be hard to load in memory, flashbacks that use assets not in-game, and the hard effects like big water splashes. My fav implementation was in Grandia 2 (Dreamcast game) where some spell effects were overlaid green screened videos, it was great!
When I was a kid, the first ever 2 disc game I owned was Tales of Symphonia. I remember being blown away by the fact that it needed 2 discs, as someone who had up to that point only had Nintendo systems and thus had never seen a multi disc game before. I for some reason believed it having 2 discs inherently meant it was a better game than a single disc game. No idea why; sometimes your brain does things that make no sense. All that said, Takes of Symphonia was a phenomenal game and remains one of my all-time favorites to this day. The 2 disc thing coloring my perception of it might play a tiny role in that.
nah man i had plenty of experience with 2 disc games, symphonia is a banger and its a shame they never released a sequel. THough after watching this video, im going to assume the only reason it was 2 discs is because of all of those absolutely godly Anime cutscenes.
@@xiphosmaniac They did release one for the Nintendo Wii (subtitled Dawn of the New World, or something similar). Didn't personally like the direction they took the story, but the combat felt as good as ever.
Tales of Symphonia was my first experience with New Game Plus (Not that it was the first game to have it). Must have played through that game like 5 times. So great. I remember making lloyd in City of Heroes
You weren't kidding when you said to expect something different. This is such a cool concept for a video and it isn't one I've seen covered before. Nicely made as always!
Final Fantasy Type-0 on PSP was an interesting case. Disc 1 contained just the game's first AND last mission, all the many involved FMVs and so on. Disc 2 contained the middle 90% of the game and entire world map. So you'd swap pretty soon into the game, and then swap back to Disc 1 to finish it. Very similar to the Mass Effect case you mentioned!
One correction for @19:16, DVD’s and CD’s read faster towards the outside, not centre. Which is why a lot of games include a large padding file to push game data to the outside of the disc, for faster read speeds (and why most ISO file can be compressed so much).
Yeah wait why did I say that That's just a complete goof, nice catch! I should've caught that slip during any part of editing. I even caught myself accidentally call it Gran Turismo Port.
also CAV vs CLV depends on the drive and not the media. The PS2 reads DVDs with the same data rate anywhere on the disc beause it‘s CLV. Gamecube and Xbox read in CAV Mode wich sped up seek times significantly as the disc didn‘t need to be spun at different speeds and the data rate increases on the outside. While the PS3 still read in CLV Mode the PS4 used CAV like all the other consoles.
@Lurch7861 Actually drives were always CLV when new media was introduced (and CDs were 1st introduced as music). CLV means a constant data speed at the head, regardless of reading place. CDs, DVDs, Blu-rays were all CLV at 1x, 2x. Few years development of each made CAV drives appear (when electronics could process more than 4x on outer edge). So saying PS3 Blu-ray was CLV vs Xbox 360 DVD was CAV makes sense, as DVDs had years of development by then. And as others said, CAV vs CLV is a drive characteristic, not media (although some drive/SW combination might recognize constant playback and turn to lower-speed CLV).
My favourite combination of mismatched cutscenes in FFVII is when you put in disc 2 when entering Gold Saucer for the first time. You get Tifa falling into the Lifestream with Cloud on the wheelchair, but set to the really upbeat Gold Saucer theme. I can't remember what led to me discovering it back in the day, but I sadly didn't try it with any other combination.
@29:24. Yup. I'll never forget how flabbergasted I was when I opened up my PC copy of GTA V to see that there were SEVEN DVDS IN THERE! I found it super cheap at Wal-Mart on day, so that's the only reason I went for a physical copy of a modern PC game
I remember that release as well, I pre ordered it off Amazon.. I was like really?! Why couldn't this have been one Blu Ray or at least have a Blu Ray option to buy, Sheesh
I just want to take a moment to say thank you for adding proper subtitles! It means a lot to those of us who rely on subtitles to fully understand and enjoy the video. It's appreciated. Thank you.
I cannot express how much I love that you used footage of Astro’s Playroom while you’re discussing the various technical parts of system functionality, like showing the thunder cloud segment while talking about RAM. That just adds an extra touch to this whole thing, absolutely adore it.
This concept is so interesting to me because as a 20 year old gamer I started playing in the PS2/GameCube era and never had a game with two discs, so hearing about games like FF8 with four different discs seemed unreal to me, and now we’ve finally gotten to big enough games to where we’re once again having multi disc games
No litterally can't go back to multi disc why. Because litterally games can't get any bigger 90 percent of gigs used by modern game are empty unused gigs litterally every game that's more than 100 gigs is just to force us to upgrade our consoles and spend money.
Metal Gear Solid's disc space was mostly taken up by audio. Most of the cinematics in the game were real-time in engine graphics. Also the PS1 had 512KB for sound.
Excellent observation. With the excellent producers such as Takanari Ishiyama, Gigi Meroni, Kazuki Muraoka, Lee Jeon Myung, TAPPY, Hiroyuki Togo, and of course Rika Muranaka, it’s no surprise the music stands up so well today.
I remember one time I was near the end and wanted to see how far I could backtrack before needing to swap disks. Made it all the way to the starting area, then realized the whole game is basically cutscenes lol
Good video, note on Metal Gear Solid: it had almost no cinematics. It's audio files for endless cutscenes and codec calls that took a lot of space and many weren't repeated between disks. Outside of Otacon and Liquid dialogue flashbacks with a minute or so each of real life documentary footage spliced in, the only FMV I can recall was the end credits.
Correction: CD/DVDs load faster the farther data is from the center. Not closer. Devs even use dummy files to push data to the edge of the disc to load faster There's also a multi-cart Vita game (Gundam G Genesis) and a few multi-UMD PSP games
Back in 2000, I had a virtual CD program and I created 5 virtual disc mounts for my Windows PC and made images of each of the Riven discs. I then edited the initialization settings and mounted the images. Riven played seamlessly.
It’s interesting to see the struggles of developers in the ps1 days having to optimize where certain parts of game should be on a disc for load times and finding ways to have the game render out environments whereas nowadays we just get a 100gb install to an SSD haha
There are a lot of games where, if the data didn't take up the whole disc, the dev would use dummy data to push the actually useful data to specific parts of the disc to take advantage of a disc being a circle and CD's using constant linear velocity
And long before that, programmers of the Atari 9600 had to time every part of the code depending on where the electron beam of your TV was currently sweeping across the screen. Time it wrong, and the whole picture is borked. It's called racing the beam. All because there was no video memory to buffer the graphics.
yeah back in the day developers actually had to try and compress their games as much as physically possible in order to be efficient. now developers cant or dont even bother with file compression, giving us games like call of duty, which im willing to bet are going to take 200g of space in a few years time. they already take 150g
One of the coolest features built in mind with swapping discs was the Vigilante 8 games. In the second game, if you swapped out the disc at the main menu and put in the first game, it would load the first game's maps and they were fully playable, with some new features from the second game, like repair spots and stuff included into the map's features. It was like a reverse, free expansion. In both games, you could also load your own music in the middle of a battle by pausing and swapping the disc with an audio CD. Man I miss those games, and those times.
I loved Vigilante games, still no car combat game with actually decent physics like it, and the atmosphere was unparalleled. Why all games don't have funk music, jumpsuits and Afros as obligatory features?
I remember, as a kid, my Ace Combat 5 disc would occasionally stop being read by the ps2. You could tell exactly when it happened because the music would suddenly cut out. You could still fly around the entire map, shoot down enemies and even complete the level, but you better hope it started reading again before the loading screen or you'd have to reset. It wasn't until only a couple years ago I realized why this was.
I was also extremely curious why I could open my disc tray and the game would still run as long as you didn't move too far away from where your character was when the disc was removed. As soon as it needed to read extra data boom the game would completely freeze up. Now all these questions have been answered for me nearly 2 decades later.
Really? I've played that game since it came out and I've never noticed that. Maybe I'll play it again now and try to push it just to see. Are there any specific missions you remember this happening on?
My copy of ace 5 is scratched like we used as skateboard for a family of 5 for a decade. I remember when it stopped working. I was so glad. Those stupid red planes man. As a child. I was not good at that game. As an adult I'd rather play Elden Ring with inverted controls then ever go back .
The GameCube discs are called mini discs, it was a format that only lasted for about 5 years in the early 2000s and late '90s. I remember getting a Bionicle game as a pack in with a box of cereal in like 2004
I had an audiophile friend in high school in the late 2000s who had a minidisc player, but they had to order them from Japan and burn music to it themselves. It's nice that they were backwards compatible with *most* CD and DVD drives. I got drivers on a mini disc last month.
@@Tynansdtm yeah most drives still have an indent for minidiscs. It's important for exotic hardware that night not have the website with drivers up anymore as many drivers came in minidisks as well.
I will never forget the day I was reorganizing the Pre Owned drawers at the GameStop I work at to find that Wolfenstein The New Order is a 4 Disc Xbox 360 title. I was actually shocked finding that out.
For L.A Noire, there are also multiple versions of the map. Depending on the cases that are on each disc, some interiors are missing while on digital and in the following gen remaster, the entire map is available, letting you explore interiors outside of the respective cases. In addition to games with DLC on the original Xbox, the 360 also had Skyrim and Fallout 3 with the GOTY and Legendary editions respectively, the second disc containing an app to install the DLC while disc 1 is just a retail disc of the standard edition with a different print. This means you can use disc 2 to install the DLC then play with a standard edition disc. When inserted in Xbox One and Series X, disc 2 simply adds all the DLC to the download queue automatically. More 360 games with the split multiplayer are Assassin's Creed 3 and 4. Since backwards compatible games on Xbox One and onwards are based on the digital version, only disc 1 is needed and the singleplayer and multiplayer are accessible from the main menu. Another oddity is Halo 3 ODST that included the Halo 3 multiplayer on a second disc. The second disc actually reports to the console as being Halo 3, allowing for crossplay with native Halo 3 players, transfering of progression and earning achievements, but when launching, there is simply no campaign. With the digital version and when playing on later consoles, the modified Halo 3 is shipped as a secondary executable that can be launched from the main menu. Halo CE Anniversary did something similar where you could play a remake of the original game's multiplayer through a set of custom modes and maps for Halo Reach. On both the physical and digital versions, there is a secondary executable of a modified version of Reach, allowing crossplay with Reach players that owned the Anniversary DLC for that game. One last case of collection/on disc DLC is Grand Theft Auto IV. That game had two DLC campaigns accessible by picking New Game from the menu, where you would be prompted to select the campaign if there were than one available. Once in, each campaign had its own autosave slot but all shared the same manual save slots. The two dlcs were eventually bundled together as a physical release known as Episodes From Liberty City, there you would be prompted to pick the episode to load on startup and had GTA IV missing from the New Game selection. That version however also reported itself as being GTA IV so it would share saves and achievements with the base game. The whole experience was eventually released where on Xbox, it was simply a bundle of the GTA IV and Episodes discs, while on PS3, it was a single disc with all three campaigns available from the New Game menu.
I'm surprised you didn't go back and at least mention the Famicom Disk System. I don't know if there were games that used multiple disks, but I think there were some games that used both sides of one disk in a single-sided drive. So the game would still stop and force you to take out a disk and put a disk in to continue, even if it was the same disk.
A couple years ago, I played Koudelka, which was a game that could be completed in less than 8 hours, but because its FMVs were of the highest quality for its time along with a plethora of voice acting, the game was split into 4 discs. Disc one was literally an hour long.
22:52 I'm unsure what era you're specifying when you call this a "throwback," but I do want to point out that the Famicom Disk System version of Zelda II: The Adventure of Link does practically the same thing. It houses the title screen, file select, Great Palace (final dungeon), and ending on side A of the disk, and the rest of the game on side B.
Great retrospective. I always found multi-disc games alluring, and the edge cases really interesting: stuff like Gran Turismo 2 breaking it up between game modes, or Rodea the Sky Soldier being (to my knowledge) the only Wii U game to ship with a second disc - containing the game's ill-fated Wii predecessor. Seeing the subject laid out with considerations for technical reasoning and development anecdotes is really interesting, and I'd love to see other subjects covered like this in the future.
Rodea was another tiny chunk of video I decided to cut out, since it's a unique almost special edition rather than a proper two-disc game. I knew eventually somebody would hit on it, I'm glad to see it was so soon!
I liked how Tales of Symphonia did it for the Gamecube. On the first disc starting a new file you begin in Iselia when prompted to insert the second disc you are back in Iselia.
This is such a cool topic. As someone who grew up with PSone and later GameCube and PS2, a multi-disc game just felt so epic. Like "Wow, there's so much game here they couldn't fit it on a single disc?!" and because Final Fantasy was so well known for their multi-disc games, quite a few games would ship in multi-disc cases despite only being a single disc, if nothing else to signify "Hey, this is an epic RPG, too!"
Just the idea of embarking in such an epic adventure was both thrilling and overwhelming. It was awesome. I remember the first time I saw The Legend of Dragoon in a store and I was like whaaaaaaat?! 4 discs?? Never got to play it until much later, when games that long were already a common thing, but back then it was truly mind blowing.
Fun fact about Riven, The Sequel To Myst. It could easily fit on four CDs, at least on the PC. The fifth disc is entirely because of the 5 theme running through the entire game.
If I recall correctly, LA: Noire had multiple discs back on Xbox 360. Seems kind of bizarre looking back on it. But then again, various modern games often have a "data disc" and a "play disc" on the physical version.
@@CaptainApathetic And because the read speeds of the 360 are "serviceable". On the PS3 the read data speed is really bad, that is why most games do require installing data, the ones who dont have this you start to wish they could, how lenghty the load times are compared to the same game on the 360.
Something not noted about Mass Effect 2 being split into two discs is how it effected development. Originally it was intended for the player to be able to recruit all the squadmates in whatever order they wanted(Legion is a bit complicated), it’s why the second batch of squadmates have dialogue for the recruitment missions for the first batch and on Horizon.
IIRC only Tali has Horizon dialogue but it saddens me not being able to bring Samara and Thane to early missions. Mass Effect 2 has a lot of NPC content people don't experience because of its structure, biggest offender is people never bringing Legion on any missions other than his loyalty, not knowing doing 2 missions during IFF install is safe (and in fact, will be forced on you), if you HAVE 2 missions. But everyone panics and clears EVERYTHING before and it's sad. I love doing Overlord or LotSB on different points too, spicing up the pacing. Hopefully they made mods for LE now (haven't checked) that streamline rare content.
I remember using the disc/lid open trick in FFVII when casting spells such as Regen on the party. In a challenging battle? Cast All*Regen, pop the lid open and wait while your health continues to climb but the rest of the battle is essentially frozen in time. Once done, close the lid and continue.
I really appreciate your Astro SSD Speedway gameplay while talking about the faster access time of the current gen consoles thanks to their SSDs. Great video!
@19:21 That is incorrect, it is the other way around. As the disc's rotational velocity is a constant, the outer layers spin faster relative to the inner ones; thus more data can be read / second from the outer ones.
Since I played mostly on PS2 when I was a kid, and later on PS3, my first experience with a 2-disc game was Red Dead Redemption 2 on PS4 I wasn't surprised I must say, seeing how some of the late CoD titles that I played (Infinite Warfare and BO III) needed a 80GB installation each
Sonic Unleashed was also almost a two disc game on Xbox 360, because of how much detail they wanted to put into Hedgehog Engine's lighting system. There's an early build of Sonic Unleashed dated just 78 days before the game releases (and is still somehow pretty unfinished), and disc 1 has most of the game on there, except for the last 4 areas: Arid Sands (Shamar), Skyscraper Scamper (Empire City), Jungle Joyride (Adabat) and Eggmanland. Most of the game would've been on disc 1 and then everything from Arid Sands/Shamar and onwards being on disc 2, it's why Professor Pickle moves from Spagonia/Rooftop Run to Shamar, so you'd never have to do frantic disc swapping after playing levels, going to Spagonia, swapping to disc 1, talk to Professor Pickle, tells you to go to a disc 2 location, leave, move to a disc 2 location, swap to disc 2, and repeat. Since the game is on one disc nowadays anyways, it's pretty pointless for him to move there now, but I suppose they just did that in the case they really needed to ship the game on multiple discs for the 360 version. They really wanted to make the game so pretty, that it had to be on multiple discs... Now, the way they pulled this off with one is, that they didn't. The released version has light fields in a lower resolution, so years of developing a new lighting engine resulted in lighting that's less detailed than it could've been. But don't worry, Sonic Team found a way to update the game without SEGA having pay a fee to update the game for free (because I think Xbox required you to pay to update your game at the time). So, to get the high-res lightfields back, you just need to buy every DLC's extra act missions, and those will update the main game's lightfields as well (which is convenient too, since some acts don't change the lighting at all anyways). That way, all lightfields can be restored to how they should look, except for Eggmanland. That just never got a DLC pack so we're stuck with the low-res lightfields, especially since we never found disc 2 of that early build.
@@EggFighterXB- The PS3 and 360 versions are nearly identical, apart from the PS3 version having its framerate uncapped and not having the hubworld transformation animation.
@@Cosmycal Well... It's an educated, very safe guess. Why else would Prof Pickle move from one continent that's on the beta disc 1 to the other continent on beta disc 2? And why else would they install the better lightfields for the maingame through the DLC? ^^' And the GDC panel about Unleashed also asked both console manufacturers how they need to allow bigger discs to make optimization less of a hassle for them. I wouldn't at all be surprised if a developer has previously admitted that it was going to be a 2 disc game though.
My biggest memory of Insert Disc 2 is playing Oddworld: Abe's Exodus on the Playstation. It was so cool that I had to open the disc drive and swap the CDs, and when you first opened it the disc was still spinning.
The xbox 360 dlc installer discs are an interesting case. For the bioshock collection, it uses an interface similar to the original blades dashboard, which I find neat.
You know, this is actually a very interesting topic. Gonna start watching it soon. Hoping stuff like multi disk PS1 games on PS3 shows up. On the digital release they made changing disk an emulator setting, but i have no idea how they did it for actual disks.
With physical PS1 discs on PS3, you would receive the same prompt that you would on a real PS1. Simply eject the disc, then insert the next one, and the game continues just as it was intended.
I was one of those people who picked up the PC disc copy of GTA V. With my internet speeds at the time it was a 2-3 hour disc install vs leaving my computer on for over 3 straight days to download it. So I definitely don't regret my decision at least.
This was such a great video. I was looking on your channel page and I had to double check that I liked this video. Having to use multiple discs definitely takes me back to the first console we had growing up in the ps1.
I remember when I first brought home Lost Odyssey for the Xbox360 and being surprised to discover it was 4 discs long. To my knowledge, that was the only game for the 360 that had that many discs; there were plenty of 2 and 3 disc games out there but only Lost Odyssey had 4. The nice thing about that game was once you were on Disc 4, you could revisit disc 1-3 areas without having to swap the disc in the player. Conversely, in Star Ocean: The Last Hope, depending on the area you wanted to explore, you had to constantly change between discs 2 and 3 which in my opinion was not very well executed when doing end game quests and farming.
hmmm i wonder if lost odyssey had the game on all 4 discs and the only reason to change discs was to access specific cutscenes. That seems to be the major thing regarding these multi disc games
Funnily enough of all games on the 360, its version of Wolfenstein: The New Order also came on 4 discs. Disc 1 was purely an installer and the remaining 3 had each act of the game on it If I had to guess why that is I’d say it’s because that game was mainly developed as a PS4/Xbone game and the compression onto the DVDs wasn’t all that effective, but I’ve also heard that it was deliberately done to make it much more difficult to pirate
couple other games i remember beginning as multi disc experiences, then were later ported to a single disc on later consoles. Tales of Symphonia on Gamecube (which was later rereleased on PS2, PS3, Wii), started as 2 discs before ports. and in the same vein, the original Valkyrie Profile was 2 discs, then became a single UMD for PSP
There was one PSP game that got released in NA that did have two UMD's, *but* it didn't get a physical release in NA. Trails in the Sky SC was released very late, after the PSP era basically ended, after a legendary development hell sequence, and to cut costs was released digital only.
I was writing a comment about why I don't think "4K Blu-ray" discs make any sense to be used for movies but accidentally hit the keyboard shortcut to reload the page and I don't want to write that whole thing again.
As someone whose childhood was dominated by Nintendo (because Sony was "too adult" for my parents and because I love Pokemon), the concept of multiple discs was foreign to me for a long time. The first I played was Tales of Symphonia on the Gamecube and then Baten Kaitos. Now I finally have some context as to why Nintendo didn't often have to do this. Oh, and on the topic of double-layered discs, this actually became a problem when Brawl released. My brother and me bought the Wii at launch and so the console wasn't capable of actually reading that new type of disc. Nintendo of Europe actually offered to modify consoles to remedy this and so we sent in our Wii just for Brawl. Almost lost it for good too, because the mailman lost it near a neighbour's house when buying lunch...
I definitely remember this especially for final fantasy games but just games in general back then for whatever reason seem to have a high probability of being multi disk particularly if they were a larger game which it's kind of weird because there'd be other games that are technically bigger files but was all on one desk so I never truly understood it unless it was just a mere fact of how they optimized the game file
Please insert side b has been a thing in early floppy disk systems on PC during the pre Hard Drive era of hardware due to also not having all games fit on a single Side of a disk. This is why Hard drives were a godsend up until we got Red Book audio on cd based games. Riven was also 5 CDs on PC, but was also one of two games in 1997 to be released on a little new format at the time, the DVD. The DVD was so much larger, that they managed to encode a better bitrate for the FMVs. And as for Phantasmogoria, Yes it's still 7 CDs on PC.
I was hoping someone would bring up floppies. Back in the 5.25 era you would even have to flip it over like a record, as you mentioned. The Famicom Disk System had games like that too.
I have always wondered why games called the sound Redbook when it was CDAudio, For example Descent 2 you could play its music in a normal CD player. Sega CD games you could also play a lot of their soundtracks in a normal player too.
I have an interesting thing to note about Tokimeki memorial that may change where the game may stand in the running for “most discs” Tokimeki memorial 2 is interesting as a dating sim/visual novel as it features the “Emotional Voice System” or EVS, which allows the player to set up how 2 of the game’s characters say the player’s name, down to the inflection and pronunciation. The game shipped with 5 discs and I’m not sure if this system is relegated to its own disc or not- but it gets interesting when you realize that there are 3 (also Japanese exclusive) discs that shipped with issues of a certain magazine that contained 3 more EVS discs for 3 more characters. So, a totally complete version of Tokimeki Memorial 2 is a total of 8 discs: the 5 the game shipped with and the 3 that were given out later through magazines. It might not count because not only are these EVS discs not games at all, just a disc that put a file on your memory card so that the girl would read your name, and also were released after the fact, but overall it’s pretty neat I think!
@@velvetbutterfly I’m pretty sure they just skipped over your name. As in, the line would be voiced but they just wouldn’t say your name at all. If you had the data with your name on it, then they would insert it into the line if that makes sense
@@velvetbutterfly they’re able to skirt around it by having a hard character limit. 5 for your name (I think it’s a nickname that is voiced?) and 5 for the honorific (Kun, San, ETC) so they do have to write around it in some respect. It’s super intriguing. There’s a video on TH-cam of someone setting the voice data up, it’s crazy in depth!
It's funny; I was thinking about making a video about the two handfuls of multi-disc PS2 games out there, but this is decently extensive stuff on the entire history.
The way Ridge Racer handled is data is very similar to Vib-Ribbon. The game was so small that it all fits in the ram, and there was a mode that had you swap in a music disc and it would create levels for that game.
You do not understand how much I appreciate and love that you use my favorite game of all time the legend of dragoon. In this video multiple times I feel like this game is a lost relic of an old time that no one when I talk about it knows what the hell I'm talking about. Except for those few that know because they know....
I had a second hand copy of FF7 that froze when I got on the gondola to gold saucer, so I eventually got past it by using the 2nd disc and it would play the fmv of one of the weapons getting its head blown off by the junon cannon.
I had the same thing, but the cutscene I got was Cloud and Tifa falling into the Lifestream, but set to the Gold Saucer theme. Maybe mine was the standard gondola coming out from the tunnel, during disc 3 but with disc 2 under the hood. I can't exactly remember.
Before CDs there were a handful of games that came on ludicrous numbers of floppy disks - Beneath a Steel Sky on Amiga was fifteen disks. And outside games, Windows 95 OSR2.1 was 26 floppies, and Office 97 was 45 for standard and a whopping *fifty-five* disks for professional... and that's after Microsoft did some trickery to fit a few extra kilobytes on each!
As a child, getting far enough in a game to hit a new disc was unbeleivably exciting. It's not something I'd ever miss or want back, but when games were still made from fairy dust, it was like opening a portal.
The main point I'd like to add is that there was actually sometimes a benefit to how multi-disc PC install tended to be more atmospheric than modern installations. Star Wars games typically played their main themes and showed exclusive concept art as you waited. The Blair Witch PC trilogy (which has nothing to do with the Bloober Team one out today) even included a jumpscare in the installation sequence for the first entry in its anthology. It's part of what I miss in the age of bland Steam installation progression bars. They used to be part of the experience, and blaze by fairly quickly to not overstay their welcome. Nowadays it's just a generic progress bar.
“Titanic: Adventure Out Of Time” for PC was pretty clever in disc consolidation. The installation and startup files are on disc one, and then you start the adventure briefly in “present day” in a single room. After a few minutes of exploring and clicking the right items, there’s a cinematic where you travel back in time, and then you’re sent to disc two - where the bulk of the game happens. Then, when the ship hits the iceberg and starts sinking, the entire playable world changes. The “sinking” environment is on disc one, with plenty of the rooms and even entire floors locked because they’re “already underwater” or “closed due to the emergency.” The data saved by not rendering those environments, are spent housing the installer, startup files, and pre-time travel room. And of course, all of the unlocked spaces in the post-crash world are tilted, darker, starting to flood, etc. It’s really a genius use of space, because there’s no way both the pre- and post-crash environments would have fit on one CD, but by Tetrissing the smaller of the two environments onto the disc with the installer, startup elements, and opening scene, they were able to avoid cutting corners on content or spilling onto a third disc.
Meanwhile on PC in the 90s, Command & Conquer had separate discs for the GDI and Nod campaigns for Tib Dawn/Tib Sun, or Allied and Soviet campaigns for Red Alert/RA2. The FMV cutscenes may have been a minor part of why but they advertised it as being a way to share the game with a friend as both of you could play online with either disc.
I did this for both the original Command & Conquer and Red Alert 2! Probably one of the other Tiberium series games too. There were a dozen or so of us playing with only 4-5 copies of the games. IMAGINE EA LETTING YOU DO SOMETHING LIKE THAT TODAY. COUCH MULTIPLAYER IN BATTLEFIELD? HAHA EFF YOU GO BUY ANOTHER COPY AND CONSOLE.
@@sheik124 I was thinking the same thing...imagine EA letting you do that nowadays! I really miss Command & Conquer. There hasn't been a PC game that has come out since then that is similar enough to old C&C to really pull me in like those games did!
Nice video! SD Gundam G-Generation Genesis (PS4/Switch/Vita) is another interesting case: the PlayStation Vita version is divided into two game cards because Sony had never produced Vita cards big enough to fit in the entire game.
"Lands of Lore: Guardian of Destiny" on PC never beat it either because my young ignant ass let the 3rd disc get too scratched. found it on GoG and bought it (along with the game before it, Throne of Chaos) but I haven't beat ToC yet so I can't even start GoD nostalgia can be a beautiful thing, non? What was that quote "Good memories can save your life" ???
Ill never forget changing discs for the legend of dragoon. Im so glad you included this game in the video since its lesser known than other games. My favorite game of all time that really deserves a remake.
I was technically correct: Persona 2 IS a 2-Disc game, though it’s disguised as 2 seperate games. To be real for a moment: Most of the multi-disc games I had were old 2-CD PC games, where Disc 1 was dedicated to installing data, and Disc 2 was the “Play Disc”. Does this count?
There actually already is a multi-disc Series X game: Microsoft Flight Simulator. And on the PC version I'm pretty sure you need to be online to play with high-quality graphics since it would take multiple TBs to store everything, and I wouldn't be surprised if it was similar on Series X.
Yes but Xbox series X are still normal bluray only PS5 have UHD disc with 100go of storage and the new Final Fantasy VII part 2 already annonce that it will have 2 disc !!!
Fantastic video!! Loved all the jokes and sly comments, and thank you for showboating all the absolutely wonderful tracks from PS5's pack-in game Astrobot!! Gladly subbed, keep the stellar work up!!
That tidbit about FF7 is interesting, because I remember with FF9 that you couldn't play any disc. It had to be in order, and they wouldn't let you go to the next disc until you beat the previous one.
I wish games didn't rely on pre-rendered cutscenes. Certainly in-engine cutscenes takes less space since you don't have to store videos, but just actors acting. Another benefit (mainly for cross-platform and lower performing PCs) is that the graphical quality stays consistent. But even in a game like Sonic Heroes, it still annoys me how it has pre-rendered cutscenes because the graphical quality is much higher in those, clashing with the game, but not only that, but the cutscenes are so low resolution when played in HD on the PC version. Pre-rendered cutscenes also makes Crash 4 appear stupid because your chosen outfits won't show up in those.
I just remember that shadow of mordor for 360 had two discs. One for the install of the game alone. Then you had to switch discs to actually play the game and
As an aging relic from this era of gaming, disc swapping is actually heavily related to how you used cheat devices in the PS1 back in the day 😂 if you ever use the gameshark on a PS1 you load the console with the CDX disc to add or load codes listed as hex values into the RAM before putting in the game disc to load the game with cheats but certain games were designed to counter cheats or enable game breaking bugs with cheats enabled so its not always the best idea. Perfect example is FFVII, if you load gameshark before starting a new playthrough it'll let you progress all the way to Disc 2 until you reach the elevator where you get the highwind then a game breaking bug is triggered forcing you to restart the entire game ruining your save file.
if you are talking the backpack gameshark that went on that wide port on the back of the console, I remember some games even had an instruction to turn the gameshark off before doing certain parts of a game or it would cause issues like a corrupted save.
@@filanfyretracker that was the original PS1 gameshark yes, when they took out the I/O port from the later models they re-released the PS1 gameshark as cd only without using the I/O port i always avoided the later models after SCPH-7501 for that reason.
In the vein of parappa and lammy, vib ribbon was a good rythm game. However, featured was the ability to remove the disc and place your own CD collection in and create new levels to Vib to. Downloaded onto the PS3 and you can still put CDs in and experiment this way! Highly recommend for a fun retro party.
6:15 this same trick of writing data in a specific order was also done with the original CD versions of MYST for PC. Cyan's guys noticed that the screen transitions, going from one spot in an area to the next, would range in speed. Like in Channelwood you could advance to the next screen almost instantly, then try to go forward again and it would take like 15 seconds to load the next screen, then the next screen would take 6 or 7 seconds. For a first person point and click game where many screens are there just to make the world movement feel more cohesive, and don't actually have to do with any puzzles or lore, that's an issue, especially for segments like the stupidly long underground rail segment where you're only on each screen for a couple seconds before advancing to an FMV of moving forward and repeating the process for like 10 minutes. So they grouped each Age's screens physically on the discs, so there would only be real loading between going from the island to an Age or the other way around. This way you could just click, click, click, click and move near instantly around each area. Also have you actually played FF13-2 bro game's fun as hell and my favorite Final Fantasy
Some of us go back to 1982 and "Time Zone" for the Apple II. It came on six double-sided floppy disks, which makes it a 12-equivalent because the drives only could read one side. The first disk also had to be the boot disk because the computer did not have non-volatile memory and RAM was limited to addressible 48K. Together with text-based games, we also went muti-disk with Wizardry and Ultima. It's been interesting to follow and bump into the last one's developer, Richard Garriott de Cayeux, over the years.
Really interesting video! I think the first multi-disk game I ever played was Final Fantasy XIII back on the Xbox 360. Even if the disks were a result of a hardware limitation, it made the game feel a lot bigger and epic when you had to continue inserting new disks as you advanced through the story.
The gamecube uses mini dvd. this is a standard format. Was used for a lot of camcorders. The anti piracy they used was not. they took the same route as the ps1 and made it that the special data had to be pressed to a disk... but if you have a disk pressing plant like action replay its not an issue.
The actual data on the disc is also stored completely different from a regular DVD, which also saved Nintendo some money by not having to pay licensing fees to the DVD Forum...
i was absolutely baffled at the fact the format (which yes, isnt terribly uncommon! even if mini-dvds were, mini-cds arent uncommon period!) never came up once, only pithy nicknames and jokes, like at what point does it stop being informational
I remember when when I was a kid, my uncle (only a few years older, so more like a cousin, really) had a PS1 and we played Tekken 3 a ton. One time, we were in the middle of a match, but one of his friends came with a new game (probably Tomb Raider?) and just opened the tray while we were playing to put in the new disc. It blew my little kiddy mind when the game didn't freeze or crash or anything and we just finished the match. (also that nolan north joke was sublime)
That was an interesting trip. I love that you mentioned Parasite Eve, an oft overlooked game. If you read that article about Crash, he mentions Lisp for the "critters". That is especially trippy that they had a Lisp interpreter built into the game to run code and they were still able to not only fit the whole game, but make it run fast. I'd assume they had some kind of bytecode format so it didn't take as much space and ran faster, but still, it's crazy.
The Dot Hack games on PS2 not only were split onto a number of disks. You had to buy each disk separately. Once you completed one of the disks your save file would be flagged and the information text would go from white to yellow. This was the only way to know that you'd need to go hunt down the next disk to continue the store.
Though that was also because the game wanted to mimic the feeling of playing an MMO. They were released in such a way to try to create that feeling (I was playing them for a while as they came out after someone at EB Games suggested I give it a try when the first one launched)
@anthonydelfino6171 Here's my problem with that being the "Goal". Each disk had just under 20 hours of content. And that's if you do all the side stuff. The main story is only about 14 hours per disk. They 100% made a regular 80 JRPG set on an MMO world and tried to charge 4X the price.
I had Resident Evil Remake on Gamecube, a fun thing was if you opened the tray, it stopped the clock. I used this method to get the Anti-Tank Gun with unlimited rounds, and unlock everything else.
One weird example of a double disc game was Sakura Wars: So Long My Love on the PS2, at least for the North American version. It came out in 2010 (5 years after the original Japanese release) and both discs contained the full game, the only difference was the choice of language, disc 1 was in English and disc 2 was in Japanese with subtitles. Just kinda odd considering some PS2 games had language select screens on one disc, but Sakura wars is a pretty text heavy visual novel so maybe the audio files were too big for one disc.
I soooo miss this ! I loved the ps1 and its my favorite system of all. It had the best turn based rpgs and i cant tell you how awesome it is to get to an exciting cliff hanger section of the game and have it say , put in disc 2! It made the game feel bigger and more satisfying, it was exciting going to the second disc because its almost like getting a sequel! I wish big rpg games would go back to this format.
I could be mistaken because it has been 15 years or so since I've played it... but I'm pretty sure Baten Kaitos on the gamecube needed 2 discs. I never got far enough as a kid to need the second disc but my dad and older brothers did.
The most incredible thing to me is that, although printed on CD, Ridge Racer 1 fits entirely on the shared 3MB memory of PS1 9:46. Many Genesis and SNES games were bigger then that.
![[FULL] RETROSPECTIVE : Final Fantasy Tactics](/img/n.gif)
You now know more than you ever wanted to about how multi-disc games and how game discs are read, welcome to my hell. Subscribe.
It's funny; I was thinking about making a video regarding the two handfuls of multi-disc PS2 games out there, but this is decently extensive stuff on the entire history.
Pokémon but every route requires it’s own disk
Didn’t Xbox Series X version of GTA V come on 2 discs?
I'm wondering how companies are doing releases for PS4, PS5, and PC, knowing people constantly update their hardware. When you buy a game on PC, are you really getting the full up-to-date version, with reworked assets and gameplay, when the company re-releases the same game on PS5? Or are you just getting the original release, some games even being almost a decade old by this point?
Why can't we wonder about Switch games so big that they need 2nd Cartridges? Sonic 3K is the most famous example of a game being too big to fit onto a single cartridge back on the Genesis or Mega Drive. Also it is shocking to learn that consoles don't read games from the discs anymore, I miss the way games used to be.
Man, I can't believe you fit this all into one video. It must be dual-layered
Damn it Wayne, get a grip!
@@TheGoldenBolt Real talk man, loved the video. I've always had a huge appreciation for stuff like this, the little details in the industry some people might not think of often. It was a real treat to watch!
Onions have LAYERS!
omg its wayne hey man love you videos so much
Nah this fit on a dvd
FF7 Rebirth just announced exclusive to PS5 with 2 discs! Love it 😂❤ keep up the great work!
That's kinda beautiful
2 disks with a day 1 patch that redownloads half the game making the 2nd disk redundant.
It seems that the second disc will just be the data disc like how Remake worked
@@I.C.Weiner why do you have to be such a dick
@@drewengel7073 There's data on both discs. It didn't fit on a single dual-layer Blu-ray. They designate one of the discs as a "play" disc because it makes sense considering the game is installed but needs a disc inserted to play.
A game that uses the PS1’s RAM storage really well is Vib Ribbon, a rhythm game. You can take the disc out, and put any music CD in, and it will load a level off of the music in it. The only thing being directly loaded from the game’s disc is it’s music.
Gods I wish that game would be emulated or ported to something else, it was such a cool idea
@@deadair32101 it’s on the PS3 store (in all regions too!) but that’s it
I wonder how that would work on the PS3 since it plays ps1 games with no problem
@@CaptainApathetic exactly how it did before, you just put the CD into the system. To play the basic levels you just have no disc in there so it isn’t trying to read new data.
Dance Factory does this on the PS2 as well. It was a "DDR clone" made by Codemasters which generated stepfiles based on your music CD collection.
The practice of writing data on disk in a way that matches the actual order of playing the game continued long into even Xbox One and PS4. It's also usual for devs to have duplicates on disk for data that is used in several levels or areas, just so that it's locality is good. We still used to do this on the modern Tomb Raider trilogy. I worked on this and packing for disks was programmed like this, it's quite common in the industry but maybe it did not catch on until Crash.
Hey, idk if you knew this, but the difference between disk and disc is that a disc is a cd-type of disc, while a disk is usually more like a floppy disk. I’m not trying to be rude by typing this, but I thought you would think it’s awesome maybe. 😅
are modern games doing this less? cuz they seem to have more problems with hard drives now, like if i install a newer game onto a hard drive i get more popin and stuff like that
One he forgot to mention that did this was the initial 360 release of The Witcher 2. The game itself was so poorly optimized they thought it needed two discs (a little foreshadowing about Cyberpunk 2077 on consoles) and duplicated the game world and all logic between both with the only unique data being story and audio related. They later recognized this error and, when the enhanced Silver Box Edition later released, they later got the entire game on a single disc. There is also evidence that they noticed this sooner than that enhanced release as installing the original release from the disc takes up 14 gb of storage but buying the digital version from Xbox Live (or Microsoft Store on Xbox One) shows the game as taking up only 7 gb (Silver Box Edition is not available digitally on consoles for some reason despite having exclusive fixes, new exclusive content, and some updated visuals).
i haven't actually looked at this so how exactly do disc releases of games on ps4/3 differ from there digital PKG version ?
@@evanas2319specifically, disC is used for optical media (CD, DVD, Blu-ray), and disK for magnetic (floppy or hard drive).
It probably helps as well that pre-rendered cutscenes got less common on the PS2, since they became less necessary. The system could handle more intense stuff in real time in-engine, so you didn't need to pre-render it.
Yeah that definitely helped out quite a bit, but a lot of PS2 games still stuck out with FMV's for big events like FFX's opening where they wanted it to look as good as it possibly could
Right, like how Naughty Dog stuck with engine rendered cut scenes just with higher poly count character models.
@@deadair32101 often FMVs were used when there's a lot of different scenes swapping, which would be hard to load in memory, flashbacks that use assets not in-game, and the hard effects like big water splashes. My fav implementation was in Grandia 2 (Dreamcast game) where some spell effects were overlaid green screened videos, it was great!
When I was a kid, the first ever 2 disc game I owned was Tales of Symphonia. I remember being blown away by the fact that it needed 2 discs, as someone who had up to that point only had Nintendo systems and thus had never seen a multi disc game before. I for some reason believed it having 2 discs inherently meant it was a better game than a single disc game. No idea why; sometimes your brain does things that make no sense.
All that said, Takes of Symphonia was a phenomenal game and remains one of my all-time favorites to this day. The 2 disc thing coloring my perception of it might play a tiny role in that.
nah man i had plenty of experience with 2 disc games, symphonia is a banger and its a shame they never released a sequel. THough after watching this video, im going to assume the only reason it was 2 discs is because of all of those absolutely godly Anime cutscenes.
@@xiphosmaniac They did release one for the Nintendo Wii (subtitled Dawn of the New World, or something similar). Didn't personally like the direction they took the story, but the combat felt as good as ever.
@xiphosmaniac the tales series is not meant for sequels
@@ShadowOfCicero The character skits in DoTNW were also pretty good. I think they were the first time the English skits were voiced.
Tales of Symphonia was my first experience with New Game Plus (Not that it was the first game to have it). Must have played through that game like 5 times. So great. I remember making lloyd in City of Heroes
You weren't kidding when you said to expect something different. This is such a cool concept for a video and it isn't one I've seen covered before. Nicely made as always!
Final Fantasy Type-0 on PSP was an interesting case. Disc 1 contained just the game's first AND last mission, all the many involved FMVs and so on. Disc 2 contained the middle 90% of the game and entire world map. So you'd swap pretty soon into the game, and then swap back to Disc 1 to finish it. Very similar to the Mass Effect case you mentioned!
One correction for @19:16, DVD’s and CD’s read faster towards the outside, not centre. Which is why a lot of games include a large padding file to push game data to the outside of the disc, for faster read speeds (and why most ISO file can be compressed so much).
Yeah wait why did I say that
That's just a complete goof, nice catch! I should've caught that slip during any part of editing. I even caught myself accidentally call it Gran Turismo Port.
also CAV vs CLV depends on the drive and not the media. The PS2 reads DVDs with the same data rate anywhere on the disc beause it‘s CLV.
Gamecube and Xbox read in CAV Mode wich sped up seek times significantly as the disc didn‘t need to be spun at different speeds and the data rate increases on the outside.
While the PS3 still read in CLV Mode the PS4 used CAV like all the other consoles.
@@benny21293 This comment feels like when Calvin is awake all night trying to understand his dad's explanation of how a vinyl plays music.
@@TheGoldenBolt 12:50 why did you play footage of Halo and talk about Jade empire?
@Lurch7861 Actually drives were always CLV when new media was introduced (and CDs were 1st introduced as music). CLV means a constant data speed at the head, regardless of reading place. CDs, DVDs, Blu-rays were all CLV at 1x, 2x. Few years development of each made CAV drives appear (when electronics could process more than 4x on outer edge). So saying PS3 Blu-ray was CLV vs Xbox 360 DVD was CAV makes sense, as DVDs had years of development by then.
And as others said, CAV vs CLV is a drive characteristic, not media (although some drive/SW combination might recognize constant playback and turn to lower-speed CLV).
My favourite combination of mismatched cutscenes in FFVII is when you put in disc 2 when entering Gold Saucer for the first time. You get Tifa falling into the Lifestream with Cloud on the wheelchair, but set to the really upbeat Gold Saucer theme. I can't remember what led to me discovering it back in the day, but I sadly didn't try it with any other combination.
@29:24. Yup. I'll never forget how flabbergasted I was when I opened up my PC copy of GTA V to see that there were SEVEN DVDS IN THERE! I found it super cheap at Wal-Mart on day, so that's the only reason I went for a physical copy of a modern PC game
Yeah I remember on release being happy that the PS3 had Blu-ray so it could all fit on one disc unlike the 360 version lol
I remember that release as well, I pre ordered it off Amazon.. I was like really?! Why couldn't this have been one Blu Ray or at least have a Blu Ray option to buy, Sheesh
Just fyi, you can use the code to just download the game from Rockstar's website, if you didn't know that.
@@adventureoflinkmk2 because nobody had a Bluray drive for a PC. They don't really exist. There is only a few of them.
@@dustojnikhummer I did...
I just want to take a moment to say thank you for adding proper subtitles! It means a lot to those of us who rely on subtitles to fully understand and enjoy the video. It's appreciated. Thank you.
I cannot express how much I love that you used footage of Astro’s Playroom while you’re discussing the various technical parts of system functionality, like showing the thunder cloud segment while talking about RAM. That just adds an extra touch to this whole thing, absolutely adore it.
This concept is so interesting to me because as a 20 year old gamer I started playing in the PS2/GameCube era and never had a game with two discs, so hearing about games like FF8 with four different discs seemed unreal to me, and now we’ve finally gotten to big enough games to where we’re once again having multi disc games
Now I have first 9 Final Fantasy games on my phone lol.
No litterally can't go back to multi disc why. Because litterally games can't get any bigger 90 percent of gigs used by modern game are empty unused gigs litterally every game that's more than 100 gigs is just to force us to upgrade our consoles and spend money.
Metal Gear Solid's disc space was mostly taken up by audio. Most of the cinematics in the game were real-time in engine graphics.
Also the PS1 had 512KB for sound.
Ps1 was original designed for super famicom, wich had awesome sound. guess this is one of the few things they never changed in the psx hardware.
Excellent observation. With the excellent producers such as Takanari Ishiyama, Gigi Meroni, Kazuki Muraoka, Lee Jeon Myung, TAPPY, Hiroyuki Togo, and of course Rika Muranaka, it’s no surprise the music stands up so well today.
I remember one time I was near the end and wanted to see how far I could backtrack before needing to swap disks. Made it all the way to the starting area, then realized the whole game is basically cutscenes lol
@@worldoffood123 nah, codec convos. It's like an audiobook. But levels don't really take much space in older games in general. No HD textures.
Good video, note on Metal Gear Solid: it had almost no cinematics. It's audio files for endless cutscenes and codec calls that took a lot of space and many weren't repeated between disks.
Outside of Otacon and Liquid dialogue flashbacks with a minute or so each of real life documentary footage spliced in, the only FMV I can recall was the end credits.
Correction: CD/DVDs load faster the farther data is from the center. Not closer. Devs even use dummy files to push data to the edge of the disc to load faster
There's also a multi-cart Vita game (Gundam G Genesis) and a few multi-UMD PSP games
Does this also happen to blurays?
@@Vlumpty_Vonty no they have constant angular velocity to keep the speed the same throughout
Back in 2000, I had a virtual CD program and I created 5 virtual disc mounts for my Windows PC and made images of each of the Riven discs. I then edited the initialization settings and mounted the images. Riven played seamlessly.
clever idea . i think you can do same in emulators with clever commad lines with just iso files
It’s interesting to see the struggles of developers in the ps1 days having to optimize where certain parts of game should be on a disc for load times and finding ways to have the game render out environments whereas nowadays we just get a 100gb install to an SSD haha
There are a lot of games where, if the data didn't take up the whole disc, the dev would use dummy data to push the actually useful data to specific parts of the disc to take advantage of a disc being a circle and CD's using constant linear velocity
My God they should take cues from Ridge Racer for ps5 (i have yet to get one.
And long before that, programmers of the Atari 9600 had to time every part of the code depending on where the electron beam of your TV was currently sweeping across the screen. Time it wrong, and the whole picture is borked. It's called racing the beam.
All because there was no video memory to buffer the graphics.
I am not sure how many SSDs would you need with each game taking 100Gb tho... On PC I keep buying hard drives because videos take so much space.
yeah back in the day developers actually had to try and compress their games as much as physically possible in order to be efficient. now developers cant or dont even bother with file compression, giving us games like call of duty, which im willing to bet are going to take 200g of space in a few years time. they already take 150g
One of the coolest features built in mind with swapping discs was the Vigilante 8 games. In the second game, if you swapped out the disc at the main menu and put in the first game, it would load the first game's maps and they were fully playable, with some new features from the second game, like repair spots and stuff included into the map's features. It was like a reverse, free expansion. In both games, you could also load your own music in the middle of a battle by pausing and swapping the disc with an audio CD.
Man I miss those games, and those times.
I loved Vigilante games, still no car combat game with actually decent physics like it, and the atmosphere was unparalleled. Why all games don't have funk music, jumpsuits and Afros as obligatory features?
BlueTag NEEDS to see this comment!
I remember, as a kid, my Ace Combat 5 disc would occasionally stop being read by the ps2. You could tell exactly when it happened because the music would suddenly cut out. You could still fly around the entire map, shoot down enemies and even complete the level, but you better hope it started reading again before the loading screen or you'd have to reset. It wasn't until only a couple years ago I realized why this was.
I was also extremely curious why I could open my disc tray and the game would still run as long as you didn't move too far away from where your character was when the disc was removed. As soon as it needed to read extra data boom the game would completely freeze up. Now all these questions have been answered for me nearly 2 decades later.
Really? I've played that game since it came out and I've never noticed that. Maybe I'll play it again now and try to push it just to see. Are there any specific missions you remember this happening on?
My copy of ace 5 is scratched like we used as skateboard for a family of 5 for a decade. I remember when it stopped working. I was so glad. Those stupid red planes man. As a child. I was not good at that game. As an adult I'd rather play Elden Ring with inverted controls then ever go back .
I know animal crossing let you play even without the disc or memory since they were only needed to boot up the game and save
The GameCube discs are called mini discs, it was a format that only lasted for about 5 years in the early 2000s and late '90s. I remember getting a Bionicle game as a pack in with a box of cereal in like 2004
I had an audiophile friend in high school in the late 2000s who had a minidisc player, but they had to order them from Japan and burn music to it themselves. It's nice that they were backwards compatible with *most* CD and DVD drives. I got drivers on a mini disc last month.
@@Tynansdtm yeah most drives still have an indent for minidiscs. It's important for exotic hardware that night not have the website with drivers up anymore as many drivers came in minidisks as well.
I will never forget the day I was reorganizing the Pre Owned drawers at the GameStop I work at to find that Wolfenstein The New Order is a 4 Disc Xbox 360 title. I was actually shocked finding that out.
The lost oddessy I think has like 3 to four disc's it's been a min since I've played it but it was I think my only multi disc's for Xbox 360
For L.A Noire, there are also multiple versions of the map. Depending on the cases that are on each disc, some interiors are missing while on digital and in the following gen remaster, the entire map is available, letting you explore interiors outside of the respective cases.
In addition to games with DLC on the original Xbox, the 360 also had Skyrim and Fallout 3 with the GOTY and Legendary editions respectively, the second disc containing an app to install the DLC while disc 1 is just a retail disc of the standard edition with a different print. This means you can use disc 2 to install the DLC then play with a standard edition disc. When inserted in Xbox One and Series X, disc 2 simply adds all the DLC to the download queue automatically.
More 360 games with the split multiplayer are Assassin's Creed 3 and 4. Since backwards compatible games on Xbox One and onwards are based on the digital version, only disc 1 is needed and the singleplayer and multiplayer are accessible from the main menu.
Another oddity is Halo 3 ODST that included the Halo 3 multiplayer on a second disc. The second disc actually reports to the console as being Halo 3, allowing for crossplay with native Halo 3 players, transfering of progression and earning achievements, but when launching, there is simply no campaign. With the digital version and when playing on later consoles, the modified Halo 3 is shipped as a secondary executable that can be launched from the main menu. Halo CE Anniversary did something similar where you could play a remake of the original game's multiplayer through a set of custom modes and maps for Halo Reach. On both the physical and digital versions, there is a secondary executable of a modified version of Reach, allowing crossplay with Reach players that owned the Anniversary DLC for that game.
One last case of collection/on disc DLC is Grand Theft Auto IV. That game had two DLC campaigns accessible by picking New Game from the menu, where you would be prompted to select the campaign if there were than one available. Once in, each campaign had its own autosave slot but all shared the same manual save slots. The two dlcs were eventually bundled together as a physical release known as Episodes From Liberty City, there you would be prompted to pick the episode to load on startup and had GTA IV missing from the New Game selection. That version however also reported itself as being GTA IV so it would share saves and achievements with the base game. The whole experience was eventually released where on Xbox, it was simply a bundle of the GTA IV and Episodes discs, while on PS3, it was a single disc with all three campaigns available from the New Game menu.
I'm surprised you didn't go back and at least mention the Famicom Disk System. I don't know if there were games that used multiple disks, but I think there were some games that used both sides of one disk in a single-sided drive. So the game would still stop and force you to take out a disk and put a disk in to continue, even if it was the same disk.
A couple years ago, I played Koudelka, which was a game that could be completed in less than 8 hours, but because its FMVs were of the highest quality for its time along with a plethora of voice acting, the game was split into 4 discs.
Disc one was literally an hour long.
22:52 I'm unsure what era you're specifying when you call this a "throwback," but I do want to point out that the Famicom Disk System version of Zelda II: The Adventure of Link does practically the same thing. It houses the title screen, file select, Great Palace (final dungeon), and ending on side A of the disk, and the rest of the game on side B.
Great retrospective. I always found multi-disc games alluring, and the edge cases really interesting: stuff like Gran Turismo 2 breaking it up between game modes, or Rodea the Sky Soldier being (to my knowledge) the only Wii U game to ship with a second disc - containing the game's ill-fated Wii predecessor. Seeing the subject laid out with considerations for technical reasoning and development anecdotes is really interesting, and I'd love to see other subjects covered like this in the future.
Rodea was another tiny chunk of video I decided to cut out, since it's a unique almost special edition rather than a proper two-disc game. I knew eventually somebody would hit on it, I'm glad to see it was so soon!
Bayoneta 2 Launched with Bayonetta 1 as a second disc.
@@slyp5409 Good call, I don't know how I forgot that one.
If you rub the top of disc 2 it smells like burned rubber. A few PS1 games had games with smell.
I liked how Tales of Symphonia did it for the Gamecube. On the first disc starting a new file you begin in Iselia when prompted to insert the second disc you are back in Iselia.
This is such a cool topic.
As someone who grew up with PSone and later GameCube and PS2, a multi-disc game just felt so epic. Like "Wow, there's so much game here they couldn't fit it on a single disc?!" and because Final Fantasy was so well known for their multi-disc games, quite a few games would ship in multi-disc cases despite only being a single disc, if nothing else to signify "Hey, this is an epic RPG, too!"
Just the idea of embarking in such an epic adventure was both thrilling and overwhelming. It was awesome. I remember the first time I saw The Legend of Dragoon in a store and I was like whaaaaaaat?! 4 discs?? Never got to play it until much later, when games that long were already a common thing, but back then it was truly mind blowing.
Fun fact about Riven, The Sequel To Myst. It could easily fit on four CDs, at least on the PC. The fifth disc is entirely because of the 5 theme running through the entire game.
If I recall correctly, LA: Noire had multiple discs back on Xbox 360. Seems kind of bizarre looking back on it. But then again, various modern games often have a "data disc" and a "play disc" on the physical version.
Also because 360 used DVD's not Blu-ray like PS3 which didn't need multi disc's at least until the end with GTA5 and maybe one or two others.
Yea really the only reason we didn't see it on the 360 that often is due to the low HDD space on base models.
@@CaptainApathetic And because the read speeds of the 360 are "serviceable". On the PS3 the read data speed is really bad, that is why most games do require installing data, the ones who dont have this you start to wish they could, how lenghty the load times are compared to the same game on the 360.
Lost Odyssey, Blue Dragon are some others that come to mind
@@mr.awesome6011 but gta 5 in ps3 didnt need multi disc
Something not noted about Mass Effect 2 being split into two discs is how it effected development. Originally it was intended for the player to be able to recruit all the squadmates in whatever order they wanted(Legion is a bit complicated), it’s why the second batch of squadmates have dialogue for the recruitment missions for the first batch and on Horizon.
IIRC only Tali has Horizon dialogue but it saddens me not being able to bring Samara and Thane to early missions.
Mass Effect 2 has a lot of NPC content people don't experience because of its structure, biggest offender is people never bringing Legion on any missions other than his loyalty, not knowing doing 2 missions during IFF install is safe (and in fact, will be forced on you), if you HAVE 2 missions. But everyone panics and clears EVERYTHING before and it's sad.
I love doing Overlord or LotSB on different points too, spicing up the pacing. Hopefully they made mods for LE now (haven't checked) that streamline rare content.
I remember using the disc/lid open trick in FFVII when casting spells such as Regen on the party. In a challenging battle? Cast All*Regen, pop the lid open and wait while your health continues to climb but the rest of the battle is essentially frozen in time. Once done, close the lid and continue.
Essentially? Grow up
@@HistoryandReviews why you triggered bro?
@@HistoryandReviews ...
cool trick, wish I knew about it trying to fight sephiroth in his final form...
I really appreciate your Astro SSD Speedway gameplay while talking about the faster access time of the current gen consoles thanks to their SSDs. Great video!
I never knew I wanted a retrospective of multi disc gaming, but here we are. Excellent video as always!
@19:21 That is incorrect, it is the other way around. As the disc's rotational velocity is a constant, the outer layers spin faster relative to the inner ones; thus more data can be read / second from the outer ones.
I've been rewatching a lot of golden bolt videos recently since I have too much spare time, this video happens to be uploaded at the best time for me
Resident Evil 2 on N64: Hold my 10 pints of beer.
Since I played mostly on PS2 when I was a kid, and later on PS3, my first experience with a 2-disc game was Red Dead Redemption 2 on PS4
I wasn't surprised I must say, seeing how some of the late CoD titles that I played (Infinite Warfare and BO III) needed a 80GB installation each
Sonic Unleashed was also almost a two disc game on Xbox 360, because of how much detail they wanted to put into Hedgehog Engine's lighting system. There's an early build of Sonic Unleashed dated just 78 days before the game releases (and is still somehow pretty unfinished), and disc 1 has most of the game on there, except for the last 4 areas: Arid Sands (Shamar), Skyscraper Scamper (Empire City), Jungle Joyride (Adabat) and Eggmanland.
Most of the game would've been on disc 1 and then everything from Arid Sands/Shamar and onwards being on disc 2, it's why Professor Pickle moves from Spagonia/Rooftop Run to Shamar, so you'd never have to do frantic disc swapping after playing levels, going to Spagonia, swapping to disc 1, talk to Professor Pickle, tells you to go to a disc 2 location, leave, move to a disc 2 location, swap to disc 2, and repeat. Since the game is on one disc nowadays anyways, it's pretty pointless for him to move there now, but I suppose they just did that in the case they really needed to ship the game on multiple discs for the 360 version. They really wanted to make the game so pretty, that it had to be on multiple discs...
Now, the way they pulled this off with one is, that they didn't. The released version has light fields in a lower resolution, so years of developing a new lighting engine resulted in lighting that's less detailed than it could've been. But don't worry, Sonic Team found a way to update the game without SEGA having pay a fee to update the game for free (because I think Xbox required you to pay to update your game at the time). So, to get the high-res lightfields back, you just need to buy every DLC's extra act missions, and those will update the main game's lightfields as well (which is convenient too, since some acts don't change the lighting at all anyways). That way, all lightfields can be restored to how they should look, except for Eggmanland. That just never got a DLC pack so we're stuck with the low-res lightfields, especially since we never found disc 2 of that early build.
Does the PS3 version contain everything?
Source?
@@EggFighterXB- Well it’s just in Beta this game was originally made on Xbox 360 while PS3 was a port so I don’t know
@@EggFighterXB- The PS3 and 360 versions are nearly identical, apart from the PS3 version having its framerate uncapped and not having the hubworld transformation animation.
@@Cosmycal Well... It's an educated, very safe guess. Why else would Prof Pickle move from one continent that's on the beta disc 1 to the other continent on beta disc 2? And why else would they install the better lightfields for the maingame through the DLC? ^^'
And the GDC panel about Unleashed also asked both console manufacturers how they need to allow bigger discs to make optimization less of a hassle for them.
I wouldn't at all be surprised if a developer has previously admitted that it was going to be a 2 disc game though.
My biggest memory of Insert Disc 2 is playing Oddworld: Abe's Exodus on the Playstation. It was so cool that I had to open the disc drive and swap the CDs, and when you first opened it the disc was still spinning.
The xbox 360 dlc installer discs are an interesting case. For the bioshock collection, it uses an interface similar to the original blades dashboard, which I find neat.
Returning to this video after Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth is a 2-disc PS5 game lmao
You know, this is actually a very interesting topic. Gonna start watching it soon. Hoping stuff like multi disk PS1 games on PS3 shows up. On the digital release they made changing disk an emulator setting, but i have no idea how they did it for actual disks.
With physical PS1 discs on PS3, you would receive the same prompt that you would on a real PS1. Simply eject the disc, then insert the next one, and the game continues just as it was intended.
Brings back some good old memories. Swapping out disks was actually kinda addicting in a weird way.
I was one of those people who picked up the PC disc copy of GTA V. With my internet speeds at the time it was a 2-3 hour disc install vs leaving my computer on for over 3 straight days to download it. So I definitely don't regret my decision at least.
I think it’s kinda cool you get more artwork
left my PC on for a week download a update.
This was such a great video. I was looking on your channel page and I had to double check that I liked this video. Having to use multiple discs definitely takes me back to the first console we had growing up in the ps1.
I remember when I first brought home Lost Odyssey for the Xbox360 and being surprised to discover it was 4 discs long. To my knowledge, that was the only game for the 360 that had that many discs; there were plenty of 2 and 3 disc games out there but only Lost Odyssey had 4. The nice thing about that game was once you were on Disc 4, you could revisit disc 1-3 areas without having to swap the disc in the player.
Conversely, in Star Ocean: The Last Hope, depending on the area you wanted to explore, you had to constantly change between discs 2 and 3 which in my opinion was not very well executed when doing end game quests and farming.
hmmm i wonder if lost odyssey had the game on all 4 discs and the only reason to change discs was to access specific cutscenes. That seems to be the major thing regarding these multi disc games
Funnily enough of all games on the 360, its version of Wolfenstein: The New Order also came on 4 discs. Disc 1 was purely an installer and the remaining 3 had each act of the game on it
If I had to guess why that is I’d say it’s because that game was mainly developed as a PS4/Xbone game and the compression onto the DVDs wasn’t all that effective, but I’ve also heard that it was deliberately done to make it much more difficult to pirate
One thing you forgot to mention is that some ps2 games were released on 2 disc because the ps2 Slim can't read dual layer disc properly
couple other games i remember beginning as multi disc experiences, then were later ported to a single disc on later consoles. Tales of Symphonia on Gamecube (which was later rereleased on PS2, PS3, Wii), started as 2 discs before ports. and in the same vein, the original Valkyrie Profile was 2 discs, then became a single UMD for PSP
There was one PSP game that got released in NA that did have two UMD's, *but* it didn't get a physical release in NA. Trails in the Sky SC was released very late, after the PSP era basically ended, after a legendary development hell sequence, and to cut costs was released digital only.
I was writing a comment about why I don't think "4K Blu-ray" discs make any sense to be used for movies but accidentally hit the keyboard shortcut to reload the page and I don't want to write that whole thing again.
I know how that feels
As someone whose childhood was dominated by Nintendo (because Sony was "too adult" for my parents and because I love Pokemon), the concept of multiple discs was foreign to me for a long time. The first I played was Tales of Symphonia on the Gamecube and then Baten Kaitos.
Now I finally have some context as to why Nintendo didn't often have to do this.
Oh, and on the topic of double-layered discs, this actually became a problem when Brawl released. My brother and me bought the Wii at launch and so the console wasn't capable of actually reading that new type of disc. Nintendo of Europe actually offered to modify consoles to remedy this and so we sent in our Wii just for Brawl. Almost lost it for good too, because the mailman lost it near a neighbour's house when buying lunch...
I definitely remember this especially for final fantasy games but just games in general back then for whatever reason seem to have a high probability of being multi disk particularly if they were a larger game which it's kind of weird because there'd be other games that are technically bigger files but was all on one desk so I never truly understood it unless it was just a mere fact of how they optimized the game file
its the fact that storage mediums were so much smaller back then, 750MB doesn't hold much, especially when you get FMV's involved
And here we are with a Final Fantasy release on PS5 with two discs. Lmao.
Please insert side b has been a thing in early floppy disk systems on PC during the pre Hard Drive era of hardware due to also not having all games fit on a single Side of a disk. This is why Hard drives were a godsend up until we got Red Book audio on cd based games. Riven was also 5 CDs on PC, but was also one of two games in 1997 to be released on a little new format at the time, the DVD. The DVD was so much larger, that they managed to encode a better bitrate for the FMVs. And as for Phantasmogoria, Yes it's still 7 CDs on PC.
I was hoping someone would bring up floppies. Back in the 5.25 era you would even have to flip it over like a record, as you mentioned. The Famicom Disk System had games like that too.
I have always wondered why games called the sound Redbook when it was CDAudio, For example Descent 2 you could play its music in a normal CD player. Sega CD games you could also play a lot of their soundtracks in a normal player too.
@@filanfyretracker Red book is an encoding standard that was published... in a red cover.
I have an interesting thing to note about Tokimeki memorial that may change where the game may stand in the running for “most discs”
Tokimeki memorial 2 is interesting as a dating sim/visual novel as it features the “Emotional Voice System” or EVS, which allows the player to set up how 2 of the game’s characters say the player’s name, down to the inflection and pronunciation.
The game shipped with 5 discs and I’m not sure if this system is relegated to its own disc or not- but it gets interesting when you realize that there are 3 (also Japanese exclusive) discs that shipped with issues of a certain magazine that contained 3 more EVS discs for 3 more characters.
So, a totally complete version of Tokimeki Memorial 2 is a total of 8 discs: the 5 the game shipped with and the 3 that were given out later through magazines. It might not count because not only are these EVS discs not games at all, just a disc that put a file on your memory card so that the girl would read your name, and also were released after the fact, but overall it’s pretty neat I think!
I wonder what the girl would read or if dialog was entirely rewritten if you lacked those files.
@@velvetbutterfly I’m pretty sure they just skipped over your name. As in, the line would be voiced but they just wouldn’t say your name at all. If you had the data with your name on it, then they would insert it into the line if that makes sense
@@BigScrumbo it does, but seems like it could be awkward in some longer text boxes.
@@velvetbutterfly they’re able to skirt around it by having a hard character limit. 5 for your name (I think it’s a nickname that is voiced?) and 5 for the honorific (Kun, San, ETC) so they do have to write around it in some respect. It’s super intriguing. There’s a video on TH-cam of someone setting the voice data up, it’s crazy in depth!
It's funny; I was thinking about making a video about the two handfuls of multi-disc PS2 games out there, but this is decently extensive stuff on the entire history.
Update- FF7 remake rebirth is confirmed to be the first 2 disc ps5 game.
The way Ridge Racer handled is data is very similar to Vib-Ribbon. The game was so small that it all fits in the ram, and there was a mode that had you swap in a music disc and it would create levels for that game.
You do not understand how much I appreciate and love that you use my favorite game of all time the legend of dragoon. In this video multiple times I feel like this game is a lost relic of an old time that no one when I talk about it knows what the hell I'm talking about. Except for those few that know because they know....
I had a second hand copy of FF7 that froze when I got on the gondola to gold saucer, so I eventually got past it by using the 2nd disc and it would play the fmv of one of the weapons getting its head blown off by the junon cannon.
I had this exact same issue, and exact solution. That Golden Saucer FMV must have been in a really scratchable place on the disc!?
I had the same thing, but the cutscene I got was Cloud and Tifa falling into the Lifestream, but set to the Gold Saucer theme. Maybe mine was the standard gondola coming out from the tunnel, during disc 3 but with disc 2 under the hood. I can't exactly remember.
Before CDs there were a handful of games that came on ludicrous numbers of floppy disks - Beneath a Steel Sky on Amiga was fifteen disks. And outside games, Windows 95 OSR2.1 was 26 floppies, and Office 97 was 45 for standard and a whopping *fifty-five* disks for professional... and that's after Microsoft did some trickery to fit a few extra kilobytes on each!
I haven’t personally played a game that requires multiple discs, but it’s still a pretty interesting topic to me nonetheless.
As a child, getting far enough in a game to hit a new disc was unbeleivably exciting. It's not something I'd ever miss or want back, but when games were still made from fairy dust, it was like opening a portal.
@@RootVegetabIe Also disappointing at times, like FFVIII with the ending FMV taking so much space all the cities were unavailable on Disc 4.
It’s 2023, and FFVII Rebirth was announced to be using two discs…on PS5. I fear for my PS5’s SSD when that launches
The main point I'd like to add is that there was actually sometimes a benefit to how multi-disc PC install tended to be more atmospheric than modern installations. Star Wars games typically played their main themes and showed exclusive concept art as you waited. The Blair Witch PC trilogy (which has nothing to do with the Bloober Team one out today) even included a jumpscare in the installation sequence for the first entry in its anthology.
It's part of what I miss in the age of bland Steam installation progression bars. They used to be part of the experience, and blaze by fairly quickly to not overstay their welcome. Nowadays it's just a generic progress bar.
Install Wizard was pretty damn neat.
My last multi disc is xplane 10. It had 8 CD-R to install the game. Geez and i thought C&C Generals had a lot of disc.
Some pirate devs have actually taken up this old art, like with Space Station 13's cracked installer.
As a kid I absolutely loved the minigames The Sims 3 (iirc?) had in the installer
Yakuza 4 install moment
THE SELFISH DEED
“Titanic: Adventure Out Of Time” for PC was pretty clever in disc consolidation. The installation and startup files are on disc one, and then you start the adventure briefly in “present day” in a single room. After a few minutes of exploring and clicking the right items, there’s a cinematic where you travel back in time, and then you’re sent to disc two - where the bulk of the game happens. Then, when the ship hits the iceberg and starts sinking, the entire playable world changes. The “sinking” environment is on disc one, with plenty of the rooms and even entire floors locked because they’re “already underwater” or “closed due to the emergency.” The data saved by not rendering those environments, are spent housing the installer, startup files, and pre-time travel room. And of course, all of the unlocked spaces in the post-crash world are tilted, darker, starting to flood, etc. It’s really a genius use of space, because there’s no way both the pre- and post-crash environments would have fit on one CD, but by Tetrissing the smaller of the two environments onto the disc with the installer, startup elements, and opening scene, they were able to avoid cutting corners on content or spilling onto a third disc.
Meanwhile on PC in the 90s, Command & Conquer had separate discs for the GDI and Nod campaigns for Tib Dawn/Tib Sun, or Allied and Soviet campaigns for Red Alert/RA2. The FMV cutscenes may have been a minor part of why but they advertised it as being a way to share the game with a friend as both of you could play online with either disc.
I did this for both the original Command & Conquer and Red Alert 2! Probably one of the other Tiberium series games too. There were a dozen or so of us playing with only 4-5 copies of the games. IMAGINE EA LETTING YOU DO SOMETHING LIKE THAT TODAY. COUCH MULTIPLAYER IN BATTLEFIELD? HAHA EFF YOU GO BUY ANOTHER COPY AND CONSOLE.
@@sheik124 I was thinking the same thing...imagine EA letting you do that nowadays! I really miss Command & Conquer. There hasn't been a PC game that has come out since then that is similar enough to old C&C to really pull me in like those games did!
Nice video! SD Gundam G-Generation Genesis (PS4/Switch/Vita) is another interesting case: the PlayStation Vita version is divided into two game cards because Sony had never produced Vita cards big enough to fit in the entire game.
My first Multiple Disc experience was Tales of Symphonia on GameCube
"Lands of Lore: Guardian of Destiny" on PC
never beat it either because my young ignant ass let the 3rd disc get too scratched.
found it on GoG and bought it (along with the game before it, Throne of Chaos) but I haven't beat ToC yet so I can't even start GoD
nostalgia can be a beautiful thing, non? What was that quote "Good memories can save your life" ???
Ill never forget changing discs for the legend of dragoon. Im so glad you included this game in the video since its lesser known than other games. My favorite game of all time that really deserves a remake.
I was technically correct: Persona 2 IS a 2-Disc game, though it’s disguised as 2 seperate games.
To be real for a moment: Most of the multi-disc games I had were old 2-CD PC games, where Disc 1 was dedicated to installing data, and Disc 2 was the “Play Disc”. Does this count?
There actually already is a multi-disc Series X game: Microsoft Flight Simulator. And on the PC version I'm pretty sure you need to be online to play with high-quality graphics since it would take multiple TBs to store everything, and I wouldn't be surprised if it was similar on Series X.
Yes but Xbox series X are still normal bluray only PS5 have UHD disc with 100go of storage and the new Final Fantasy VII part 2 already annonce that it will have 2 disc !!!
@@GuiOmania Pretty sure Series X games also use UHD. It can at least play UHD Blu Ray discs so it should be able to play UHD games.
Fantastic video!! Loved all the jokes and sly comments, and thank you for showboating all the absolutely wonderful tracks from PS5's pack-in game Astrobot!!
Gladly subbed, keep the stellar work up!!
the "i'm not your dad... yet" at the end caught me off guard haha
That tidbit about FF7 is interesting, because I remember with FF9 that you couldn't play any disc. It had to be in order, and they wouldn't let you go to the next disc until you beat the previous one.
lot of areas were not reachable in later disks . in ff 8 lot of towns cant be entered in disk 4 eighter
I wish games didn't rely on pre-rendered cutscenes. Certainly in-engine cutscenes takes less space since you don't have to store videos, but just actors acting. Another benefit (mainly for cross-platform and lower performing PCs) is that the graphical quality stays consistent. But even in a game like Sonic Heroes, it still annoys me how it has pre-rendered cutscenes because the graphical quality is much higher in those, clashing with the game, but not only that, but the cutscenes are so low resolution when played in HD on the PC version. Pre-rendered cutscenes also makes Crash 4 appear stupid because your chosen outfits won't show up in those.
I just remember that shadow of mordor for 360 had two discs. One for the install of the game alone. Then you had to switch discs to actually play the game and
The Pandora Directive for PC. Had 7 disks. Good times. I learned about Roswell from that point and click game.
As an aging relic from this era of gaming, disc swapping is actually heavily related to how you used cheat devices in the PS1 back in the day 😂 if you ever use the gameshark on a PS1 you load the console with the CDX disc to add or load codes listed as hex values into the RAM before putting in the game disc to load the game with cheats but certain games were designed to counter cheats or enable game breaking bugs with cheats enabled so its not always the best idea. Perfect example is FFVII, if you load gameshark before starting a new playthrough it'll let you progress all the way to Disc 2 until you reach the elevator where you get the highwind then a game breaking bug is triggered forcing you to restart the entire game ruining your save file.
if you are talking the backpack gameshark that went on that wide port on the back of the console, I remember some games even had an instruction to turn the gameshark off before doing certain parts of a game or it would cause issues like a corrupted save.
@@filanfyretracker that was the original PS1 gameshark yes, when they took out the I/O port from the later models they re-released the PS1 gameshark as cd only without using the I/O port i always avoided the later models after SCPH-7501 for that reason.
In the vein of parappa and lammy, vib ribbon was a good rythm game. However, featured was the ability to remove the disc and place your own CD collection in and create new levels to Vib to. Downloaded onto the PS3 and you can still put CDs in and experiment this way! Highly recommend for a fun retro party.
6:15 this same trick of writing data in a specific order was also done with the original CD versions of MYST for PC. Cyan's guys noticed that the screen transitions, going from one spot in an area to the next, would range in speed. Like in Channelwood you could advance to the next screen almost instantly, then try to go forward again and it would take like 15 seconds to load the next screen, then the next screen would take 6 or 7 seconds. For a first person point and click game where many screens are there just to make the world movement feel more cohesive, and don't actually have to do with any puzzles or lore, that's an issue, especially for segments like the stupidly long underground rail segment where you're only on each screen for a couple seconds before advancing to an FMV of moving forward and repeating the process for like 10 minutes.
So they grouped each Age's screens physically on the discs, so there would only be real loading between going from the island to an Age or the other way around. This way you could just click, click, click, click and move near instantly around each area.
Also have you actually played FF13-2 bro game's fun as hell and my favorite Final Fantasy
Some of us go back to 1982 and "Time Zone" for the Apple II. It came on six double-sided floppy disks, which makes it a 12-equivalent because the drives only could read one side. The first disk also had to be the boot disk because the computer did not have non-volatile memory and RAM was limited to addressible 48K. Together with text-based games, we also went muti-disk with Wizardry and Ultima. It's been interesting to follow and bump into the last one's developer, Richard Garriott de Cayeux, over the years.
Really interesting video! I think the first multi-disk game I ever played was Final Fantasy XIII back on the Xbox 360. Even if the disks were a result of a hardware limitation, it made the game feel a lot bigger and epic when you had to continue inserting new disks as you advanced through the story.
we could say this is a thing of the past.... then FF7 rebirth announcement came in
The gamecube uses mini dvd. this is a standard format. Was used for a lot of camcorders. The anti piracy they used was not. they took the same route as the ps1 and made it that the special data had to be pressed to a disk... but if you have a disk pressing plant like action replay its not an issue.
The actual data on the disc is also stored completely different from a regular DVD, which also saved Nintendo some money by not having to pay licensing fees to the DVD Forum...
i was absolutely baffled at the fact the format (which yes, isnt terribly uncommon! even if mini-dvds were, mini-cds arent uncommon period!) never came up once, only pithy nicknames and jokes, like at what point does it stop being informational
I heard it also reads the discs backward
I remember when when I was a kid, my uncle (only a few years older, so more like a cousin, really) had a PS1 and we played Tekken 3 a ton. One time, we were in the middle of a match, but one of his friends came with a new game (probably Tomb Raider?) and just opened the tray while we were playing to put in the new disc. It blew my little kiddy mind when the game didn't freeze or crash or anything and we just finished the match.
(also that nolan north joke was sublime)
That was an interesting trip. I love that you mentioned Parasite Eve, an oft overlooked game. If you read that article about Crash, he mentions Lisp for the "critters". That is especially trippy that they had a Lisp interpreter built into the game to run code and they were still able to not only fit the whole game, but make it run fast. I'd assume they had some kind of bytecode format so it didn't take as much space and ran faster, but still, it's crazy.
The Dot Hack games on PS2 not only were split onto a number of disks. You had to buy each disk separately. Once you completed one of the disks your save file would be flagged and the information text would go from white to yellow. This was the only way to know that you'd need to go hunt down the next disk to continue the store.
Though that was also because the game wanted to mimic the feeling of playing an MMO. They were released in such a way to try to create that feeling (I was playing them for a while as they came out after someone at EB Games suggested I give it a try when the first one launched)
@anthonydelfino6171 Here's my problem with that being the "Goal". Each disk had just under 20 hours of content. And that's if you do all the side stuff. The main story is only about 14 hours per disk.
They 100% made a regular 80 JRPG set on an MMO world and tried to charge 4X the price.
THIS ISNT RATCHET AND CLANK!!!!! Jk, I’m glad to see you tackle new and interesting topics. Great stuff as always!
Every time somebody mentions R&C, the PSP video gets delayed another week
Love that they announced that FF7R part 2 as a multi disc ps5 game less than a year after this video lol
Only 10 months later, square already announce FFVII rebirth with 2 disc. World sure spin too fast.
I had Resident Evil Remake on Gamecube, a fun thing was if you opened the tray, it stopped the clock. I used this method to get the Anti-Tank Gun with unlimited rounds, and unlock everything else.
One weird example of a double disc game was Sakura Wars: So Long My Love on the PS2, at least for the North American version. It came out in 2010 (5 years after the original Japanese release) and both discs contained the full game, the only difference was the choice of language, disc 1 was in English and disc 2 was in Japanese with subtitles. Just kinda odd considering some PS2 games had language select screens on one disc, but Sakura wars is a pretty text heavy visual novel so maybe the audio files were too big for one disc.
Games of that era didn't have high resolution textures so any large space would be used for audio or FMVs, yeah. Think an audiobook or movie size.
Rock band is actually an 8 disk game when you include all the track packs, which were basically physical dlc.
I soooo miss this ! I loved the ps1 and its my favorite system of all. It had the best turn based rpgs and i cant tell you how awesome it is to get to an exciting cliff hanger section of the game and have it say , put in disc 2!
It made the game feel bigger and more satisfying, it was exciting going to the second disc because its almost like getting a sequel!
I wish big rpg games would go back to this format.
I could be mistaken because it has been 15 years or so since I've played it... but I'm pretty sure Baten Kaitos on the gamecube needed 2 discs. I never got far enough as a kid to need the second disc but my dad and older brothers did.
It does have 2 disks. I only know this because you need both ISO files to emulate the game, lol.
The most incredible thing to me is that, although printed on CD, Ridge Racer 1 fits entirely on the shared 3MB memory of PS1 9:46. Many Genesis and SNES games were bigger then that.