I did this to myself because I only played games that my gpu could perform and that was the reason why pretty much all of the games I play are pre 2010.
What GPU
Don’t remember which one I had at the time, but it barely played angry birds and my current one is an rx580.
Ah okay. Asking as my 1080 is still playing anything I want even though it’s 10+(?) years old
The 1080 was a factory freak. I used mine forever, I want to say from a 2015 build as well.
- Mario 64?
- Ocarina of Time?
- Turkish?
- Goldeneye?
This kid is about to meet one of the gaming gods.
Kid’ll be fine.
Besides, what super awesome lifestyle changing game is out right now that the kid will miss?
Roblox 🤮
Ehhh, there’s a lot of crap on Roblox, but some of it isn’t bad. There’s just the obvious UI bullshit and constant spam to buy shit, but I take that opportunity to shit on people who do that so that my kids understand that’s a dirty practice.
as if everybody gaming in the 90’s we were all in sync with each other. lol i was rocking pc win98 tie fighter, and old floppy disc knock off games/ sim city, one kid down the street, she had a Nintendo with 3 Disney games Aladdin, lion king etc, one had a Sega with zombies ate my neighbors, that paper boy game and some sanic. it was pure chaos even later when “everyone” had a ps1 everyone’s tastes were completely different. sure there were trends but nobody felt they were stuck in a outdated bubble like op is implying except for that Atari kid. only played pong, fuck that bubble kid neanderthal mutherfucker. lol
we are currently playing stardew valley and I don’t think harvest moon would hit as well, but maybe that’s an exception overall, they truly just enjoy hard simpler games like the classics are
I have had an N-64 plugged into the back of my TV for 25 years straight. The TV has changed. My kids were raised on this shit.
Now my daughter brings her friends home to play Mario 64! Masterpieces have no expiry date!!
I misread that as Mario Kart 64. That game is the apex of the genre.
Cant force the shit, same with any culturally significant thing from your childhood. Think of it in reverse: if you aren’t willing to engage with their zeitgeist in good faith, how could you expect them to engage with yours?
There are plenty of games up to the PS3 era that every kid would do well to play at least once. Stuff that is objectively good, that aged well, or close enough.
The problem, as I see it, is that if they get too used to mobile games, they won’t have the patience for typical console or PC games, because those, on average, aren’t dopamine dispensers and won’t be rewarding every second click or button press - more importantly, they should NOT nag the player with cash shops.
Also important: limit the amount of games available - this is valid both for current and retro games. The moment you have “all the games” at your disposal, several things kick in: analysis paralysis, appeal to familiarity (will only play what you already know or someone knows), seeing no value in the games[1].
Others mentioned the social aspect, which is true as well and something they just can’t experience nowadays anymore. Minecraft and Roblox are famous because they’re easy for kids to pick and play with friends. Back in our days, we had to physically sit beside one another and play together, or pass the controller on death; we also physically lent and traded games, so the games also had value within our little social circles. While fully digital games are extremely convenient, the “scarcity” gave them a social value that they completely lack today and which I suppose boardgames now fill out (yes, you can play them online, but playing on an actual table is almost always better)
If, when you were small, you only had a limited selection of games, which was common during the cartridge era, you would be very careful with choosing new games to ask your parents to buy, though renting was an option to see which ones were good or not. You had to make do with the little you had. When you got bored with one, you either looked through your collection and played something else, or did something else entirely; you never threw away a game (unless it really sucked) and you never got a new game on a whim. That is good. ↩︎
i don’t think i’ve ever heard anyone call it “the ps3 era”.
God I tried. And it told me a lot out myself.
The VAST majority of that old stuff, the stuff that I remember so fondly, was only fun because it was the best we had.
My first game was Yars Revenge. By today’s standards, it’s about 30 seconds of entertainment.
Even Super Mario Brothers, the pinnacle of games for years, had no save button and you have to pull off a long series of perfect play with only a couple of lives or get sent back to level 1. It was almost all single player taking turns.
Compared to even old current systems, there’s just no draw there and there’s no social aspects for them.
I think you’re missing a large piece of the puzzle here.
back between the 70s-90s you played games with friends in the room. you would mock and challenge each other to do better. That was the game.
ᵃⁿᵈ ʸᵒᵘ ʲᵘˢᵗ ˡᵒˢᵗ ᶦᵗ
Sounds like something someone who had friends growing up would say
I didn’t have any friends, but I had siblings.
ᵃⁿᵈ ʸᵒᵘ ʲᵘˢᵗ ˡᵒˢᵗ ᶦᵗ
thanks for making me lose the game 😠
Even Super Mario Brothers, the pinnacle of games for years, had no save button and you have to pull off a long series of perfect play with only a couple of lives or get sent back to level 1.
Maybe the original has this issue of being held back by overly punishing arcade inspired design, but I replayed Super Mario World recently and I think it holds up in this respect. You only need to get past the next checkpoint for your progress to be saved, and if you are running low on lives and don’t want to lose progress, there is the option of going back to previous levels to farm more lives and powerups. There are also semi-secret areas with buttons that put extra blocks into every level that make the game easier. For basically the first half of the game the only thing that’s really required to win is a small amount of impulse control, planning and patience, and it seems to deliberately work to teach you that stuff in various ways.
My kid is almost 6 so he doesn’t really know modern games. For now he is totally into lemmings and the incredible machine 2. It’s fun because I played those games a lot and can easily help him when he is stuck.
Given all the child predators on Roblox, can’t blame ya
Don’t forget the slavery and financial exploitation!
Ive heard of the financial exploitation and pedo controversy but what is the slavery controversy for roblox?
Gonna be honest, my brain farted while being flippant. “Financial exploitation” to refer to extracting robux from users. I used “slavery” to refer to uncompensated or undercompensated underage labor relating to development…
This is the responsible way to raise a child on video games IMO. Modern games have predatory practices like microtransactions.
The look on her face says everything to me though.
The look on her face says everything to me though.
lol, it wasn’t even attempting to be a good photoshop. Maybe your screen needs cleaning?
Plenty of fun normal games, especially indie games.
Jokes on them. I hack games that have micro transactions and DLCs and make them entirely free. Even games I have paid for. My child hasn’t seen an ad or a micro transaction yet.
Can you elaborate a bit more on that? Most of the games with dlc or microtransaction stuff that I play have it all verified with some sort of online system (steam, mostly). What games are you hacking, and how?
steam does not verify much by itself, its not made to be a strong security system. look up goldberg emu, cream api, etc. they work if the DLC content is not really downloadable, but already baked in just locked away behind a check
and if the content is something to download, most of the time you can grab the clean steam files from a website of a russian counterstrike community and drop the files into your game install folder and then use the aforementioned tools.
This.
Well, what about this: Early exposure to the shithead practices of modern gaming can enable children to more easily identify what’s good and what’s just trying to take money from them.
I dunno.
You could argue the other way around - growing up with decent and non-predatory practices makes you less tolerant of when companies try to extort you because you already know what “good” looks like.
I’m sure the corpos would love nothing more than kids getting exposed to predatory practices from a young age so they grow up feeling those things are acceptable and normal.
Drag thinks we should expose kids to a safe environment most of the time, and to little bits of predatory design in contexts that make them easy to identify. Like a vaccine.
“Dad, how do I put armour on my horse?”
“You need to grow up and get a job and a credit card for that.”
“That sucks, I hate Oblivion! I want to go back to Morrowind!”
“It’s okay buddy, I pirated the Oblivion remaster. Let’s play that instead.”
Most kids aren’t discerning about those kinds of things.
That’s why I slam that shit home all the time. Robux are a scam. YouTubers are just selling to you. If it has ads it’s not worth watching. Just repeat that every day to the kids and they’re good to go.
The problem is that kids dont make or have money. Its like burning their hand the first time, they need to attempt to pay for their own lives fully at least once to really understand it. I think its fair to restrict these types of things to mature rated games as a general rule.
My kids didn’t see an ad connected to videos until the youngest was about 7 (outside of a movie theater, at least). When they first saw them, they were flabbergasted about what they were or why people would just sit there watching them, and absolutely refuse to put up with them. I’d say they are better off seeing how things could be, so when they see how things are now they recognize how utter shit it is.
I grew up playing games with my dad. I wouldn’t change a thing. I miss it dearly.
He never went easy on me in Soul Calibur.
He never went easy on me in Soul Calibur
Dad aint raising no wimp! Get good or get schooled.
But seriously that’s really sweet.Your dad is Nick Swardson? That’s cool
Yeah my mom was an old school namco head and we’d play together when I was a kid
Telling my five-year-old that if they can beat Ecco the Dolphin in front of me I will take them out for ice cream, but I’m not sitting down to watch more often than once a week.
Woah you just unlocked some core memories.
I got a Miyoo Mini plus for mine, installed onionos and loads of games from internet archive. They love it, maybe one day I’ll set up my dusty wiiU but i only have Mario kart for it. Or some kind of minipc set up.
Counterpoint:
The reason they will be out of touch is that they will have better impulse control and better spending habits than kids raised on modern games with their FOMO MTX and gacha bullshit.
So basically, actual ‘nerds’ are rasing another generation of ‘nerds’, except this time, nerds 2.0 will probably actually be more socially intelligent than the brain dead zombies being raised on fornite, roblox and tiktok, who have negative attention spans and cannot fathom the concept of doing any actual thought-work, when chatgpt can just do their homework for them.
They’ll also be more tech savvy, like being exposed to or having to learn at least some of how emulation works, which kinda de facto makes you understand things like a file structure, which an increasing number of kids (now adults too) raised on modern mobile UIs… have no clue about.
Oh, they’ll also likely just be generally more literate.
Apples and oranges.
'90s equivalent to “them goshdang tiktoks and fortnites” isn’t Half-Life and Ocarina of Time, it’s Television. The Simpsons or DBZ. Or those awful “classic” animated shows from the '80s that were designed from the ground up to be toy ads. “Impulse control” my ass, most of y’all were glued up to the TV screen like a moth to a lamp and only got consumption impulses out of it. Calling young people “brain dead zombies” is such an “old man yells at cloud” moment, look at yourself.
There’s more culture than ever being created now thanks to the incredibly lower barrier to entry. There are more incredible microtransaction-less indie games made in the last 10 years than the exhaustive library of most gaming consoles back then. Celeste, Outer Wilds, Expedition 33, Baldur’s Gate 3, Tunic…
The existence of slop is a constant across generations, and clinging to an idealized past is such a foolish endeavor, and will cause you to lose out on so much relevant cultural discourse happening right now. How many classic video games from the '90s might a queer kid growing up nowadays look up to? How many?? How many had, oh, I don’t know, a goddamn female protagonist? And don’t say that Samus counts. What a lame-ass culture to let our daughters grow up in.
I mean, as a 90s kid, and tech dork… yeah, I largely did drop TV almost entirely, in favor of console and pc gaming, and exploring the early public internet on a 56k modem.
I would imagine most tech dorks of the era did as well?
Like, as soon as I learned how to block ads on the internet, then later on youtube, as well as uh, obtain audio visual media without cost… I did that regularly, never looked back, began to actually not be able to stand TV due to ads everywhere all the time.
And yep, I am still calling anyone who watches ads for anything, anyone who buys into incredibly exploitative business models that waste your time, money, or both, yep, I’ve been calling them idiot consumer zombies since the 90s, consistently.
You are right that there are more non bs indie games now. That is great! That is good.
Are more games more diverse now?
Yes! Also good.
… But I’ve had basically the same opinions on all this since the 90s, I am not rembering an idealized past, I am one of the nerds thats been this way the whole damn time.
They call Gen Z the digital native generation, but this omits the ubernerd Millenials such as myself (and others from other generations) who forged the way, who were early adopters from a young age, who were digital visionaries that forged the path before the ecosystems got to be more user friendly, more accessible, more mainstream.
Like uh, without potentially doxxing myself, of those indie games you list?
Yeah, I know a few people on one of those game’s dev teams, personally, met them online when I was first like like 13, back when multiplayer games had server browsers with private custom servers, some of those also had their own websites and forums, all we had for voice comms was ventrilo… I met these people way back, have regularly voice chatted and gamed with them for… 20 years?
I myself have been modding (as in making mods) for that long as well, I literally taught myself how to code so that I could do it, before I got out of high school, before any high school offered coding classes, before Adobe bought out Macromedia, and flash games on Newgrounds were all the rage.
Not to try to gatekeep nerddom with some kind of official checklist you have to measure up against, but I think you are considerably underestimating the potential nerdiness of a lot of really dedicated nerds from that era, and thus writing them off as ‘old men yelling at clouds’… when we’ve been yelling at those same clouds since we were kids, then we went on to actually implement the changes we deemed necessary, as best as we could when up against the corporate and financial behemoths constructed by Boomers.
My public high school in Southern California had programming class in the late 1970’s. Nerds been nerding for a bit. Now if you’ll excuse me, I gotta yell at some clouds, now where did I leave my onion belt…
You’re not kidding about file structure. I haven’t got a fucking clue how to do it with phones. Every thing is just “in here somewhere” and it’ll pray the search feature can find it when I eventually locate the file browser.
I miss my PC
Due to circumstances, I’ve had to emulate more on phones. You very much can figure out the file structure so long at its Android (and 9 times out of 10 shit is just in the download folder). I swear my wife’s iPhone is a little black box, though.
IIRC modern iOS ships with a file manager. The black box used to be even worse!
iPhone bitch here
Yeah we absolutely have a file manager!
You’re in a virtualized container that only exposes some directories, also those directories are mostly hidden from you, also within this container you generally don’t have any permissions to them, and also every application completely obfuscates it’s folder access via some file access API.
It’s crazy to me how hard consumers got fucked right from the start on phone software and how normalized we are to it.
It’s mainly done for security reasons, but yes it is not the most friendly way of doing things.
I agree with you, though… it’s definitely good for the general population as a whole. Tech savvy peeps should have the option to…be, but most folks should not have root access.
If it was primarily done for security then it was a massive fucking failure. But I believe that security was a secondary concern.
What reason do you think? Also what makes you think it was a failure? Seems pretty successful to me.
Do yourself a favor and install a FOSS file manager system, if you can / its not too much trouble on your particular phone.
Basicslly every phone OS goes out of their way to make their particular file browsing app batcrap overcomplicated and unintuitive if you want to do anything other than exactly what they want you do do.
Which is usually sync everything on your phone to their cloud and your account.
I am running a sort of jerry rigged, half baked, de goodled android, … basically I have torn out, replaced or disabled everything I can without root, but left in play store and core g services so i can actually still use it for common apps… done the best I can to lock down everything to its bare minimim privelege set, never use a big ole shared account for anything, everything is a separate, old school email account.
I haven’t got a fucking clue how to do it with phones.
In a certain way, probably me neither. I use ls, df, md5sum, cp, mv, rsync, tar, gzip, gpg, vim, touch and mkdir in Termux (terminal emulator for Android). For example, say I am replacing MP3 for FLAC. I really like to keep the timestamps of when I added the specific song, but I can’t find any better way than
touch -r oldfile.mp3 newfile.flacBut I also use FX File explorer for certain tasks, as it thankfully keeps timestamps. I absolutely hate how moving photos in Google Photos updates the modified timestamp to the date of when the file was moved. Why?
And I also have an ancient version of ES File explorer, version 4.0.2.3. Before it enshittified.But I am not sure whatever that is installable from within the device, or it’s old enough to require
adb install --bypass-low-target-sdk-block app.apklike some other old apps I use.Anyway, I have no idea what’s going on with iPhones and files, or whether that’s a non-existent concept there.
Yeah the nerds usually find themselves in very powerful social circles if they survive school. Circles of emotionally mature experts with strong careers.
Kids’ needs are of course very important, but abandoning engaging hobbies in favor of some phantom desire to fit in is dumb.
Never discount the sheer volume of text and dialog contained in the average mid-90s JRPG!
4 CDs of text to be read!! Though I’ll gladly replay the 2 CDs of Chrono Cross for the beautiful graphics, music and characters.
