I've told my child, 7, that when he completes the original Super Mario Bros he can get a switch and play mario-kart. He consistently gets to the end of 8-2, so he's damn close, and he loves the game! Though he has a slight preference for Kirby, also on the original NES.
Most of his friends seem to be obsessed with Minecraft, and Ultimate Chicken Horse, to the extent that when he had a friend over I overheard him saying "Mario is old, but it's still fun!" in Finnish.
> Most of his friends seem to be obsessed with Minecraft, and Ultimate Chicken Horse
It's really difficult to compare creative multiplayer games like Minecraft with Super Mario Bros. I think it's perfectly natural for kids to prefer to play games they can actually play together. Especially sandbox games that allow people to play the same game with drastically different play styles. When I play Minecraft with my kids, I'll go hunting and scavenging with my son and we'll use the resources collected to build out and decorate a village with my daughters. They all have learned about redstone enough to start automating some of their own builds. This is all vastly more engaging than taking turns watching each other play a single player game.
When he plays minecraft he alternates between trying to build things he knows, or just wandering around and placing dynamite everywhere to blow things up.
He does! I guess I wasn't clear, he's got an XBox for minecraft and stuff, but I ignore it because I'm not interested in those games. So he plays that by himself, with his friends, or with his mom.
I just happen to have a NES classic for myself, and that's what he chooses to play with me.
I think having three consoles is crazy, but I have promised him the third when/if he completes Mario.
Minecraft is really great - I would stop ignoring it and play it with your kid. My two "non-gamer" daughters play it several times a week together. They have done so for nearly 10 years.
My son was ruined after we started using mods. The ones he sees on Youtube are all paid things on the MS store, but now he believes I can just magic them out of my hat.
On the plus side, we have a great deal of fun playing hide and seek with the morph modpack.
His friends all play minecraft on the Switch, but they don’t have mods so he thinks it boring.
Just curious if other people feel the same way? My kid is right on the edge of the Minecraft-Roblox divide and I don’t have a strong opinion either way (he’s almost 7)
Thinking about your kids „safety“ (that’s a strong word, but consider gambling, violent content, scammers, etc.), Minecraft is definitely a better choice for a child.
Get him into Java Edition rather than Bedrock edition and most of the mods are free, there’s a lot of tinkering he can do with it and practically all of the games content single- and multiplayer is absolutely child-safe.
Roblox is a lot more open-ended with what it lets it’s users create, which leads to a lot of violent and not safe for children content, mixed with some pretty aggressive monetization. I don’t have a child, but if I did I’d rather let them play Call of Duty (one of the older ones without microtransactions) than leave them alone with Roblox.
I guess I should have explained more - he also plays minecraft on the xbox, he just chooses to play NES games with me. I think those two consoles are enough, but I've offered the switch when he finishes Mario.
But I guess even outside the home he's been exposed to other consoles via his friends, and their parents. I'm certainly not holding him back and forcing him to play weird/old games alone!
Eh, I don't think you need to. The internet is crammed full of judgmental comments that people make based on a single sentence or two, often without any attempt at asking clarifying questions. People just generally need to take a breath and not assume the worst about someone just because they don't go immediately into a high level of detail about their personal lives in front of a bunch of strangers.
As long as the rest of world is accessing shared media, there is no way around this. Keeping these things from the kid will mean a lifetime of references and metaphors they don’t understand.
In general I think it’s harder than it was 20 years ago. The monoculture is basically dead. Instead of everyone having the choice of the same 3 TV shows on Friday night, there is an endless number of options on streaming services or YouTube, not to mention games, Twitch, etc. However, having something will at least allow them to to have a connection with a peer group who was in the same niche, and other things have grown big enough to transcend some of that, like Mr Beast and Mark Rober for example. I think a lot of people, even outside the core audience have seen the videos and know who they are.
This doesn’t need to be the center of culture, but awareness of it still helps round someone out.
To touch on religion… In the US, even if someone isn’t a Christian, I think it is still extremely helpful to be aware of the stories and traditions of Christianity. It is such a huge part of the culture and there are references all over the place that would be missed without this knowledge.
The only time these things wouldn’t be useful is, like you said, in some kind of small religious community they will never leave, or a cult.
Honestly I think you just let it happen organically. You don't have to push them towards or away from specific media, just be supportive as they want to approach things. If they come home asking to play minecraft, or whatever new trend is being talked about at school, let them. Or if you want to guide things a little bit, let them play as long as you are playing as well.
People don't need 100% coverage of what's on trend for their generation to fit, but they do need some exposure. I'm sure we all remember the "my mom doesn't let me watch tv" kid from our youth that had trouble fitting in, but rarely remember which was the "I don't really like Power Rangers, but do like Ninja Turtles" kid because they still fit in.
I did that. I gave him a simple console from the 90s and a TI-86 programmable calculator when he was 6. Thankfully he mastered them before he was 9 and got exposed to python/minecraft.
Now he can learn anything due to having been exposed to the basics.
Psst, someone tell the poor kiddo about save states in emulators.
Practice the hard parts as much as you want.
It makes playing/experiencing all the ultrahard games a lot easier. Of course a lot of diehards hate that, but ultimately keeping old games relevant involves making them accessible and the save states help with that quite a lot.
Ditto with faqs and maps and cheats. What is nice about the old games is that you can direct-hack the roms and memory spaces a lot more easily than modern games, so it is an early entry into computer architecture and education within the context of games.
The Switch has many modern Mario games that support 2 players that are essentially the old games with better graphics (side scrolling, not like the other full 3d Mario games).
You should get a Switch so that you and your kids can play together. It's much more fun and social
The Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment specializes in generational knowledge exchange through the medium of video games. There is nothing that warms my heart more than watching that information transfer in real time.
Watching a parent explain to their child how to properly hold an N64 controller.
Watching the child's mind explode as mom/grandma/dad/gramps shows them the warp zone in level 1-2 of Super Mario Bros. Frequent "Mom doesn't know about video games, how'd she do that!?" kind of quotes from the kids.
Watching dad and daughter charge through a Sierra adventure game, looking up the manual in Archive.org and figuring out 40 year old puzzles together.
It would be great if my kid was into the video games I was into as a kid, but I've kind of resigned myself to the fact that she's a different person, grew up in a different environment, has different expectations out of video games. You can't force someone to like something. Same with movies and music. I tried to get her into Harry Potter and Star Wars and the kid/teen movies I grew up with like The Goonies and Flight of the Navigator, but those movies just so old to this generation, and there's nothing in it for them to relate to.
It's like trying to get "11 year old me" into The Howdy Doody Show.
This hasn’t been my experience. My kids have loved Star Wars, Harry Potter, Space Jam, Looney Toons, Muppets, Uncle Buck, Top Gun, Ghostbusters, My Neighbor Tuturo, all the classic Disney movies, Mary Poppins, Get Smart, and others I’m sure I’m missing. They even like some of the light westerns thier grandparents put on. It’s not everything, but it’s most of what I’ve tried.
They currently love playing classic arcade games on a cabinet I built.
It depends on the kid, but I don’t think it’s just a generational thing. The limits tend to be very old movies with sound issues, which was my limit as well.
My kid's into the old movies I show him but I only pick classics like Princess Bride and Neverending Story that are pretty much timeless, and also terrible B-movies where the oldness makes it even better.
And the thing is there is plenty of new content targeting that generation that is very good. There is a lot of changes in cultural values and norms that just aren’t captured by all our old 1980’s movies. For example views on gender, race and sexuality are wildly different than what we encountered as 80’s kids. Not to mention socioeconomic and geopolitical changes too.
That isn’t to say that 1980’s movies are garbage. Far from it. It’s just like the parent said… trying to get 12 year old me into old junk like pink panther or whatever cartoons were watched in the boomer era.
I mean hell, half the plot lines in older shows don’t work if everybody has a powerful internet connected computer in their pocket.
I would say the topics mentioned were basically non-topics in movies of the past unless explicit like Mississippi Burning.
I think it is more like the Matrix. Super relevant with AI but traveling through phone lines and pay phones, what? It would have to seem so dated the way black and white movies have always just felt too distant for me.
> trying to get 12 year old me into old junk like pink panther or whatever cartoons were watched in the boomer era
I caught a few of them in reruns in the 80's, and for a long time, I assumed those were what the Pink Panther was.
It wasn't until college that I learned about the live-action Inspector Clouseau movies that the cartoons came from. They're amusing farces, and still hold up pretty well. (Though honestly, the Marx Brothers hold up better.)
Of course they can't, the majority of them are rendered unplayable by the manufacturer. For the consoles I played as a kid, this is just tongue-in-cheek, but it is quite likely kids today will not be able to even show their children the games they grew up with. Duck FRM.
I grew up in the 90s, and the time period during which something was created seems to have little correlation with whether I like it or not. My grandmother had an original Nintendo with Super Mario Bros 3, and I much preferred that over whatever was recent for the time (GameCube?). I never got into modern multiplayer video games, and old school Tetris remains one of my favorite games to this day (along with the 40 line clear variant).
Some of my favorite music was written hundreds of years ago. Or a few decades ago. Or in the 90s. Or now. There's good stuff and bad stuff across all time periods. I discovered the Miyazaki films way into adulthood, but that didn't affect how much I enjoyed them.
It seems like more of a personality thing whether someone is willing to give old stuff a "chance" or whether they only gravitate to the latest stuff that their friends are interested in.
For frame of reference, the original Nintendo wasn't discontinued until 1995. The GameCube wasn't released until 2001.
I do find it fascinating how many thousands or tens of thousands of man-hours might go into developing a video game or other interactive media, but the shelf-life for mass enjoyment and cultural relevancy is measured in years or at most a decade or two, unlike more traditional forms of non-interactive media such as literature, photography, painting or even film.
In the case of video games this is particularly true today due to rapid advances in graphics and computing capabilities, and also rapid evolution in game design and mechanics. For example, a large swath of early 3D games suffer from outdated control schemes such as "tank controls" which anyone outside of enthusiasts might find too jarring for enjoyment. Some titles have thankfully gotten rereleases with improved mechanics and QOL, and have found new audiences.
I imagine this is logarithmic and that video game shelf life will expand over time? Unless interactive media and technological progress are forever entwined.
Honestly... I don't think there's much difference between games and other forms of media in terms of longevity in the public consciousness. "Singin' in the Rain" was released in 1952 and might very well still at least ring a bell today, but what about "Monkey Business" or "Viva Zapata!", released the same year? Those films even had some pretty big names (Marilyn Monroe and Marlon Brando). Even nowadays, there are still plenty of "shovelware" movies out there.
That being said, I think the real difference comes down to the fact that games are (by necessity) relatively tightly coupled to the hardware required to run them. Movie projector systems, while complex, are still much "dumber" than a computer. I think it's safe to say that if you have a film print from, say, the 60s, there would probably be a range of projector models from the preceding decade that could play it.
By contrast, if you have a copy of a PC game from, say, 1996, you're going to have to pay a lot more attention to its specific hardware requirements in order to build a system that's capable of running it. That raises the skill floor to run it in the first place. Honestly, I think this is one reason console retrogaming is so popular: to play a game, you only have to get a hold of a working console. The problem these days is that consoles are becoming more PC-like, so they're kinda backing into the same problems as PCs.
Imo it already has, since ~ps3 controls have been pretty standardized and graphics was good enough for The Last of Us level quality, so the limiting factor is more the art budget than the technology.
The biggest problem is multiplayer games that need to keep a community and cloud servers only that can be shut down on a whim
Other than that, there's the culture aspect thats just as true of books and movies where new things can say something about the current culture that old ones can't as easily and its fun to be excites about something new
I've had the experience of something being more enjoyable as a Child, less because of the time period and more because the nature of the art just worked better for who/what I was at the time
I've seen for example Narnia's book series mentioned as an example of this
I can't even play at a level I used to be able to play in the games I loved, I imagine they would fair a bit better given the time.
I think it is time too, I can't dedicate 4 straight hours to a single game problem like I could before, and I can't get the reps in for competitive game training like I used to. Competitive games need a "masters" category for washed up casuals!
> They’ve now independently played through Pokémon Shield, which is vaguely set in Britain, if Britain were comprised entirely of castles, villages and London.
I dunno, sounds about right to me.
I wonder what it is about games that grab some kids but not others. I was hooked from the very first time I saw Mario on my dad's NES at about age 4. Tons of other kids in the same age and same situation shrugged and gave it a pass.
One of my favorite intersections of classic video games and modern emulation is that there are updated versions of Tecmo Bowl that have current players and rosters.
I have an eight year old and he likes playing Tecmo Bowl with his friends b/c:
- it has the current teams he and his friends know and like
- the learning curve is pretty quick so you can get up and running with someone who has never played in only a few minutes
I played a hack a few years back; they didn't just change the roster and team locations/logos. They also added in 4-3 defenses for teams that use it, which impressed me.
One of the games that it turned out my dad loved, but that I randomly stumbled on here on HN first is Star Control II, or in this case the open source remake of it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37925538
Was absolutely surprised by how much I enjoyed it. I think the late 80s and 90s are a particularly timeless period given how much strength there often was in the artistic direction. To me a lot of stuff from the early 2000s actually holds up less well.
2D games were a relatively mature medium by the 90s, so the games people were making by then were just good.
It took a long time before people developed a set of conventions after the general switch to 3D games. So a lot of the games from the late 90s - early 2000s period might have been really innovative and sold well, but often aren't very fun to play today unless you are a connoisseur of weird old games.
it's almost like the slow shift away from silent film -- studios invested in it hugely and there were blockbuster talking pictures, but it took a while before people really figured out how to handle it artistically.
StarCon II adventure mode remains one of the best games I have ever played. Really took you in. My friends and I would all sit around the computer and play it for hours. Some good old Melee action was always great as well. BTW the O.G. creators are getting together and finally making a sequel!
That game was bonkers when it came out. Reminds me I should give it another run. It is also one of the few games that used the pc speaker in a way that was not just random beeps. When I heard that I had to spend a few days figuring out the timer chip to make it so I could do something similar.
I got stuck at the age of 6 in Link's Awakening for the OG Gameboy. I convinced my mom to let me call the tip hotline so I knew how to progress.
I was stuck just before the seventh? dungeon where you need to revive the rooster to fly over the pit to the entrance. I had the revival song and level two bracelet but for the life of me couldn't figure out what to do next. After about 5 questions where I answered yes to all of them the gentleman on the line directed me to the town satue.
I remember my mind being blow when I discovered GameFAQs.
This reminds me of my playthrough of Arx Fatalis, some years after the game came out. This game is a sort-of love letter to Ultima Underworld and kind-of seems to take place in the same universe as the later game Dark Messiah of Might and Magic.
Anyway, I occasionally looked up hints when I got stuck and sometimes really needed them. Towards the end of the game there is a sequence where a werewolf is hunting you and you're forced to a spot where you seemingly must make a very difficult jump over a pit to escape. I couldn't make the jump after tons of tries and the guide had no other hints other than that you had to do so to progress.
Finally I piled some gold bricks I'd been carrying in my inventory forever that had seemingly no purpose on the very ridge of the pit and used them to get just enough of a boost to barely make the jump over the pit. It was weird it even worked.
Later I found out if you ran with vsync off it screwed up your characters momentum in the game and that was why the jump was impossible for me.
In Sonic 3 there is a carnival level. At a certain point in the game there's this spin bouncing platform you need to move to get past. Many hours/days spent trying to get past that part.
Year later, in college I was thinking back on it and I looked it up, turns out it should have been much easier. Seeing your comment made me look it back up. Apparently it's called "the barrel of doom" and well known.
Before discovering GameFaqs, some games just ended at a certain part because you were lost.
I figured that one out only by luck (I got bored and decided to spin dash), and only after multiple lives lost due to running out the clock.
I don’t think it’s even supposed to be that hard, but the way the platform bounces down if you jump on it gives you the entirely wrong idea as to the solution.
That and the fact that it gates progress entirely using a mechanic that had, up to that point, never really been introduced -- you might have noticed it on accident, but the whole design of the game (go fast from left to right, jumping sometimes) and, as you mentioned, the fact that it bounces when you jump on it, lead you to have no idea how to solve it correctly.
My spicy take is this: that particular obstacle is not "they upped the difficulty", but is instead "they designed this poorly."
Well sonic games are… weird. The actual experience of playing them blind is frankly very poor. You want to go fast but you’re constantly stopping because it’s too difficult to play smoothly without prior knowledge of the level. The levels aren’t designed to be particularly challenging to complete; they’re designed to be challenging to master and complete “quickly”.
Most of what we think of for evaluating levels is from the ethos of mario. Which is probably the right call as most people don’t want to play platformers levels multiple times.
Amusingly, when first playing through A Link To the Past on its remake for the GBA, I distinctly remember getting stuck before the seventh dungeon, which ultimately requires you to find the statue in the dark world that corresponds to the rooster statue in Kakariko.
GameFAQs also taught me that it was possible to glitch out of bounds and traverse a specific path through the game's memory in order to access the new dungeon that you were only supposed to be able to enter if you completed the remake-exclusive multiplayer mode.
I had a similar thing happen with Link's Awakening, but I had the DX version for the GBC and I was probably 8-10 when I got it. I explored every nook and cranny of that game, but was stuck in the seventh dungeon because the only way to progress was to find a hidden, bombable section of wall. As far as I know there is no hint that it's there. I had already gone through the whole dungeon poking every square inch of wall with my sword listening for the hollow plink, but I missed this section.
I only got back to it on the multi-state drive at the end of summer to my second year of college, when I borrowed my parent's Blackberry to look up the answer on gamefaqs. Then I breezed through the eighth dungeon and beat the game after a decade of not playing it at all.
The final boss in link’s awakening is a multi-stage shadow thing (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZu01qH2f0c) with the final one being the arm flail thing. I managed to beat it with sword beams (meaning never getting hit through all the stages, because sword beams only works at full health).
Apparently you’re supposed to use arrows on it, but when I had initially tried, they had kept bouncing off. So only bombs and sword beams seemed to work. It took me a few weeks and many tries, but finally I got-gud and eventually did it. Sometime after I learned arrows do work.
It cuts both ways, though :) My son is obsessed with the Switch Zelda games, Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. You can save at almost any time, plus the game autosaves constantly. He always tries to pull BUT DAD I GOTTA SAVE GIMME A FEW MORE MINUTES. Sorry bud, I saw the autosave icon pop up 10 seconds ago, you're good.
Videos showing how to beat every single game really helps as well, much easier to learn how to play a game by watching someone play than reading a guide in a magazine.
I think the ubiquity of gameplay videos really takes something away from the experience. I feel like it puts you in a different mindspace when you're "unspoiled" and seeing everything for the first time. And having to experiment, discover, and make progress through only your own brainpower is like, better for your brain in some way I feel, than it is to go running to a guide to give you the answer every time you can't figure out what to do in 30 seconds.
I learned arcade games in the early 1980's mostly by watching someone else play. When a new game showed up, I would typically watch people play for at least a couple hours before putting a quarter up. I wasn't rich.
I absolutely hate how they won't explain crucial gameplay details (never mind the confusing story/lore) and somehow that's part of the experience. DS2 seems particularly bad (case in point, that ridiculous adaptability stat - also I had now idea where to go 90% of the time).
That said, DS1 is still a great game that's insanely replayable.
For me it strongly depends on the game. A self-contained narrative game or a puzzle game? No, figuring it out from what's in the game is the point. A sandbox game, especially a small early-access one with a nonexistant/incorrect/broken tutorial? Hell yeah. Also competitive RTS and FPS games. PVE FPS and platformers it's not so useful to do so until you're already somewhat OK at the game and you want to do something like speedrunning it.
I know it's kind of an exception, since it's such a "pure" game, but still: one of best NES Tetris player right now is currently 14 (he was born 20 years after the game was released) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willis_Gibson
fpses since Call of Duty are a different breed. The Quake skill ceiling...just didn't exist. I'm not sure such a thing is politically correct now in modern games (read okay with management given they want to sell cheap dopamine, not adrenaline)
To play Quake or Counter-Strike competently, you have to use a PC, a keyboard, and, crucially, a mouse. A console controller can't hope to compete. And a ton of players play on consoles from a sofa, before a large TV. To capture this audience, the FPS games had to slooow doooown.
CounterStrike (back when it was an HL mod) was the last game I really got good at. And by good I mean "somewhat competitive people didn't hate having me on their team" not "I was the MVP." I sunk a lot of time into doing so.
CoD/Val still have a skill ceiling most people will never reach, I sorta agree with you though, esp battle royale style games are only popular because you don't have to be good to win. In quake if you're bad you will never take a game off me, in Apex you might get lucky.
I wouldn't say that, there definetly are FPS games with a very high skill ceiling. It's just that most of them nowadays have more of a mix of raw mechanical skill and tactical play (with team mates). Take Counter Strike or Valorant for instance which mix a high requirement for mechanical skill with lots of tactical thinking. Or games like Overwatch and Pubg where aim is still important, but cooperation and positioning will mostly beat that.
This is one of the things I loved about Overwatch when it was first released. You use a healer with a beam they locks onto people or a giant man with a shield blocking incoming shots, but you also had the soldier with his rifle and the archer if you want to take accurate shots and test your mechanical skills more. It really allowed folks with a wide range of FPS skills to play together somewhat effectively.
Most old games need serious modding before I’d actually recommend them, because they are haunted by lots of terrible design choices.
Secret of Mana holds a special place in my heart, but really needs the Turbo romhack to really enjoy. The great thing about this romhack, is that it’s multiple hacks gathered into a system that allows easily activating or deactivating the parts you want: https://www.romhacking.net/forum/index.php?topic=27890.0
I hope they never know what it was like playing World of Warcraft in 2006, when quests sometimes asked for 10 of an item with a low drop rate, from mobs with a low spawn rate.
It’s very hard to say. I’m aged in gamer years, and over the last few decades I’ve seen the average age of gamer climb much higher than I expected. When I played Amiga or NES or GameGear, it was strictly in the kids territory. Adults sat around drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes and having a chat. Talking business. Nowadays I think the average age is nearing 35? Has it passed it? Teens and young adults met up in PC Cafes but that era is gone, so now it’s all online.
Are kids going to be better than someone with 25-30 years of experience? Can they play FPSs better than the CAL generation of counter-strike players? Kids who spent their teenage years evening after evening meeting up to play Melee games? It’s doubtful.
Envious of new graphics? Not really. As a kid the games captivated me for what they were. Games strived to be unique, original. I think they’ve succeeded. My point of comparison for TailSpin was the tank (or ape) aiming game where you both sight the other and press fire, and TailSpin looked miles better with rain and thunder effects. No envy on my part, I got my “wow” many, many times over. Defeating Joker in Batman after 100+ playthroughs is triumph enough.
>Are kids going to be better than someone with 25-30 years of experience? Can they play FPSs better than the CAL generation of counter-strike players? Kids who spent their teenage years evening after evening meeting up to play Melee games? It’s doubtful.
Depends on the game, but don't underestimate a) the amount of free time kids have and b) the age advantage in reaction times. Most of the FPS and RTS pros are pretty young for a reason.
> When I played Amiga or NES or GameGear, it was strictly in the kids territory. Adults sat around drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes and having a chat.
Most of the adults in my life gamed growing up. I’ve got photos of my old man draped over the couch playing the master system from the early 90s.
It was my grandmother who introduced me to computers through sharing the games she loved with me. She was particularly fond of Duke 1 and 2 and wolfenstien 3D
> It’s very hard to say. I’m aged in gamer years, and over the last few decades I’ve seen the average age of gamer climb much higher than I expected.
I remember being in the car and talking to my sister about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. My dad's face crinkled up in a mixture of confusion and disgust. "Teenage... Mutant... Ninja... Turtles? Teenage... Mutant... Ninja... Turtles?"
These days I see dads the age he was then, walking with their kids, and they're both rocking TMNT T-shirts. The same with Zelda or other franchises I love. I'm convinced that people my age and younger are sort of living an extended childhood. I don't know whether I should feel bad about this... but I don't.
There are always more stupid questions that we can imagine. If you just look an average kid playing something like FIFA you would have an answer immediately. In FPSs you can confuse kids with real military personnel.
Regarding interest, I think less sophisticate games such as Minecraft has an appeal because they have a social aspect and this depends of the specific kid.
In general, their parents games are super easy comparing with today's games. Mainly arcade.
i wonder much less if they can versus how much exposure to high fidelity AAA games and movies is enough to not be able to enjoy or connect to the classic games i loved. i hope i will find out one day.
Something has absolutely been lost in the transition to 3d and voice acting, and all of that crap.
When I was a kid, I was playing games made for adults, or at least teenagers. Mega Man X, Super Mario World, Turtles in Time, Metal Slug... those games were tough!
I learned to read from Final Fantasy VI and Chrono Trigger. We would go to our mom as 4 and 5 year olds and beg her to teach us so we could play these mysterious games with amazing graphics and music.
We all went into kindergarten learning to read, and I tested at a 12 grade level in 3rd grade.
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Modern game design in some ways is better than it ever has been. Games like Dead Cells have taken the arcade "keep starting over" mechanic and fine-tuned it into an amazing mechanic. Elden Ring has such rich, amazing lore, coupled with a challenging adventure game with awesome combat, and the ability to build a character to fit your personality. Baldur's Gate 3 feels like a real tabletop RPG, it really is the zenith of modern RPG storytelling.
However, something has been lost in translation. Beat-em-ups, SHMUPs, and character action games like:
- Devil May Cry 3
- Godhand
- E.S.P. Ra.De
- Ninja Gaiden Sigma
- Resident Evil 4
- Streets of Rage 3
- Contra
- Metal Slug
- Alien vs. Predator ( the beat-em-up )
are not simple games, as they first appear. They are challenging masterpieces that emerged from arcade genres, and were developed by former arcade developers.
They have intricate scoring systems that let you push-your-luck and be rewarded with a higher score. Your competition was the other kids in the arcade, and climbing that leader-board. The ultimate achievement was a 1cc, clearing the entire game on one credit. Bonus points if you get a high score!
They came from a culture where scoring systems mattered. Modern games are great, but I miss the old days.
There is a youtuber called "The Electric Underground" who has some great content on arcade game and character action game design. Highly recommend his review of Resident Evil 4 Remake.
My son, 10, is way better than I ever was at the games of my childhood. Although he has gamed since he was 4, I only get a computer (C64) when I was 11. It was old at this (this was 1991).
Can he beat a bunch of NES or SNES games? Does he have to keep his Nintendo on all week so his friends can resume playing next weekend? DONT UNPLUG IT MOM!
Does he have a near impossible level where the one random neighborhood kid has to come over and beat it?
Did he have to buy GamePro or another magazine to understand how to beat something?
What about that one unintuitive Sonic level on Sega Gensis? The one where you had to press down or up, can’t remember but we’d always run out of time.
Don’t get me started on Battletoads or TNMT.
Kids these days have it easy. Mom, hang up the phone you disconnected my AOL and I need to beat Pokémon Red. Get off my lawn.
Sure but also a bunch of people in this thread have been vastly over-estimating how many of their peers actually beat a lot of these games. Plus modern games have plenty of stupidly challenging levels. I pretty much fail on any game that makes you make dozens of perfectly placed jumps in a row or walk across narrow platforms and end up having my kids complete those for me.
My son is absolutely mind-boggingly good at video games compared to me. We played the Q1 port on the Switch and he had several maps mastered in a day, along with RJing, jumping in general, and aiming in a way which took me months to master.
I apparently sucked at video games but he is definitely able to crush on anything I have thrown at him from back in the day, all the way back to NES on Retropie.
I didn’t have the reaction time until I was a little bit older. Good for your kid!
My kids are to young but they like watching me play Pokémon. I tried to show them Mario Kart on switch but they didn’t have the attention span to play.
I played through that game twice recently with my kids (this was my first time, it's my wife's Genesis). I didn't get stuck there and don't know what you're talking about. I must have accidentally done the right thing? In general I found Sonic 3 to be among the easiest 16-bit platformers I've played, and much easier than the NES games I grew up on.
The vertical floating barrel in Carnival Night zone required you to press up and down to influence the speed and movement - it was infamous back in the day for being "the thing" that people would get stuck on, to the point where many gaming magazines poked fun at it.
I also played it later on as an adult though, and similarly wondered "holy shit, what was wrong with me as a kid" lol
For people who didn’t watch British TV in the 90s, Dominik Diamond (the last parent in the article) compèred GamesMaster, which was the video games show. Although I guess we all read Digitiser as well.
When I try to get my 12 year old interested in the games I played as a kid I get laughed out of the room with side-eye "boomer" comments (I'm Gen-X, but "boomer" seems to be slang for "anyone over 40" these days). It's all in good humor, but there's no competing with what's out today.
That being said, he is playing Skyrim V which was released 13 years ago ...
I sometimes read alarming articles in the media about literacy rates and attention spans. I played Planescape Torment and other text heavy games in my teens.
I too was hoping for something about the 25-cents-per-play video arcades, I was partial to Xevious and Gravitar. (Which are still available in one form or another, either on PC or Playstation). Except, I was already not a kid at the time, late 1970s to mid 1980s peak game arcade experience. Maybe the title should include "games their grandparents love".
My kid wanted to try my Robotron 2084 standup in the basement. He first got confused by the lack of continues, then just gave up because he was playing for free.
UO today isn't the same as UO back in the day, but it's still around. There's a community of reverse engineered servers that he plays on for free, he got tired of paying for the real server.
Can't really get the same experiences without the people though.
Lol well, yes, I wouldn't want them to spend as much time as I did on them. But I ran a guild and learned alot of important social skills that translated well to the business world.
Why would I torture them.
When I look at old games, I'm always shocked about why I endured some of the terrible design choices. I'm so glad for modern game design and don't torture my children with old stuff.
Doesn't mean they get life easy, I let them play at stuff that's harder than their current age and they get plenty of frustration: put a 3 years old on new super mario bros u and see what happens.
My children are much younger than yours though: 3 and 6. The reflexes are just not there yet.
Of the old games, I probably can replay Castlevania SOTN, Super Smash Bros 64. I can make personal exceptions for Super Mario World 2, but not for my children, those games are highly unforgivable, even for stuff that repeats over and over: dying puts often you so far back in the level that after 10 deaths, they correctly get frustrated with the game, it's not fun anymore to repeat the same part that you already know can do. And the gameover offers no value, but it's there ready to annoy you.
For the others many game I've played, they are all full of farming, permanently missable secrets or poor punishments for failing.
I played them back then and loved them, but I was trying to play Final Fantasy VIII recently (I played JRPGs extensively as a child) and I was going to vomit over the amount of farming and boring battles that are there.
I remember picking back up the legend of dragoon as an adult and the dialogues were atrocious.
Castlevania SOTN aged well because the exploration is still incredible, but the challenge of the gameplay (combat) drops significantly once you can read English and can make some strategy: all bosses end up being very easy.
The thing we lost are couch co-op games: bomberman 64, bomberman world, baldur's gate dark alliance 1 and 2 (I know there are the remasters, but those are indeed remasters) and such, these are so rare now, you need two computers every time.
What about Metal Gear Solid? Ocarina of Time? Chrono Trigger? Crash Team Racing? Kirby Super Star? I'm not gonna say any of these games are flawless, but I do think there are at least some SNES/PS1/N64 games that are eminently playable even without nostalgia goggles.
At least two of those titles from your list I played for the first time in my life just recently and had a blast. I can’t relate even remotely to the parent. (Chrono trigger and metal gear solid).
Played and finished final fantasy 9 for the first time a year or so ago and it might be one of the best experiences I’ve ever had with an entertainment medium. It really spoke to me.
One day I told my son, "You should check out this video game I loved when I was your age. You adventure through a huge underground empire, collecting magical treasures and weapons." He got excited, and then I loaded up Zork.
"Here you go!"
West of House
You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.
There is a small mailbox here.
...he looked at me expectantly, waiting for something to happen. "Aren't you going to load the game up, Dad?"
i've been looking for these two ROM packs for NES forever
First mystery ROM: It was called 101-in-1 or one of those bootleg multiple games in one cartridge and there is a menu list of all the games you can play and at the bottom there is two crab like characters walking towards the center from the left and right and when they meet they pull away from each other but different color. The games in this cartridge were insanely tough.
Second mystery ROM: side scroller but there is this weird dune like worm monsters, definitely not kid friendly as the game had creepy images but it was the hardest game I ever played on the NES
Most of his friends seem to be obsessed with Minecraft, and Ultimate Chicken Horse, to the extent that when he had a friend over I overheard him saying "Mario is old, but it's still fun!" in Finnish.
So I guess there's hope for me yet :)