Obligatory
[off topic?]
Just read an interview with the young actors from ‘Stranger Things.’ They said that one of the craziest 1980s thing they did was get on bikes and just ride around town, unsupervised. One said he looks around now, and never sees kids just riding bikes.
We even did that without maps. If we got lost, we just rode around until we recognized something familiar.
I’ve noticed with my kids I have to know where they are basically at all times. Leave school, go to friends house, I get notified. On weekends if they go from one house to the other, I need to know.
When I was a kid, I would get up and on my bike around 7-8am, would not be back until dark at least, and just go… anywhere? Ride 10 miles across the whole town, through construction, to the creek or up the big ass hill a little outside of town? Sure. And the wild thing about this is that it was completely normal.
When I was a kid, I would get up and on my bike around 7-8am, would not be back until dark at least, and just go… anywhere? Ride 10 miles across the whole town, through construction, to the creek or up the big ass hill a little outside of town? Sure. And the wild thing about this is that it was completely normal.
That sounds awesome, bicycles give you superpowers in landscapes that aren’t violently hostile to anything that isn’t cars. I grew up on the side of a highway, I could only bike up and down my driveway basically.
Now I take so much pleasure in just shooting over to the grocery store on my bike. Every single time I do it I am thankful because of how much that capacity was utterly denied by where I grew up.
Must have been a wonderful chaos to tool around on a bicycle as a kid like an idiot going wherever you wanted. Every single god damn thing I ever did had to be mediated through a car and thus an adult directly facilitating a specific activity I wanted to go do. There was zero capacity to spontaneously just go and roam.
I posted because I have seen it go from expecting a bike rider to be a kid to expecting them to be an older adult. But I guess it’s different depending on where you live.
It definitely is. Kids bike down my street every day, though much more on weekends, I think because most schools near me don’t allow walking or biking to/fro anymore. Some kids getting run down on rural roads because they’ve been paved and turned into highways made it too unsafe for many kids to walk or bike to school, and it was too big a headache to have selective rules.
I’m in a suburban area between rural and city where kids don’t have to worry about high speed traffic or much violent crime, so kids are still free-range here. They videogame, too, of course.
I see kids doing that in my neighborhood all the time. There’s some that go with poles down to fish in a nearby creek. It all depends on where you live.
Hell I was born in the mid to late 00s and i grew up in the 2010s, but I still did this, we did have dialup internet (i lived and still live in the middle of nowhere, but now we get satellite internet) and I distinctly remember the time we went with my sis and some friends and a fucking massive storm appeared, I thought we were gonna die lol, I think I was like 10 or 11 at that time
Yes I am an European, specifically one of the eastern kind
True, I rode all over the place when I was a kid. We let my daughter ride everywhere she wanted within our (very large) subdivision, but it’s semi-rural and the entrances are both country roads that cars hurtle down, so we didn’t feel safe letting her down those. When I was a kid, I lived in town, so it was different. Maybe kids in town aren’t like that anymore though.
The problem is that there isnt really anywhere for kids to hangout any more. Playgrounds are for small kids, but even just biking to the library is completely out of the question for most middle schoolers/early teens who dont have a car. There’s no malls, few small public parks, no arcades, small local dinners/ice cream joints, or any other "third places"that aren’t just school or home. We, as a society, have spent the past 40 years destroying the concept of a public space and are now shocked that we dont see kids hanging out in non-existent spaces.
Yeah, it sucks for my daughter. There’s almost nowhere to go. And worse, there’s almost nowhere to go that doesn’t cost money and we’re down to a single income. There was so much to do when I was a teenager growing up. There was a small park downtown where all the punk, goth and alternative teens hung out. I must have spent half my teenage years in that park.
My daughter is in online school now. I don’t even know where she should go to make friends.
They can hang out anywhere they want actually. We didn’t have any kid hangout places back in the 90s and we biked and skateboarded all over town. We hung out with friends in parking lots and stores, wherever we wanted to basically.
The problem is the frame of mind that they need a structured environment to do their activities when they don’t.
I’m squarely gen-z and I did that all the time in the 2000s and 2010s. I was also lucky enough to grow up in a less car dependent city with good cycling infrastructure which helped a lot. Seeing how the incidence of pedestrian and cyclist deaths due to car collisions has steadily risen over these past decades (accounting for more deaths than from both drugs and thugs combined mind you), I’d also argue that kids don’t do that anymore because it’s now a lot less safe to exist outside if you’re not in a car. Not every problem can be blamed on that damn phone.
That was the thing about old games, they weren’t worried about being difficult sometimes. Gamers were happy to get a challenge.
The old old games - the arcade games - were made difficult on purpose to farm coins for continues, in fact. Then with video games, publishers gradually started flipping it over to encourage players to complete their games and buy new ones
Yeah I was never into arcade games as a kid. I realized right away that they were made to be difficult for that reason, so it felt like they were not worth it.
But games at home, at my commodore 64 or Amiga, were often difficult too. There was often no tutorials even. You just started playing and figured things out. I remember feeling like I had all the time in the world back then. As an adult, I often feel my time is limited and I should be doing something useful with it.
Well there’s a few things for early at home games, for one the instruction booklets were actually worth a damn, often containing the story, tutorial, and more. Also, size was at much more of a premium, so since instruction manuals were a thing, it was considered a waste to have all of that stuff in the game itself. I’m sure there are exceptions but that’s the general idea.
Much as I lament the loss of good instruction manuals, it’s understandable why they went away in light of why they were necessary before.
I swear I probably spent like 2 solid weeks after school just running into walls in the Water Temple because I couldn’t figure it out. And I used to 100% like everything I played. You’d find out every secret, every cheat, and spend hours. Especially once things like GTA came out, just hours and hours of doing functionally nothing. Fuck even games I didn’t really even like I was an expert in. These days, I’m lucky to get a few hours a week on a game, and I rarely finish anything that’s not exactly the type of game I’m extremely into, and 100% is a thing that basically never happens anymore.
Kinda. Publishers often found arcade difficulty spikes useful in home console games because it would mask how little content there was. Super Mario Bros could be beaten in an hour or two by most people if the lives system didn’t send you all the way back to the beginning of the game when you ran out.
I remember buying a book with the secrets of Super Mario Bros (and other NES) games typed backwards so you had to use a mirror to know how to warp from 1-2 to 4-2 to get to 8-1.
I doubt I’d have finished…but I’ve got a TG-16 I can’t beat anything on.
Making the game harder also made a smaller game last longer. If you remove the difficulty factor of lots of most old games, either by tweaking it or mastering it, then it becomes possible to beat the game in a matter of minutes.
I don’t know, but perhaps in america, in addition to the original consoles from Nintendo, no-name consoles were sold?
In post-USSR countries, those were definitely more prevalent. I had one of the “off brand” consoles and a bunch of cartridges, some without casing, even. Also had that light gun thing that you could point at a TV screen for the duck hunt game
That is the most boomer shit I have ever heard. Games were difficult because the rental market was huge.
But they sure did by selling extra copies, plus if the game was good we’d buy it. I’m convinced the TG-16 never took off because they didn’t let places rent games.
Plus game rentals made owning a console more attractive and that means perhaps more potential sales for all games you’ve produced.
Short view you’re right, long view I think rentals helped the industry much more than hurt it back then.
I spent an entire summer playing Atari. An entire month beating Pac-Man. I leave my kids alone.
A big difference between then and now is the portable nature and ubiquity of the devices.
Back then you didn’t take your NES to bed and keep playing it, or play Sega on the toilet, or Atari at the dinner table.
The devices are in every space of our lives now.
Yeah I had one and the battery life was not great, so you could not use it in all of those places unless you were rich and had an endless supply of AA batteries. I had the original B&W Gameboy and the added magnifier / light combo that took even more batteries.
It was good for a couple hours on one set of 4 AA batteries if I recall correctly. We did have rechargables back then but they were Ni-Cad and they sucked, took forever to recharge.
Maybe you are forgetting about the Sega Genesis Nomad and the fact that the gameboy was effectively a handheld NES?
TBF were talking about the 90s but still
Yeah I had the original B&W Gameboy and the battery life was not great, so you could not use it in all of those places unless you were rich and had an endless supply of AA batteries.
It was good for a couple hours on one set of 4 AA batteries if I recall correctly. We did have rechargables back then but they were Ni-Cad and they sucked, took forever to recharge.
I think it was easier to make this jump if you were small. Maybe it’s an illusion, but it felt that way
Believe, technically speaking, it merely increased his size and hitbox vertically. Realistically speaking whatever helped your developing brain overcome it is true even if it isn’t technically so because what matters is you did it 💪.
