Obligatory
suburban hell
stroads
Lack of trees as well
[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.
oh, absolutely. I’ve never really lived in a proper city (bigger towns, maybe) so it’s still possible now, but the culture has def moved on. I mean, I see the occasional kids on bikes, but when I was a kid (80’s - 90’s) pretty much every kid had a bike and this was just the default.
I was born in 1993 and I did that with my neighborhood friends too.
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.
Back in 1993 I used to ride my bicycle on the highway that had a 55 mph speed limit.
It was so far out in the country though, that there were only about 4 cars per hour.
I was 10 years old.
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
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.
Yeah the best manual I ever read was for https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunship_(video_game), it was amazing. A thick manual explaining so much about the military helicopter and how it worked. Was thrilling to read as a kid.
I don’t remember the graphics being so bad though…:) But it’s pretty shit by today’s standards.
For PC in 1986, those are pretty good graphics. Arcades were where the best graphics were back then.
I think this was on Commodore 64 actually :)
It’s okay, most* games have good wikis that do an alright impression.
*Less so now that we have the plague that is fextralife and similar doing their damndest to elbow out useful wikis for any and every game.
it didn’t help if you were in (eg) the uk where games cost £1 a go, rather than 25c. Which was nearly $2 in 1992, so 8x as expensive
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.
The real scams were games with countdown timers that went down constantly unless you were able to get a lucky object. Notably, Gauntlet. You had to keep putting in quarters or you would die even if you were really good.
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.
I still have my Nintendo power guide book for all the super Mario Bros, The legend of Zelda 1, link, all the mega Man games… And a few others. I also have two original NES systems, a super Nintendo, N64, PS2, and a Wii.
Oh yeah! Forgot about that stuff lol
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.
Yeah, I was surprised when I first started watching longplays and discovered that most 16-bit and under games took 20-30 minutes to beat if you knew what you were doing.
Dragon Slayer.
Gamers these days!
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
It was a Dendy, wasn’t it?
Of course it was
I meannnn I’m old, but easy games like Kirby were such a treat, it’s no surprise things went the way they did.
That is the most boomer shit I have ever heard. Games were difficult because the rental market was huge.
Arcade games were difficult because they were the microtransactions of the day, and console games were difficult because that’s how you made a simple game last longer.
Game developers didn’t profit from rents.
The publishers did.
Not as much as if there was no rental business. It was bad for them, Nintendo even tried to stop blockbuster from renting their games. They weren’t designing games thinking about the rentals.
What is funny is that we remember Nintendo still. NEC’s TurboGrafx -16 failed because you couldn’t rent games.
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.
The GameBoy is from 1989 and could do all of those things.
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.
But game boy has its own games. TurboGrafx-16 and TurboExpress (colored handheld) used the exact same games. Battery life did suck.
I think its a bit different with the internet on all devices now, games and tv and stuff like that is fine after the age of 3 or so but those micro-transaction addictive games and social media is something else you have to keep an eye on
I think it was easier to make this jump if you were small. Maybe it’s an illusion, but it felt that way
The problem is not so much the total time spent on the device but more the time spent per content nowadays. There is a certain value in spending 3 days to accomplish something whereas imo no value in spending 5 seconds per content.
You literally run across the first two and jump, wtf 😂
I take it you weren’t 10 years old in 1987.
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There’s always that one sibling that you pass the controller to, who can easily do the thing, like it’s nothing, and you have been trying for hours. Also, I was born 1977 too! We had an Atari, tho. I spent full days on that thing trying to get that big block of attacking aliens down to none.
I WAS THAT SIBLING
I remember my mind was blown when my cousin born in 75 knew all the secrets on the first level of Super Mario Bros
I was that kid in my small town. I made most of my friends because I was the kid known to be able to get past all the toughest shit on Nintendo 🤣
Dayum, how’re ur grandchildren doing?
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Pipe in the way though
You run from the exact position Mario is standing in the pic
you just walk over it?
Run then jump at the second edge
Use the pipe, Luke!
Yeah … don’t needle around carefully jumping onto one block then spend half an hour positioning yourself right to the edge to give yourself enough room to run and jump … You have to learn to make a full on run over the pipe, just touch the far edge, land on the far block still running at full speed and time your jump at the last possible moment … It’s a skill that takes months to achieve … I know because I spent an entire summer one year doing that.
I played a playstation on a similar tv. No one thought about it at the time, but such a screen is not suitable for looking at at close range.
Oh I was certainly reminded to sit far away in a well lit living room. Which made it so fun when we got to play to close like in the picture
Remember how I played Bounty Bob without knowing that if you jumped straight up, ju could start a side-jump any time you were in the air (by wiggling left or right), making livel 23 finishable…
That one tile you had to walk on, I spent so much time trying to jump in the craziest patterns to get to it with no success of course 😅
I played probably around 100 hours of “a boy and his blob” on the gameboy. Never finished it, never understood it, couldn’t read english (not that it would’ve helped but i didn’t know) never even finished the first level if it even has levels.
It has the city and the planet of Blobalonia. That was a hard game until you learned what the heck you were supposed to do to advance.
