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.
Actually the area I lived was pretty rural, that was precisely the problem. Roads were high speed, car exclusive roads with no sidewalk and if there was one people would look at you like you were a criminal for not being in a car so it felt wrong to use them anyways.
It didn’t matter if there was awesome woods to roam around in 5 minutes down the road, walking/bicycling there not only felt like doing something wrong based on the behavior of 100% of the adults around me, it also was extraordinarily dangerous and just not worth the discomfort of feeling like I was going to die any second from a 4000 pound metal box slamming into me at 45mph (and running me over because the hood is 5 feet off the ground for no reason other than it looks cool or something).
The lack of traffic on rural roads just made this problem worse because instead of a line of cars all seeing the cars in front of them move out of the way of something on the side of the road, or the general presence of traffic keeping people driving from absolutely as fast as they could possibly go, you would just have a car whip around the corner every once in awhile going near highway speeds on a windy back road in a way that left them zero chance to swerve out of the way and not hit you if they weren’t paying attention. I also remember literally being yelled at and taunted by (usually pickup truck) drivers the few times I did ride a bicycle on a road because that seemed to make them angry.
There was plenty of space around you, iffff you had a car. If you didn’t, you might as well have been stranded on a space station.
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
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.
Dude, this is the thing that depresses the hell out of me. When I was kid there were skating rinks, arcades, malls, etc. Granted, those things cost money as well, but most of us could make a $5 last all day.
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.
For real. Cemetery. Storm water culvert. That’s about it, outside of someone’s back yard, the cemetery and the storm water culvert. And I grew up in a fairly urban place. Not a city, but certainly not back country. Hop on bike, find somewhere without adults.
When I was a kid in the 90s, we biked all over. Loved going 5 miles down the highway to the surplus store. It wasn’t a busy highway though and had a big shoulder.
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.
Not an expert, but it sounds like a vicious cycle. More car vs. bike accidents means fewer bikes on the road means drivers don’t look out for bikes which causes more accidents.
And no, I’m not telling you to go out and ride until you get hit to raise awareness.
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.
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.
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 :)
I’m using PC in the literal “personal computer” sense. I don’t recall PC = Microsoft being a thing back then, though I may be wrong.
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.
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.
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.
The lion king monkey puzzle was made for the rental market.
Made for the rental market?
It was hard so it would suck for people who rented the game. Developers and publishers didn’t get a cut for each rental.
A game you can compete in one sitting is not a game you’ll rent for a long time.
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.
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.
You’re right that it needed a light source, but the battery life was actually pretty decent if you didn’t have cheap batteries - around 15 hours, which is a hell of a lot better than a Switch.
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
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 💪.
Incredible. I could have sworn
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
Hey man, that’s one of your secret superpowers!
ಠ_ಠ
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 🤣
You were the superstar cool kid! I bet you’re just as cool, now bud.
Dayum, how’re ur grandchildren doing?
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you just walk over it?
Run then jump at the second edge
Pipe in the way though
You run from the exact position Mario is standing in the pic
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.
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 even if you knew what the heck you were supposed to do to advance.
I honesty think “screen-time” is overblown. Screens are tools and while creative old-fashioned play is very important, screens play an important role, too.
I’ve got two kids, 4 and 7. I differentiate between games (as long as they are age-appropriate or maybe a little older for them), “good-tv” (age appropriate educational shows or shows with “lessons” I.e Curious George, Daniel Tiger, Odd Squad, etc), “great-tv” (purely educational shows like Nova or How It’s Made…my oldest loves both), and “junk food tv” (SpongeBob, Gumball, etc).
They all have their place and none are “bad” as long as moderation is applied and content is age-appropriate.
Kids definitely have better options these days. There was basically a world of shit for kids older than Sesame Street age when I was growing up in the 80s. Every Saturday morning show was an extended toy commercial in between toy commercials.
The real ironic thing is, the doctors that are publishing papers saying screentime is bad are the same people who plopped us in front of Nintendo and Nickelodeon because stranger danger (and that, even more ironically, because of prime time news magazines like Dateline and 20/20 and Current Affair)).
Shocker, stranger danger kids are using the TV more in raising their kids.
“Y’all kids today spend too much time on devices.”
Yeah, because that device literally gives us access to all the information the entire human race has amassed. Not only that, but we also have our work and/or school tied into it, so for those things we literally need to be on it at least part of the time. Instead of hoarding expensive books that you’ve never read to justify having an oversized McMansion with a “library”, we access our information as needed.
