Kids These Days (ARE LUCKY)

The whole Disney Infinity thing got me thinking broadly about how much I would have loved these games today as a kid.

It's with a frustrated nostalgia that I think back to what most of us grew up with. PS1 was just figuring out how to make things playable, and the N64 made blurry cool again. I would have KILLED for a mediocre open world spider man game. The idea of some type of digital fucking toybox?! All I had was that gameboy Terminator 2 game nobody could beat the first level of. Jesus christ.

I'll have no way to relate to this generation. Gaming is so vastly different. It's enjoyment based, and offers instant reward. It used to be about hating yourself and wearing No Fear.

I got two things for this thread. First, Colecovision son! Second, "back in my day...!" etc. etc.

This isn't another "REMEMBER NES HAHA" (though that is fun)

But it is crazy to think how spoiled rotten these glassy eyed consumers are now. I'm jealous of their youth, sense of wonder, and free time.

*edit* And no, mercifully I don't remember Colecovision lol

Yup, the coolest thing I had as a kid was a GT snow racer for a long time.

Eventually I got lego and such, but I can't imagine the worlds I'd have built if young me with all that time and energy had been given minecraft.

You know other than the fact that in the 90's the US was in a vast economic boom so you were much more likely to be able to afford these things, plus when you bought a game that was it. No need to beg your parents to buy the latest DLC or microtransaction. Yea, I would have loved this Disney thing. Would have probably loved Skylanders as well. But at least I got an entire game for $50.

@raven10: or $90 if it was a good nintendo product.

The game does some pretty neat. Really thinking about getting some of the Pokemon figures if Pokemon Rumble U comes to the US, which it will most likely.

I remember my Dad getting me Turok for Christmas and that was the sticker price at Radioshack

Crazy.

Please, I had Pokemon Silver as a kid.

That game blew my fucking mind when I was eight.

@sdharrison: One, you aren't supposed to swear in thread titles so you might want to edit that out (although, thinking about it that was probably a rule made for when forum posts showed on the front page, which they stupidly no longer do. You might be alright now.)

Two, if you genuinely grew up with a PS1 you would know it was the shit. No, seriously. Crash Bash (Well anything Crash related, eg. Crash Team Racing)?Spyro?Ape Escape (Have you seen the shit they call Ape Escape games now? Kids have no fuckin' clue.)?Tony Hawks Pro Skater 2 (Again, have you seen how crap that franchise has become?)?

Glad kids are able to have fun with cooler and cooler tech

I don't see kids as lucky, I see them as spoiled. I work as a store manager at GameStop and I can't even begin to tell you how spoiled rotten and bratty most kids are now a days. I see so many parents just buying them as many skylanders toys as they can get their hands on, buying their 5 year old an iPad 3 and their 8 year old an iPhone 5. I see all the 10 year olds coming in and buying Call of Duty and Battlefield and all these other Mature rated titles that they have no business playing. Parents now a days are just lazy and could care less about their kids well being. They just give in and get them whatever will shut them up the fastest.

I was never able to own or even play a mature rated game till I was old enough to buy it myself and the same goes for all my friends growing up. We actually went outside and played and developed social skills and used our imagination whereas the kids of today only know how to act based off of what the see and hear in Call of Duty or on some YouTube video.

I don't know if I would call it "lucky" since some of my favorite memories involved the arcade. But kids these days, one $60 payment for a copy of SFIV and you can play as much as you want. I probably spent over $1000 in quarters playing SFII, and I never owned a copy of the original my entire life.

@sdharrison: Kids!? Am I the only guy that's not a kid that's buying Disney Infinity!? IT LOOKS AMAZING!

ColecoVision, yessir! Showing my age here but this was my first gaming system. There was a side-scrolling James Bond game I played to death, and a platformer called Squish Em Sam. Boy were those shitty games...ah the memories.

One-on-One Dr. J vs Larry Bird, 2010, Tapper, Donkey Kong Jr, that fucking Smurfs game, Pitfall motherfucking 2! That system was awesome.

If I was a kid in this decade, I would be ALL OVER skylanders, and to some extent I still consider it devil magic that you put a toy on a stand and the toy shows up on the tv box.

That being said, I've done the "You damn kids" routine to my younger brother more than a few times whenever I've seen him playing FIFA or Halo or whatnot. He's been lucky to have inherited my vast collection of quality titles, because I had it hard. They didn't have video game websites back in my day (or rather, I was young and my parents wouldn't let me on the internet) so I bought games that looked cool from the box. Sonic Adventure 2 was my first gamecube game, and let me tell you sonny, that camera is still utterly terrible. AND I LIKED IT. Now you have intuitive user interfaces and microtransactions this and another thing!...

Oh jesus the Smurfs game! Never did get past that skull I don't believe..

I'm glad how high the standards are today. Mediocre shooters are still better than anything you'd find 10 years ago. Remember when you had to pull out the grenade and THEN you could throw it? Or when checkpoints were few and far between in every level? Or when every game seemed to have a completely different control scheme then the next? That shit is unacceptable today, unless it's some "HD" remake or rerelease.

But it seems some people just can't take off their rose-tinted glasses. If you loved the original CoD/Halo/MoH so damn much why don't you keep playing it? No one's forcing you to buy the new one.

A game being less challenging doesn't make it better. Most FPS games today are simple point A- point B CoD knock-offs, Id prefer to have deeper games like Quake or Perfect Dark any day then the majority of what we have now.

If you're a kid today, just imagine how many free or $3 on sale games you could get? You could go such a long ways with $20 that you got from your grandma. That wouldn't get you shit before.

@sdharrison: I see your point, but then again, I hate the Transformers movies and the first G.I.Joe move was terrible. I liked what we had as kids better.

I remember feeling this way about all of the smartphones and tablets the kids have these days. It was an event for the entire family just to get one desktop computer in the house. Now everyone in the house can be texting or watching videos or playing games all at the same time. It's funny how much things have changed.

Buying CoD on a SmartThing, might make you a sad panda, though..

I wasn't talking about mobile devices. Sorry I mean the one true gaming platform and Steam sales.

Wayward Beta 1.1.1 | HTML5 Survival Roguelike Game

I would have fucking devoured a game like that back when I was a kid and it would have cost over $50 to do it.

I remember when games didn't have endings. They were infinitely long until you may come across a kill screen.

@bigboss1911 said:

I can pull up a bunch more examples, but that'd be just me ranting about poor gameplay design. CoD knockoffs? If you knew anything about CoD, you'd know it runs on a heavily modified version of ID tech 3. It runs on DOOM. Need I say more? The same point A-B nature has been a hallmark of all FPS games, it was the same today as it was 2 decades ago. I'm perfectly satisfied with the games of today, pity you can't.

Fuck your Terminator game, I got Stargate.

The fact that my niece is growing up in a world where video phones are a common thing is already haunting enough. Growing up I'd only ever think about them because of sci-fi movies and 80s cartoons. Get off my lawn.

For as much as we were marketed to by corporations and monitored bye everything and everyone back in the 80s, I actually feel sorry for kids, today. Every moment of their life has to be planned. Every ounce of risk and fun has to be ripped out at school, at home, by parents, teachers, all sorts of authority. On top of that, they get to be constantly monitored and marketed to. And all of this is on top of the just simply general suckiness of being a kid (high school is ass, people suck, hormones, being temporarily insane for a few years, etc).

The only thing kids have today of any real meaningfulness that we didn't in the 80s was that they seem to be constantly getting blow-jobs in class and we didn't have girls in our class sending us naked pics of themselves by phone.

I was at a hockey game today, and I was thinking about how much freedom I had as a child, when my brother was playing I pretty much did whatever I wanted as long as I showed up by the end of the third period so they didn't have to come looking for me.

The N64 was the first console I ever owned and I loved it. I wouldn't trade my childhood with it for anything.

Don't forget online gaming. I never got to play an online game because I didn't have a PC, and I didn't have a brother who could play co-op with me. Today the idea of online gaming is so queer to me.

In a way don't you think we're lucky? We got to experience tech and video games on their journey to where they are now, all while maintaining some sort of "normal" childhood. All these kids know is social networks, iPhones, and staying inside and "murkin n00bs!!!!". That wide eyed innocence we experienced is lost on today's youth.

I wouldn't call that lucky at all.

Did you ever play Spider-Man on the PS1? That shit was amazing and has more Spider-Man fan service then any Spider-Man games made today. Plus, if you played it when it was new the gameplay and graphics wouldn't have bothered you so it was just a fantastic game all around. Sure it wasn't open world but it still had sold web swinging in areas that appeared to be open at the time.