Can kids master the video games their parents loved?

Agreed, completely different games.

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.

> This is all vastly more engaging than taking turns watching each other play a single player game.

I’m not sure about that. Taking turns playing Mario was just as engaging at the time.

It’s only when you know you can be playing too, that the waiting and cheering loses its lustre.

I entirely agree, something special about multiplayer sandboxes that spark something that cannot be sparked otherwise.

Next level would be to play Rust together. Organizing boxes at home while parents are out to gather resources when raiders arrive. Back to our roots.

I've always likened Minecraft to a digital version of LEGO.

Yeah, minecraft is more of a toy than a game in a lot of contexts

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.

>And I thought I could be harsh in enforcing silly rules. Let the kid play modern games with his friends you monster.

This, so much of fitting in with your generational peers is having shared frames of reference to whatever media you grow up with.

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.

Show them some Mystery Science Theater 3000!

Oedipus Rex doesn't work if there are paternity tests but that doesn't mean it can't be appreciated.

> 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.)

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 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.

How did I miss that! Thanks for the heads-up.

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.

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.

I beat it in a weekend without a guide.

And GameFAQs was a glorious thing in my days; I would print out pages as a kid.

My kids have no idea how good they have it with parents who understand “hold on, I just need to make it to the next save!”

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.

Yeah but consider that videos don't have the sheer swagger of a 1.4mb blob of text on GameFAQs headed by a lovingly rendered piece of ascii art.

Many games these days assume that you will. Minecraft was until recently a prime example.

Because you’re playing a souls game and you can only take so much suffering?

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.

Of course you know why! Good on you for resisting, though.

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.

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.

It changed from Call of Duty to Text of Duty.

Cup-and-ball popularity fell off but net-and-ball is going strong.

>Kids these days have it easy.

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.

> Don’t get me started on Battletoads or TNMT.

Fun fact: the NES version of TNMT was easier than the PC version, which was unbeatable without exploiting glitches to skip an impossible jump.

Carnival Night Zone in Sonic 3 (& Knuckles) is what you’re thinking of.

I once called the hotline as a kid to figure it out. If that doesn’t date me, I don’t know what does.

Lots of GenXers still have small children. Not everyone has kids in their twenties.

I was born in 1980; I have 4 kids ranging from 11-17 and played Joust as a kid.

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.

No, I'm talking about NES/SNES/PS1/N64 era.

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.