Obligatory
suburban hell
stroads
[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.
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.
I was born in 1993 and I did that with my neighborhood friends too.
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 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
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 not worth it.
But games at home, at my commodore 64 or Amiga, we’re 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
I think it was easier to make this jump if you were small. Maybe it’s an illusion, but it felt that way
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.
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.
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.
“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.
