Still seems kinda flimsy. Like if I ever move there it’s because I love Thai food, want to learn more about the culture, and I want to see some bettas in the wild!

Why move to Thailand if you like America though?

A hat is definitely part of it!

I was not home schooled but I wish I had been (but not by some crazy religious conservative family). I hated school from grade 6 onward. The social situation was absolute hell and the teachers barely cared at all. I dropped out at age 16 and finished high school in my 30s, then got into university and got my degree before 40.

My local public library runs programs every day for parents who homeschool their kids. They have librarians trained in ECE and they do all kinds of cool stuff. Everything from teaching kids how to research stuff in the library, to running science experiments, building stuff with 3D printers, exploring art and painting and poetry books, building robots and writing code to control them, learning about cultures and history and archaeology through loads of great books for kids.

Lots of kids attend these programs and they get to socialize with each other while learning cool stuff. It’s of course still on their parents to teach them how to read and write and do math, but all of the inspiration and resources are provided by the library (yes, including books on how to write essays and letters and all kinds of math and science books with problems and instruction covering the full school curriculum).

It’s a specialist tool. You can say the same thing about any specialist tool. Why should CNC machine tools exist if they’re so hard to use and take a lot of training and are dangerous in the hands of untrained people?

There could also be selection effects at work, with regard to who gets tattoos and for what reason.

I knew a woman who had fibromyalgia and she used to get tattoos all the time. She said the tattoos helped with her fibro pain. Pain is weird, that’s all I can say about that!

Haskell keeps track of your types automatically. You can ask it “what is the type of this expression” and it will infer it for you. Haskell is of course fully static typed (types erased at compile time).

Seeing what’s happening in Ukraine and in Iran and neighbouring gulf countries feels like early stage Terminator to me. Same goes for all the Sam Altman slop. The goal of AI is to replace us. Right now it might not do a very good job at most things we can do, but I don’t think it’s too far from replacing almost everything we do on the battlefield.

Lots of parents I knew as a kid didn’t let their kids have this kind of cereal. They didn’t let their kids drink pop all the time either.

And it’s not normal, it’s a problem!

Everyone knows those cereals are for kids and only as a special treat, not an every day thing.

If someone wants to have banana Nutella crepes for breakfast once a month I don’t think that’s a big deal. But having toast with Nutella every day (or cookie cereal) is not a normal thing to do.

Sure but not a chocolate cake. Putting Nutella on a piece of bread is basically having a piece of chocolate cake for breakfast.

It’s amazing that anyone was fooled by this marketing. It shows you the power of it I guess.

The first time I tried Nutella I immediately knew what it was: chocolate hazelnut cake frosting. The fact that people slather it on their toast every day seemed as absurd to me as eating cake frosting every day.

None of what I’m saying should be taken as an argument that game developers should give up or something like that. The situation is much better now than it was. Heck, a lot of NES game developers had to design their sprites on graph paper and input them into the game’s ROM file by hand, by typing in the raw numbers in hexadecimal! Clearly we now have a lot better ways of doing graphics than that!

I just want to push back against the general notion that “old games are outdated/obsolete/etc” or that new games are always better than old games by virtue of having more features, flashier graphics, better sound etc. There’s tradeoffs with everything and I think the kitchen sink approach to game design isn’t obviously correct.

We went through the same historical trends with painting, music, and movies. Now if you look at more recent trends in classical music, there’s a lot of focus on minimalism, compared to the opulence of the baroque and classical periods.

Believe it or not, some people like grinding! There’s an element to grinding-based RPGs that you don’t really see anywhere else: the ability to tune the game’s difficulty level on the fly, through your own gameplay. If you’re stuck on a section of the game, you can decide to grind a lot until it’s trivially easy to pass, or you can grind less and try to push your luck.

FF1 is really nice for this because you can’t just save your game anywhere, you need to stay at an Inn in town or spend a tent/cabin/house to save on the world map. You can’t save your game in dungeons at all. This means your expedition into a dungeon must be completed in one go.

Since grinding is the way you make your party stronger (and hence the dungeon easier), you can decide how much grinding you want to do before taking a shot at the dungeon. If you mess up and the party gets wiped, well that’s too bad! This really does give the game a push your luck mechanic and allows you to try to conquer the dungeon with a minimal amount of grinding.

Later games in general tend to go out of their way to avoid this at all costs, with the exception of Soulslike games that I mentioned earlier (as well as Roguelikes, which I happen to be a huge fan of), because game developers are often quite afraid of players losing progress (and players have become accustomed to this).

Metroid is also like this. You can spend a lot of time grinding your energy back to full or you can push your luck and try to explore without getting hit. It’s a challenge that later games in the series heavily mitigated by providing abundant recharging stations.

I’m sure it was, my comment was just stating my preference. That’s the main direction this whole thread seems to have taken: me defending the validity of preferences for retro gamers.

It seems a lot of people are puzzled by this and actually just believe that these old games are objectively worse. To me, that’s really sad, because it represents a failure to communicate and understand one another.

I disagree. I’d much rather play FF1 than play the latest FF game. Modern Final Fantasy games are way too easy for my taste. They’re more like movies with a load of very soft mechanics, with all the sharp edges sanded off.

That’s really common across the board. I know a lot of people love modern Soulslike games but I much prefer the fast, crunchy combat of a game like Zelda II over the smooth, floaty, anticipation-based controls of Dark Souls.

There’s a lot of other comparisons like this. The original Metroid is very rough, lonely, and lacks an automap which makes it easy to get lost. Later games in the series surround you with helpers that eliminate all sense of isolation and bombard you with hints and automaps that make it impossible to lose your way.

Lots of modern players would call these systems “objectively better” and I won’t contradict their preference, I only deny the objectivity of it. As I see it, many of these improvements are actually tradeoffs. Many modern players, for example, hate getting lost. Well I like getting lost and a lot of modern games simply won’t let me! I like getting stuck in games and having to do serious problem solving to figure it out. Many modern gamers get impatient and give up on games like that. They might even call it excruciating, as you do.

Anyway, none of this is intended to convince you to be a retro gamer like me. You love what you love and hate what you hate. I just hope it’s a little bit clearer why folks like me have all this nostalgia, as depicted in the comic.

There definitely are seriously janky and just plain bad games for all systems in the past. The difference is that there is a much higher proportion of good games from that era due to the smaller number of games overall.

There were 675 games released for the NES in North America during its lifespan. If you take the top 100 games you’d find that most are good games worth revisiting and many are great games considered widely to be classics.

On the other hand, well over 10,000 games are released on Steam every year since 2021. How many of those have you even heard of, let alone could you say are worth playing?

Sure, it’s not fair at all to blame the developers of great games coming out today for all of the slop and endless clones they have nothing to do with. But discovery is a huge problem now and it’s only getting worse!

I’ve actually begun a quest to go back and finish all the games I didn’t play / didn’t finish from the past. NES, SNES, N64, and PSX. To my surprise, I’m actually enjoying some of these games much more than I did as a kid.

The gameplay is quite simple but it’s really well executed. There are a lot of games that just try to do one or two interesting things and then explore how far they can go with that. Nowadays, games seem to take more of a “kitchen sink” approach which tends toward some features being much better developed than others, and first-order-optimal strategies abound.

Sure, there are also plenty of retro-inspired games (like UFO 50), but I view those as a return to the design principles of old, rather than a refutation of them.

Very cute, but unclear where to add the one! Thanks for sharing!