Sure, though you don’t need a state of the art PC to play 90% of the games ever made. These days I play a lot of my games on an old 3DS (hacked to the gills)!
I also have a huge steam library of games, many of which I bought for next to nothing in huge bundles during past sales. Many of them I still haven’t played! They would run fine on a 10 year old PC though.
Love how she’s looking at you like “hey, we’re not done here!” She likes getting the summer coat cleanup!
Gaming is cheaper than ever. Just don’t buy new games. I haven’t bought a new AAA game in decades. There are thousands and thousands of games you can play for free or nearly free.
It’s like music. You can listen to lifetimes worth of music for free or nearly free. The only expensive thing is going to some fancy concert and giving a ton of money to Ticketmaster.
Cognitive dissonance isn’t a skill, it’s a bias. Generally the way it goes is that the worse things get, the tighter people hold on to their existing belief.
Think about it like this: people living in a prehistoric village are suffering from a famine. Under a lot of stress, people start arguing with each other about what the group should be doing. One person is suffering from cognitive dissonance because they believe the group has the wrong idea. Now, should that person abandon the group and go off on their own? Or should they stick it out and just try to survive?
Evolution favours sticking with the group. Hence cognitive dissonance resolves into status quo bias. Now you might say we’re no longer in that sort of situation. That doesn’t matter actually, because our brains are basically the same as they were 10,000 years ago! We have all the same biases, it’s our environment that has changed so much.
So why is it different for you or me? Simple. We’re part of different groups than they are.
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.
They get jobs at white shoe law firms!
Yes, though the air pocket is there right from the start. If you pierce the bottom of the shell with a pin before boiling then the egg will have less of a dent at the bottom after boiling, giving a more uniform shape.
The egg always has an air pocket on the bottom, at the blunt end. This is an air pocket that the developing chicken embryo uses for gas exchange. See the diagram:
Source: Bird eggs on Wikipedia.
It’s not just money. It’s any time a small group has some kind of shared interest. That interest usually is money, but not always directly. The shared interest ties that group together is what allows them to work against the interests of wider society.
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.
Start working together is, in my opinion, the single hardest thing to achieve as a species. It’s called the Collective action problem in psychology and there’s a ton of research into why it is so challenging.
I’ve seen many people on Lemmy who seem to be unaware of it at a surface level but aware of it at an intuitive level, and it’s extremely frustrating for them.
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.
Do you understand how the wealth is growing? Who these people are? They’re the owners of all the news media, the grocery stores, the food producers (bread, meat, vegetable oil, potato products), toilet paper, cable/cell phone/internet, sports teams and channels, car manufacturing (supply chain)…
To stop funding them you’d have to go off the grid, grow your own food, no car, no internet, no news media, no sports. Sounds pretty difficult for the average person.
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.
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.