Re: Things you really miss?
Well, what do I misss? It's a huge lot, so yeah. Reminiscence all the way here...
Well I'm a fair bit younger than most of you, can't say that for certain but I hardly remember anything from the 90s growing up as a little kid.
One thing I miss which isn't tech related, is my childhood spirit. I still have it, but I know as I grow up, it will be tolerated less and less. Asking countless questions about whatever ridiculous pops into my head that really interests me, annoys a lot of people. I get more and more of a feeling that I'm being isolated because I don't know if people think I'm weird or not, or are flat out ignoring me. I've grown used to the fact that I just think too differently and I have to be patient.
But for tech and game stuff, I never did get into video games much, but I always enjoyed hearing people play them back in the very late 90s and early 2000s. I remember my stepbrother had one of those consoles that coul
d play Megadrive games,, not sure if the original Playstation could do that, but back then the PS2 wasn't out yet. Him and my stepsister would always play Sonic the Hedgehog or some other game I can't remember, but I don't remember them getting far in it, though I was very young. While they weren't the type to describe everything to me, I still enjoyed it. A few years later, my Mom and her husband got a PS2, which came with a few Megadrive games on it. They played Sonic a lot, and also got a few Ps2 native games. Sadly, that never lasted long. She also used to play all kinds of cool computer games, mostly platformers and other things like Super Deekout where you had to find items in a set amount of time and avoid things. She knows nothing about audio games but enjoys it when I tell her about them. The ultimate video gaming experience for me is when someone sighted, who knows the basic game play, and are willing to put up with my questions without getting mad at m
e for distracting them from the game. It's even better if they have not beaten the game yet, that way we can both enjoy the surprises. I just miss that world in general, most of the people I know now either like games that are too simple (Grandma-style puzzle games), or really complex games such as Grand Theft Auto. Nothing wrong with any of those, but it's not my main gaming interest.
As for arcades, I remember a few years ago, we used to go to a mall near here, not sure which mall it was, but my mom would take me for the soul purpose of enjoying the small arcade there. This was only a few years ago... The games I can remember are Air Hockey, which we modified the rules for so I was allowed to touch the disc with either the puck or my hands, whichever came first... I could barely hear the disc moving along the table because there was a compressor blowing air through little air holes, making the disc glide smoothly just a few millimeters above the table. Of course tha
t's sort of a necessity to the game; if it were to slide along the surface of the table instead of above it, it would gain friction quickly and wouldn't go far at all.
There was another game which required you to throw balls into different openings... there was a little ramp, and at the top, there were like 4 different openings, and the higher openings would get you more points than the lower ones. I guess it was mainly for hand-eye coordination, which I have none of, because my eyeballs don't work. Nevertheless, I was pretty good at it compared to sighted people, not something to marvel at but I wasn't hopeless either. A few times the ball rebounded against the metal cage surrounding the machine, and that always scared me. Most sighted people who are normal and sober don't do something that stupid by accident, at least my mom didn't LOL.
There were several chance games, where you pull a lever and hope for the best, or move an arm with a
claw to pick up something, like the UFO catcher in Ukio's side scrollers. I never liked those games for obvious reasons. one of the games I really liked was like whack-a-moll. The story was that you had encountered an angry alligator with 5 heads who was trying to eat you. The five open mouths would come out at random, and you had to press the top of a head to close its mouth. The levels dramatically increased in difficulty, and I remember my mom and I did it together, she took the two on the right and I had the other three. It was still hard, and one of the heads was faulty so that impaired our progress, not sure if there was an end or not. I doubt it... Not sure how you lost. the sounds that game made were amusing, there was elavator music in the background, and when you hit one of the heads, the alligator would say "ow!" and if the head managed to come out all the way, he would say "Munch." In this really stereotypical cartoon monster voice. In bet
ween levels, he would say "Now I'm angry!" I can see little kids just swarming around that machine, well at least I would have, maybe other kids would have found it boring.
But there was one game I liked most of all, and it was almost unfair because I was so good at it, it basically had numbers flashing and counting from 0 to 1000, accompanied by a rising tone. Of course the numbers went by very quickly, about 100 a second, and you had to press a button exactly, and I mean exactly, when it reached 1000. If you weren't on time, it would give you a really meager reward for getting close, but the big one came if you got between 999 and 1001. I could always win it within 5 attempts because my perfect and relative pitch are honed so greatly. Not sure how easy it is for sighted folks but my mom, who was never good at those types of games, didn't do as well. When my GF came over, I wanted to see how well she could do at this particular game, she has perfect pi
tch as well but is not a musician. Sadly, that game was gone, as well as most of the others I described above. Instead we were stuck playing racing arcade games, which was the new thing I guess, and it wasn't any fun for me. At her house she had a mario arcade machine, and her and her dad would also tell me that the point of a game like that isn't to beat it, it's to have fun. I don't understand how you could have fun pressing random buttons, maybe learning a sound here and there, but of course it's not an audio game so you can't really tell what's happening.
Like Arq, I miss old technology for the simple fact that it was easy to tweak it to your liking. while a certain learning curve was required to operate a computer, once you were beyond that level, you could progress at your leisure. Some people like me only go into entry level tweaking, but other people practically dismantle their system and completely re-work it... back then you had more
of a choice. Nowadays everything is meant to be simple for the end user and reduce the learning curve to as close to nothing as possible. The downside to this is that if something does go wrong and you have to tweak something, or even worse if a fatal error occurs, now all of a sudden it's hard to fix and diagnose because everything is hidden behind that interface which is as simplistic as possible, to keep you from putting up with a scary learning curve. I see good things in both approaches... personally I prefer a simple interface for learning an OS, but then I want to learn slightly harder ways of doing things so that I have more flexibility with using the system. I don't like things being so automatic that I can't do things manually when I need to.
Anyway that's enough of my rants on what I miss... hope some of it was a fun read!
URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php? pid=166515#p166515
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