5d ago

Gamers go offline in retro console revival | The Guardian

www.theguardian.com ‘There’s no stress’: gamers go offline in retro console revival

Trend to fix or buy consoles such as Game Gear or Nintendo 64s may reflect a desire for internet-free fun

Rosenau is part of a growing community who are ditching contemporary video games and picking up the consoles from their childhood, or even before their time. And gen Z gamers are following suit, with 24% owning a retro console, according to research by Pringles.

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modern gaming feels like:
huge download size, then have to update.
oh wait, you gotta register before playing,
now let's show you a bunch of ads inside a game you already paid for.
now wait 10 minutes to connect to a game,
proceed to get demolished by people who spend $100/year for upgrades,
oh wait, now there's a dlc, I have to buy another game within the game,
oops servers down, you can no longer play the game you bought
this is why i emulate

according to research by Pringles
Well everyone knows Doritos are the definitive chip authority when it comes to gamers, so I would take this with a grain of salt
- Pringles research is usually fine as long as it's peer reviewed by someone at Mountain Dew U.
  
  Please drink verification can.
  
  UwU?
- Pringles comes with a lot more than a grain of salt...
  
  I personally go for salt and vinegar.
- Yeah, what in the hell is that all about. I assume they don't mean the chips, but they should know to qualify that 🤣
  
  Pretty sure they do mean the chips. This guy in the thumbnail is wearing a Pringles brand apron of sorts.
  
  chips
  Its a strange product, in the US they were ordered not to call them "chips", and call them "crisps" instead:
  The product was originally known as Pringle's Newfangled Potato Chips, but other snack manufacturers objected, saying Pringles failed to meet the definition of a potato "chip" since they were made from a potato-based dough rather than being sliced from potatoes. The US Food and Drug Administration weighed in on the matter, and in 1975 they ruled Pringles could only use the word "chip" in their product name within the phrase: "potato chips made from dried potatoes". Faced with such a lengthy and unpalatable appellation, Pringles eventually renamed their product potato "crisps", instead of chips.
  In the UK, they argued they were not "potato crisps" because they though their low potato content would get a lower tax rate.
  In July 2008, in the London High Court, P&G lawyers successfully argued that Pringles were not crisps (the term by which potato chips are known in British English), even though labelled "Potato Crisps" on the container, as the potato content was only 42% and their shape, P&G stated, "is not found in nature". This ruling, against a United Kingdom value added tax (VAT) and Duties Tribunal decision to the contrary, exempted Pringles from the then 17.5% VAT for potato crisps and potato-derived snacks. In May 2009, the Court of Appeal reversed the earlier decision.
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pringles

One thing about many early games is that they're difficult. I haven't a clue how someone can get through Super Ghost n' Goblins or Battletoads. I had a game genie just so I can see the parts of a game that I would never be able to on my own.
- You answered your own question. You just cheated, or you played it over and over and over until you got really good/lucky.
  You have to realize, a lot of the early stuff came off the backs of arcade titles that were designed to be played repeatedly with little progression aside a number that went up.
- There is a YouTube series call debunking game difficulty (or something like that), it provides guide on some hard retro games, one of the episode is on ghost and goblin
- That's to me part of the delight in modern experience of classic games: to go through these games you never had a chance to complete before! mostly with a few features:
  save/load states (with accessible shortcuts on your controller) anywhere in the game, whether or not the original game had a way to save/load progress, and regardless on when/where the players were "allowed" to save. because we don't have as much time as we had when we were 12yo....
  rewind. YES. in case you havent played a modern emulator through retroarch recently you may not even have thought it would be a thing! but it is... like in movies. you get killed in that super-hard shmup that implacably sends you back to the beginning of the level every time you die? ever found that a bit... unfair, maybe? well, just rewind, dodge that bullet and keep playing. you may not integrate this new learning as much as if you had to play it 100 times to learn it by heart and get there, but hell, again, the time thing. (also fast-forward comes handy for those JRPGs games, where you had to constantly grind with random encounters in order to level up.. think "catchin'em'all" and not having all the time in the world...)
  arcade games frequently had unlimited "continue" (as long as you would shove money into them), while console adaptations we tried our teeth into at home -for the lucky few of us- had usually an arbitrarily set number of "continue"... (mostly -so i heard about the US at least, where there was a huge rental market for console games- to make sure kids won't finish the game in less than a day or a week-end worth of a rental... and rather be challenge to rent the game again). with arcade emulators, you have all the virtual coins that you need...
  Combining those together gives anyone the occasion to just experience any of these games, from start to finish, in a relatively short period of time. a 90s arcade brawler or shmup or such goes in one sitting of usually less than one hour... anyone is free to then decide to practice them hundreds of times until they decide to stop using these features one by one and/or use them as creative constraints along the way of their own training, etc...
  In short: modern emulation gaming levels the playing field (pun very much intended) when it comes to making those games accessible to everyone, especially those nail-hard ones, by giving access to a wide diversity of ways to experience them! yay! \o/
  
  A million times this. Retro games aren't just still good, they're better than they've ever been thanks to modern tools and emulation.
  
  Just FYI, rewind features have been part of emulators for like two decades, Retroarch didn't invent anything.

It’s funny: runaway console game prices are what lead me to GOG.

Early games were designed to delight, slightly more modern games are designed to both delight and advertise.
It's the difference between "I can't beat this boss so I'd better go level up for 20 mins, ooh I unlocked a new spell" and "I can't beat this boss I had better prep for a 10 hour grind, this is so I can find the X to craft the Y so I can begin to make the Z which offers me a 1 in 10 chance to unlock the option to craft a new spell... Or I could just pay $5 to skip that bit by buying the spell..."
- Minus the "pay $5 to skip" part, retro games are overwhelmingly more likely to be the second than the first. How do you keep someone playing your game for longer than a weekend, in an age where games are 12mb you can't add new content after you ship? You make your game hard as balls and require a ton of grinding.
  Not all games were like this, but tons were. Final fantasy, Ghosts n Ghouls/Goblins, Battletoads, and more all follow this pattern. Even Pokémon isn't exactly hard but half of the game is just grinding.

could pringles be the new face of gaming?

Research by Pringles? 🤨
- https://www.kelloggs.co.uk/content/dam/europe/kelloggs_gb/pdf/The nostalgia is real Pringles launches NEW Retro Console Clinic as 80 percentage of Brits fall back in love with 00s and 90s tech.pdf

according to research by Pringles.
Pringles you say?

Fair enough considering I (as a Gen z that calls himself a millennial because I hate how cringe Gen z is) have a few retro consoles.
Sega Genesis & Dreamcast, and PS2. The others I wouldn't consider retro yet. Maybe in a few years, though, but not now.
Definitely looking in the future to get my hands on a Sega CD, Saturn, and Game Gear to have all the greatest retro consoles I could think of. Though that's far off because of how expensive they are.
- Try emulators for the Game Gear. Some games were great, some sucked big time.
  The best RPG ever: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defenders_of_Oasis
  Ninjas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_G.G._Shinobi
  The original Advance Wars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_Warriors
  But seriously, try Defenders of the fucking Oasis, it's awesome, it had a great story, great music (I can still hear the music in my head 30 year later, god I have to play that game again), great cutscenes... And all the Sonics sucked, forget those.
  On the Genesis/Megadrive, you had Beyond Oasis which is not a sequel but is still good and more action-oriented. You could play that one too.
  
  Definitely don't have a problem with emulating games and will probably emulate those titles, but I'd absolutely love to try on actual hardware since emulators can't come close to that feeling of using the actual console.
- Nintendo starting at 64 (because divorce dad was cool dad). Picked up an Analogue pocket and am currently working my way through the GB/GBC/GBA catalog. Also got Ecco for Genesis working. It really feels less like playing a game, and more like experiencing a culture.
  It reminds me how important all these emulator projects are at keeping games alive.
- That's funny, I'm at the very ass-end of GenX, and wouldn't call myself a millennial to save my life lol.

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