I have noticed this and built a system of scarcity in my consumption. I have a "random walk" of movies where I randomly go from one movie to the next based on director, writer, cast, prizes etc. I make sure the walk is not a slog and there is enough good movies that I encounter. That way it's really fun to "hit" a very good movie. It's almost like gambling but then with media consumption. I do that with restaurants/activities too (to a certain extent that I control) with all kinds of subsystems in it that I designed to be fun for myself.

For video games my system is not random, but I will go 20 years in the past and play the major releases of that year. So I'm playing Beyond Good & Evil soon and already look forward to Half Life 2 next year. Makes me hyped but without fail because I know the actual release was a hit.

You could apply your video game system to other media consumption as well. Why don't you?

If I had to take a guess: watching a potentially bad movie still has a quality floor unless we are counting those dollar bin Wal mart DVDs. And even a really bad movie is generally 2 hours.

a bad game can be frustrating to play and take 5 times that length at minimum.

Well they just explained that they created kind of a content consumption subsystem and that having that system is fun in and of itself.

Besides, with something like media consumption, having an idiosyncratic system doesn't to my mind present any conceptual issue where it's necessary to interrogate it for consistency, so I'm a bit confused as to what motivates that kind of question.

All systems went through changes and I'm not afraid to change them further along the way. I was interested in video games from a young age and have an interest in how games progressed over the years. I saw a chance to have a somewhat comprehensive experience from the 90's over to the 00's, who knows how long I will keep doing this.

With movies I didn't want to start in the 30's and watch all kinds of esoteric material that is mostly historically relevant, I just want to be entertained with a movie. Also, with movies it feels more satisfying to watch a classic in between other movies, instead of watching only classic after classic, so that's how I designed that system. With video games, I want all experiences to be very good otherwise I will just stop playing. It's just how I consume it and it's quite personal.

Typically randomness adds an exciting factor to the equation so I prefer it over deterministic systems, but video games are an exception here.

this is interesting and sounds like fun. is there anywhere in particular you’re looking for the top releases for 20 years ago?

Also old games wining was not guaranteed.

Mario, sonic, hell most sidesrollers. Just because you put 50 hours into the game doesn't mean you'll win. It's why dark souls has a place in my heart. It was a modern game where wining was absolutely not guaranteed. It was hard. And it put you on awe with visuals.

Most games you play nowadays is winnable. And when it isn't people complain why isn't it winnable.

Well... It's why they're not impactful. Do you remember the win you made against a group of 5 year Olds in soccer? Or do you remember the win against friends who were better than you but you played your heart out. That's the difference. Imo

I think this is just nostalgia talking.

My first SNES games, Super Mario World, is a 5 hours long game, 9 if you are going to 100% it https://howlongtobeat.com/game/9387

And I did beat it back then. Not a super complicated game.

What I didn’t remember though and only looked up recently: the MSRP was $60-70 https://imgur.io/khmhfoA

Today that would be like $120-130 for a 5 hours long game https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ But honestly nowadays even $60-70 for a 5 hours long game would be atrocious no matter the nostalgia factor.

Made me think why my parents only bought a game for me three times a year (birthday, christmas, summer vacation)

> My first SNES games, Super Mario World, is a 5 hours long game, 9 if you are going to 100% it https://howlongtobeat.com/game/9387

That is is you have already mastered games. It takes years to get good enough to beat those games in the time those sites says, if you have already spent years playing games then yes you play through those games quickly.

For example, that site lists Super Mario Bros as a 2 hour game. Do you think me as a kid beat that game in 2 hours? No, of course not, I spent hundreds of hours playing it in total and never beat it. At that time games were made arcade hard, they weren't meant for kids to beat, they were meant to provide a long lasting challenge so you can try over and over.

https://howlongtobeat.com/game/9371

> For example, that site lists Super Mario Bros as a 2 hour game. Do you think me as a kid beat that game in 2 hours? No, of course not, I spent hundreds of hours playing it in total and never beat it.

We had so much time, though so it wasn't a big deal how hard and tedious a game was. As a bored teenager, dropping 100 hours on a video game in 2-3 weeks was nothing. There was nothing else to do. Trying and failing at a game over and over felt entertaining.

I'm closing in on my 50s, and gaming is just different now. I recently grabbed a NES emulator and a knock-off USB NES gamepad and played through a bunch of old games from my childhood. It hits real different now that I have a life and time is precious.

Games that I remember as fun are now just time consuming and frustrating, rather than entertaining. Platformers where you needed surgical precision to land on just the right brick or you're back to the beginning of the level: irritating and very quickly my brain starts telling me: "This is not worth it." RPGs where you spend most of your time grinding between bosses who (randomly) either kill your party or go down without much of a fight, my brain says: "This is definitely not as entertaining as I remember it." And all the while, I'm watching the clock, thinking about how otherwise productive I could be being right now...

Sure. Closing in on my 50s too. I generally don't have patience for most games of that era either. I think quite a few of those games still stand up but when I play them now it's more of a historical engineering thing where I am understanding and figuring out how they pulled off certain effects, etc.

    I recently grabbed a NES emulator and a knock-off USB NES 
    gamepad and played through a bunch of old games from my 
    childhood. It hits real different now that I have a life 
    and time is precious.

Getting back to the point of the linked article, there were some special things about how these games looked and played on real hardware on real CRTs. One was the look. Two was a true zero-latency experience. While we may have "nostalgia" about the CRT look, there are also objective differences there.

    And all the while, I'm watching the clock, thinking about how 
    otherwise productive I could be being right now... 

I feel this too. But I also feel this way about reading books at this point in my life, I'm ashamed to say. I hardly read any more. But I don't blame the games, or the books. It's clearly me that has changed.

> https://howlongtobeat.com/

The completion times seem generally lower than I expected. I wonder if there is a selection bias, as in most users who submitted stats are people are pretty good at games. Or maybe for classic games, it's recording replay times from people who have already beat it years ago, as opposed to first runs through the game.

(It's the first time I have heard of this site, so I looked up stats for the most recent game I completed, and it said I was 4 times slower than the median and only 3 minutes faster than the slowest time ever. This is true for most games I sampled so I am just bad at games.)

In modern AA/AAA titles there often is way too much filler content for my taste; clearly not respecting my time.

Also tutorials (Pikmin 4 recently put me off again because of that) and way too much in-your-face world building in general… the original Doom had lots of world building but also impeccably thought through gameplay and one manual page that set the scene very simply end effectively. Everything else emerged throughout actual immediacy of game play and the world itself.

Unfortunately not every game can be a Disco Elysium a Cyberpunk 2077 or a Baldur’s Gate 3. No need to waste my time; just be honest about it rather than inflate playtime.

So some of those other games … they could have been good maybe even great 5 hour experiences instead even at “full price”.

Super Mario World was not a 5 to 9 hour long game for a 10 year old in the 90s.

You can play as different characters, find hidden worlds, play around. Super Mario World was a game you could play over and over. I might go back to it today.

Duck hunt was the same thing over and over but you kept playing

There were many games you could pass quickly. You rented those games. You had Romance of the three Kingdom which would take years to pass

    What I didn’t remember though and only looked up
    recently: the MSRP was $60-70

Notice that Super Mario World isn't even in that ad. That's because Super Mario World was a free pack-in game for most of the SNES's lifespan, at least in the US. So the MSRP was effectively $0 for a lot of us.

    is a 5 hours long game, 

That means you spent about 10-15 minutes on each level if you did a minimal playthrough and skipped all secrets. A brisk clip for an initial playthrough but it seems reasonable for an experienced gamer I guess.

There's no right or wrong way to enjoy a game, so if you are the type to power through a minimal playthrough and never touch it again... cool. No hate. That's your style. I have definitely done that with some games.

On the other hand if I enjoyed a game back then I definitely replayed it multiple times, so "5 hours to completion" definitely did not equal "5 hours of fun" for me and a lot of other people.

    9 [hours] if you are going to 100%

Now this number is objectively junk.

Some of the hidden worlds and hidden exits are tough to find and are going to require experimentation, death, and some blind jumps IIRC. To get all 96 exits you're going to have to beat all 73 levels and you're going to have to beat some of them twice so you will play a total of 96 levels.

So 100%'ing this game in 9 hours means you are hitting a new exit every 5.6 minutes. That doesn't seem realistic for most people on their first playthrough.

Obviously you can do it in less than 9 hours if you know where everything is by using playthroughs, walkthroughs, savestates, etc. The world record is 1h21m.

A child doesn't pick up Mario World and just beat it in 5 hours on the first go through. Those playthrough times listed are for people who already are expert at the game and already know all the levels.

My family spent more than a year playing Mario World, exploring, finding secrets.

> I think this is just nostalgia talking. My first SNES games, Super Mario World, is a 5 hours long game

Nice humblebrag. I put a hundred+ hours into Super Mario Bros when I was a kid and I never finished it. Adults who still play this game today can beat it fast because they have years of practice and the internet/guides for advice, tell them which warps to take, etc.

I honestly had a lot of trouble getting through games like Sonic 2. If you were to play Sonic 2 end-to-end its probably 3-4 hours. But the reality is getting through it all was challenging. It wasn't 40 hours of puzzles, nono.

This is not to say that that is the right way to make a game, but it was to say that playing it was a challenge for young me. Today the only games I find challenging is PvP games, but often times I don't want the other parts of the challenge like the actual people part. This is why some games like Demon's Souls (the first time I ever saw a castle in the distance that I could literally walk up to and smash through, was an awe moment) still stick in my mind.

> Most games you play nowadays is winnable. And when it isn't people complain why isn't it winnable.

Meh. There’s plenty of modern games where “winning” either is not really a thing (Minecraft, Terraria, dwarf fortress) or is fiendishly difficult (“winning” StS would be semi-reliably killing the heart with any character at maximum ascension, I think just reaching A20 in 50 hours would be impressive).

Yeah. As a kid who spent a lot of time playing games but just wasn't very good at them, I'd pore manuals to look at levels that I knew I'd never reach, and not for lack of trying. I was amazed the first time I played a single player game on the PC (forgot what) and was actually able to see the end! Unless you're into speedrunning, playing the same levels over and over just isn't fun. It's frustrating

Semi-reliably beating the heart on A20 is no more required to beat the game than speed running a competitive time in Dark Souls is.

You can always impose artificial constraints to add more time sinks but that’s on you and your ego not the game.

Old games locked content behind hard challenges, games like StS doesn't. Playing a challenge that doesn't unlock new content is like cooking and then just throwing away the food, it kills the enjoyment for most.

Minecraft and Terraria still have final bosses as well as achievements. You definitely run out of things to do eventually unless you just want to build stuff at the endgame and/or collect every optional item, which can get boring quick for many people. A full run of either is often weeks-long and dozens if not hundreds of hours, but I don't think most people play the same world/character/save forever.

> Minecraft [...] still have final bosses as well as achievements. You definitely run out of things to do eventually unless you just want to build stuff at the endgame and/or collect every optional item,

I don't know about Terraria, but only speedrunners consider the end dragon to be the final boss of the game. Besides the fact that the game has received regular updates with new content (and harder challenges/bosses) for more than a decade since the dragon was added, it's a block game...

> unless you just want to build stuff at the endgame

That's like saying "unless you want to build things with lego." Building things is the point, it should go without saying. Beating the dragon is what players do in the first day playing on a new map to clear the way for the real gameplay. It's a prerequisite (not finish line) for getting a full set of equipment so you can start building in earnest. Beating the ender dragon is like getting the box of legos open and poured onto the floor.

In Minecraft, Survival Mode is the main thing. While you can still build, of course, and you likely will to create a base, I would not say building is actually a major part of the game anymore. Comparing to legos feels a bit off. I played a lot of Minecraft, thousands of hours, a fair bit of that was with mods. A run just tended to peter out after a few weeks. I'm not saying you'd stop at the Ender Dragon either, but once you've done "all the stuff", it's often more fun to either start over or play a different game for a while. I know when hosting servers for a dozen or so active players, most people didn't stick around more than a few weeks, and often they'd ask for a "reset" at some point because the early-game progression was more fun than having a bunch of endgame stuff and not much left to do. Terraria has a much larger focus on combat than Minecraft and many more bosses and clear progression, but I still think of them similarly here. I don't have some 15 year old Minecraft map/server, I have many distinct memories of playing through the game for a while with different people at different times, starting over is just part of it. That goes for Terraria as well, it's borderline taboo to bring a character with progress into a new world if your friend is starting a new character, and if you both had endgame characters it just wouldn't be that interesting. While a speedrunner might skip a lot of the game's content to get to beating the Ender Dragon, a more typical player would probably just get a good mine, good farm, good stockpile of crafting materials, maybe upgrade/rebuild their base once or twice, and eventually not have much left to do. I know there are people building computers in both of these games, but as far as real world cases, almost no one I know even touches Redstone beyond the minimum. I see these more as adventure/sandbox games than building games, even if you can build. I do more terraforming and spelunking than building things just for the sake of it. Expanding your base is often to fit more chests or in the case of Terraria, because you need more places for NPCs to move in so you can access new shops. If building things was a major goal of yours, then it certainly gets easier once you have upgraded movement and mining speed and so on, I just find that I/we usually stop playing around then.

StS = Slay the Spire (I think)

What is StS?

I guess that explains the appeal of the "souls" subgenre of games. But also why it's not for me. I never beat Sonic 2 or Mario 3 as a small child and that was frustrating.

Meanwhile, some of the first games I did beat by myself were Pokemon Silver and Final Fantasy VII. And they both gave me satisfying conclusions to my journey (compared to say, GTA 2, another game I played a lot by myself). And that proceeded to strongly influence the kinds of games I play. not necessarily hard ones, but ones that rewarded my teambuilding (or at least, ability to cheese the mechanics).

A game like GTA 2 (and specially 3) was not meant to be played as-in-the-script, but to fuck around in the city the to have fun and, then, yes, complete the game.

> Most games you play nowadays is winnable. And when it isn't people complain why isn't it winnable.

> Well... It's why they're not impactful.

Today's landscape in of videogame design is much wider than "winnable"/"unwinnable".

There's plenty of "unwinnable" games if one wants nowadays - they're called "hard". There is even the "faithful retro NES" subgenre, which reproduces NES design and difficulty. There are definitely impactful hard games, when well produced (I don't like them, but I guess games like Super Meat Boy have a lot of fans).

There's a reason why, on the other end of the spectrum, there are "easy" games; their objective is to provide an experience rather than a challenge - and also on this side of the spectrum, there is an extreme end - the walking adventures.

Old/unwinnable game of the past doesn't imply "impactful" at all; there was plenty of garbage back then.

There's still plenty of garbage nowadays of course[¹], but there are experience-oriented games that are "impactful" - think of the Bioshock series, or even What Remains of Edith Finch.

There is one aspect of the past that is gone forever, and it's the mystique that some games had for people who couldn't access gaming media.

If, 30+ years ago, one couldn't finish a game (for any reasons), the ending was a mystery. Nowadays, one just looks on Youtube. I have very ambiguous feelings about this, though, as it also carried frustration.

[¹] Although I think that, nowadays, due to the lower bar to production, people with good design skills and poor programming skills, can still produce a remarkable game.

those side scrollers were made following the same model of arcade games, which means you are supposed to 'lose' often so you or somebody elae put another quarter on the machine. It was not an artistic choice like in the Souls games.

It takes discipline in all things. In highschool I had SNES.zip, and I fully completed over a dozen RPGs, some multiple times.

For my children, I insist they watch one movie at once, one show, one game, one book. We don’t start multiple games, or books, until we follow something all the way through.

What if it’s a book or show they don’t like? Do they have to follow it all the way through just because of the mistake of starting it? Seems like they’re going to miss out on a lot of experiences because they accidentally chose the wrong thing.

I have a friend like this—he’s super noncommittal on experiences and events because he’s convinced something better will come along last minute (it rarely, if ever, does). And he ends up missing out—a lot.

I think the point was to do one thing at a time.

If a book/movie/series doesn't work out, then drop it and move on.

Life is too short.

That’s just not how it works. The child like inclination is to switch songs 90 seconds in, or switch tv shows, or jump book to book because the library has an overwhelming number of options.

The massive amount of choice available is paralyzing, and after some time they’ve become a lot better at seeing things through.

It sounds like your friend is the exact opposite. He can’t commit because he’s paralyzed by too many options. Eliminate the options and the paralysis disappears.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice

I've always been an avid reader and for as long as I've able to read I've always read multiple books at a time, depending on my mood, and I finish them all. Granted I didn't grow up with the massive amount of available media kids have today, but I don't see a problem with kids reading multiple books at a time, if they go through them anyway. I much prefer this than kids not reading at all.

I can see your point though, I just can't agree with the books part, from my personal experience.

Yeah, I grew up getting books at yardsales and used book stores, usually a dozen at a time for a few dollars, and I almost always read several of them at a time. Switching between books seems like a natural way to read books, it's not a symptom of mass media induced brain damage or whatever is being suggested above. My family didn't even have cable TV so I'm quite sure my attention span wasn't damaged by it.

What do you mean that’s just not how it works? You said “follow all the way through.” So if your kid picks Super Ghouls N Ghosts or NetHack they may end up never touching another game until they move out? Or do you let them give up after a certain number of hours?

But what if it really sucks? There are bands who are "one hit wonders" not because of peoples attention spans but because the rest of their songs actually suck. Detective book series, where the supposed detective starts solving crimes by using astrology? Yeah... no, thank you. Scrubs season 9? The last few seasons of house of cards?

It sucks, there are many other things to read/watch/play, so why not quit the bad stuff and find something better?

>What if it’s a book or show they don’t like? Do they have to follow it all the way through just because of the mistake of starting it? Seems like they’re going to miss out on a lot of experiences because they accidentally chose the wrong thing.

This is the coddling the of American mind.

Check the review!

Check the rotten tomato score!

Scour goodreads!

Live fast! Life's short! Indulge in the Good Approved Product!

How about people learn what they like and don't like (and WHY)? How about we stop pushing away negative emotions the second they appear? How about we develop a real identity? You can't grow a personal taste if you only get fed what you instinctively like, you also have to go through the stinkers.

Ok but if you're halfway through The Land Before Time you can tell if you're gonna be interested in the rest without forcing yourself to slog through it.

If my hypothetical kids don't enjoy the land before time, I'm getting a paternity test.

> Check the review! Check the rotten tomato score! Scour goodreads!

These things tell you if other people like the thing, not if you will like it. There's a keen difference you know, people can have their own opinions on things without taking cues from the crowd.

Anyway, putting down bad books isn't an Americanism. Why do you let Americans live rent free in your mind?

Identity has nothing to do with which unpopular movies or books you happen to enjoy.

My kids live with me and we often watch and play things together. They’re not holed up in their rooms living sad lives of isolation.

For that reason, we’re never going to watch trash. Gabby’s Dollhouse will never, ever be on any screen in my house. I refuse.

Sounds good, but I feel like being disciplined in your consumption of relaxing entertainment is something of an oxymoron.

It’s not an oxymoron when facing an infinite number of algorithmic firehoses of content.

When raising kids media consumption at a family level is actually often less about relaxation and more about cultural education, and if done right, educating kids how to consume media without the dark patterns of media consuming you.

My time is limited. If something doesn't capture my attention after giving it a fair chance, I move on. No need to feed a completionist disorder or fall for the sunk cost fallacy.

Also just sheer choice of "good" games.

I look at my wishlist on Steam and think "If didn't had a job and could play games for next 20 years I would still not have to settle for average one ever again". Like, compared to 20 years ago I don't ever play anything that by 20 years ago standards would be considered "just okay" or below. We're definitely spoiled

And between indies and sales they are cheap too.

Frankly picking good ones becomes harder, you no longer can count on next <AAA developer> being great as usual and game journalists are incompetent more often than they are useful.

Funny that gameplay-wise, AAA games are the least interesting IMO.

I play AAA games for the narrative now.

As the current AAA games are as playable as mediocre movies, and the movies themselves are nothing but soulless remakes, I'd prefer to get some public domain comic books from https://comicbookplus.com and get some stories from Ditko, the non-superhero based ones, but the ones from mistery/scifi themes, kinda like a comic version of The Twilight Zone.

On proper gaming, most AAA games are lacking against Slashem, IF, csokoban and casual and libre games like Trigger Rally where the playability it's just there, even if the graphics are two decades behind.

Yes, I do agree that books are superior.

But sometimes at the end of the day when I am tired, I just want to play something mindless and not that challenging.

> Also just sheer choice of "good" games.

It is obviously a matter of personal taste and a matter of being lucky or unlucky choosing games, but my experience is very much the opposite. There are (nearly) no good games anymore.

You can easily play a very big chunk of the good/great games from the past 40 years and plenty of new good and great games get released every year so you are probably being unlucky or do not know how to find the games that will appeal to your taste.

There are no good games that reflect your taste, or good games that reflect your taste are hard to find?

On my end, there are so many options that I tend to look at qualities that I would not even consider twenty years ago, like tone and setting. (Why would I want to play a grim game? Do I really want to play another game set in space?) Quite often, nothing will get past my personal taste filters, even when they are good games.

There's a pretty huge dichotomy between consoles and PC right now. I find those who bemoan that lack of games tend to refer to the former. It's become much better due to arcade/PSN titles, but consoles still tend to suffer from the 'we have all types of games - first person shooty/stabbers and third person shooty/stabbers' syndrome.

Go to Steam, search for any genre whatsoever that you're interested in, look at player reviews, and find out why some people think there are no games and why others think we're currently in an unprecedented golden age of gaming. Alternatively, which genres do you like?

I find modern games are often superior to the old ones, so I would disagree with the "anymore" part of "no good games anymore".

But I disagree with the sibling comments in that I'm quite sure it's a fact for a lot of players that there are hardly any good games left in the sense that they have grown and their tastes have reached levels where pretty rehashes of old mechanics and ideas will no longer cut it. AAA games don't innovate much these days, and the indie game with one cool new idea is rarely fun to play because the execution as a whole is so lacking.

To be honest, I think the average HN user does not play games that much. Or watch films, listen to music, read fiction, etc. Which is probably a good thing, but means they have less taste, both in the subjective and objective sense. But go to different internet forums, say 4chan, and you'll find people definitely have huge problems with quality creative content being so rare.

It's a mixed bag, I think.

Good things: * Tons of high quality small indie games that experiment with mood, story, genre. Think Cultist Simulator or Factorio.

* Remasters and emulation bring the best of the past to the present.

* New experiments in gaming hardware: Nintendo Switch, Playdate.

* Console play is more ergonomic (controllers, voice chat) than ever.

* Gaming is pretty mainstream now, so there's more people to play with, and there's less stigma.

* Twitch, Discord, YouTube all make finding a community for your game easy and fun (if your game is blessed with a positive one at least).

Bad things:

* Certain genres haven't really seen top-quality entries. After Age of Empires 2, Age of Mythology, and Warcraft 3, the only top-quality entry in the RTS genre was StarCraft 2. We just don't see folks even trying, certainly not with AAA budgets.

* Game design choices make games too streamlined, and remove fun interactions. For RPG games: quest markers, level scaling, lax loot table probabilities, incentivizing solo play til end game, etc.

* Voice acting means there's just less text and less depth. Compare Morrowind to Skyrim. But I think we're over the hump here. A game like RDR2 is fully voice-acted but had 2000 pages of writing. That's the best of both worlds.

* Bad art design makes things look really bad in low-power hardware. Compare D2 and D4 on a lower-end computer.

My main gripe is lack of worthy sequels to my favourite games:

Deus ex, I really tried hard to like mankind divided but I don't know why I don't.

Wave race 64, even the GameCube sequel didn't capture the magic and every other attempt has rubbish water physics.

1080 snowboarding, the sequel was terrible, I left it back to the shop. No other snowboarding game captures the rewarding control scheme (same with wave race).

Goldeneye, ok perfect dark is good but why has no other game even attempted to capture what makes goldeneye special? It plays like a roller coaster that you can control. (I think someone on a gaming forum said that, I think they are correct).

Quake 3 and unreal tournament 99, no online shooter I've played compares to instagib on these.

1080 Snowboarding was a gem not matched for a long time. The reason it was so good was because the chief coder, Giles Goddard, was an avid snowboarder and intuitively understood what it should feel like. He modeled the friction of the board relative to the contact patch it makes with the snow. I don't think any other game tried to do this outside of racing sins for quite some time.

Yes, it's a pretty amazing story of a westerner working at Nintendo. Bizarrely I worked with a guy who worked with him. I dont work in the games industry but this guy had. Roughly he said he was genius. I didn't realise until after I left that job that he was talking about the same guy who led 1080 development. He was just talking about the mario 64 squishy face that can be pulled and stretched. Saying he knew the guy who programmed that. (Given his background I don't doubt the story)

Fast FPSs generally and instagib specifically have disappeared completely.

You're talking about a different thing than the video is talking about.

I suggest you watch at least 30 seconds of the video. "Nostalgia's a very powerful and good thing" referring to our desire to come back to these games, "20, 30 years later."

This comment is very relevant to the general effect of nostalgia and how it affects our desire to play to these games, and presents another (not contradictory or mutually exclusive) reason why they can sometimes fall flat today. The video focuses on the technical aspect but the economic/life aspect in the comment is equally important.

One throw away sentence in the beginning doesn't make it the topic...

No, the parent is right.

I watched over half of the video, and while nostalgia is a big focus, it’s a completely different kind of visual nostalgia associated with CRTs, and the very technical differences, down to how CRTs produce smoother motion.

I read the OP and had the same reaction as the parent — this is an interesting observation, but has almost nothing to do with the video.

This is true, but does not stop a foodie from going on a mission to replicate the spicy sausage flavour of petrol station food they loved on childhood road trips.

Is this a real story? If so, link please?

No. It's rhetorical.

What is scarce today?

Have we amused ourselves to death?

> You know how food tastes better when you’re hungry? That’s the element of nostalgia that is still unaccounted for in the emulation/preservation scene.

Do you know that an LCD at 24bpp has the same color quality or even worse as an CRT at 16bpp?

I need my HDR TV to be able to play some old games because the old LCD monitor is crap.

You might be on to something here. I spend more time configuring things rather than playing games (mister fpga, real hardware or emulators).

I think having access to any game up to about 2004 has caused me to feel opportunity cost in playing any of them. I remember friends complaining of the same sort of thing once playstation piracy took off. It got to the point were one guy I new would purposely buy real retail games that he wanted to properly play because he knew if he got it on CDR it would be worthless to him and he'd not invest the time in it.

In hindsight, most of those games were bad. Some were very bad. A handful were OK, and a select few are still worth playing today. In general, games that old weren't fair, and they relied on a lot of repetitive gameplay to overcome technological limitations.

16-year-old me would also be shocked that grown-up me spends more time being physically active than gaming, though interestingly, both are driven by a sense of accomplishment.

Nah, man, CRTs, vinyl, and tube amps are just better. If you don't understand why you haven't really experienced them deeply. CRT televisions produce a richer, warmer picture, man!

Seriously though, I do so love hearing from soi-disant experts about how NES games are objectively better on the grotty, hand-me-down CRT TV they played them on than on today's crisp, high quality LCD or OLED displays. I know because I was there -- we would have given our left nut for that kind of picture sharpness back in the day. In fact I remember transitioning my computer display in the early 2000s from a quite good CRT to one of the earliest non-ghosty LED monitors -- and the increase in sharpness was a significant improvement, less eyestrain. Not to mention the CRT flicker -- annoying to me, possibly seizure-inducing to my sister -- that's largely gone now.

For a long time CRTs did have the advantage of better color reproduction, and they still have the advantage of lower latency. But compared to modern displays they have enough disadvantages that the talk of their objective superiority is mainly nostalgia and copium.

I am nostalgic for consoles hooked up to CRTs. I miss the NTSC color artifacts, the perturbations in the 60Hz hum caused by crosstalk from the CPU or video hardware, the beam racing coding techniques. But I also realize I am spoiled by being able to play all my favorite retro games on a razor-sharp 4K monitor.

My son got an N64 because he likes F-Zero and was looking for a CRT to go with it, I spoke to the director of our reuse center who said they send them to the hazardous waste landfill all the time but they’d hold one out for us and in a few weeks we got a cute little TV with a built-in VCR. I was hoping to get a home theatre from the late analog era but we didn’t see one so I got him a 2-channel receiver from NAD that looked like the gear I would have lusted over in the 1980s.