games

You spent more time looking at her butt than her boobs anyway. Which is why they put more polygons into her butt. Resource management!

Backing Lara into a corner so the camera zooms in on those luscious triangle titties.

and you have to be 14 years old

Then I got a Nintendo 64 and Super Mario was the most realistic thing I've seen.

It's really hard to communicate the incredible size of the graphical leaps in the early days of mainstream consoles. Every generation was just amazingly better than the last for quite a while there. I remember booting up Mario 64 for the first time and just sitting there with my whole family, jaws hanging open. You could see Mario breathing. The world was enormous, three-dimensional, and open. Coming off the SNES, it was just mind-blowing. The move from PS3 to PS5 looks like hardly a tune-up by comparison. It was wild.

Yeah, very much this. I think it's tied in to how vision works - We don't perceive the world directly. What we see is a bunch of cludges and hacks that our brain uses to assemble a coherent picture from a bunch of very bad sensors. Like I think your eyes can only really see what's directly in front of you and most of your peripheral vision is just cludged together from things you've seen recently, which is probably why, like, people can sometimes sneak up on you and claerly be in your peripheral vision and you don't notice htem bc you were focused somewhere else.

It didn't really matter that Lara was a bunch of polygons or the dinosaurs in Turok were like 50 tris or whatever. Your brain will fill in the details. When I think about the actual experience of playing games decades ago I don't remember the actual graphics. My brain has assembled sort of a representation of that where Lara Croft is "high poly" and shadows and lighting work and the movement system wasn't a nightmare.

I remember seeing footage of Shenmue when it was new and laughing. I thought it was some kind of joke, because there was no way a game could look that realistic or smooth. I thought it was some kind of footage of real people that had a special effect put over it. When I learned it was a real game I felt a weird sense of dread, because it felt like arriving at the end of human history, like I slipped into the future by accident

Shenmue look liked this

a higher level of fidelity than 2024 releases

We've reached a point where the major bottleneck on realism isn't the hardware you run on, it's the size of your dev team and the amount of time you spend working on your graphics. That's part of why triple ayyyyyyyyyy games are so much more expensive to make than they need to be, because they're throwing money at diminishing returns and they always have to outdo the last game that came out.

No, bro. This was 5 years ago. If this was your childhood, you're still a child.

No, most of Gen Z already feels like old people. Capitalist enshittification literally aged us at lightning speed.

FNAF was a thing when I was in 6th-7th grade. I’m 24 now lol

I mean "content from the 2010s" could mean a lot of things. Like someone who says "FNAF was my childhood" could be a 22 year old who played it as a 12 year old in 2014

Hell even something from 5 years ago could be a lot of people's childhood, an 18 year old remembers 2019 as a 13 year old

There was a time when computers would scream at each other in binary anguish to establish a connection to the net.

I remember the time when someone gets on the dial-up internet, nobody at home could use the landline phone. And this was before the time when every single person gets their own personal cell phone.

Imagine not being able to use the internet for much of the day because your parents or someone else in the family might have to call home.

Lara wasnt my thing but I did have a polygonal video game crush as as a PS1 kid, and it was Kid from Chrono Cross.

The mind makes it real, Neo.

one fear

Kids these days don't understand the appeal of british women with infinite ammo and a fifteen foot standing high jump murdering endangered species for reasons that aren't really justified by the plot.

Chica from Five Nights at Freddy's