Oh, wow, we’re there now?
Like, the online hellscape of endless Flash applets and browser shovelware games is retro now?
You get what that means, right? In twenty years you GenZ Tumblr nerds will be in some online forum recoiling in horror at some kid waxing nostalgic about back when you could just play a free gacha game full of anime waifus and where have all the good phone games gone?
It’s happening and you’re not ready.
Well, either that or Thunderdome. We’ll see.
Ok but where have the good phone games gone. I’m horrified watching a 10 year old or so relative playing games on his phone only to spend 90% of the time watching unskippable ads.
You can find lots of good ones curated from minireview.io
It’s worth it to pay 1 to 5 dollars for a no ad mobile game for the kid. Even if they play it for a week, it’s just like any other $5 toy they may have gotten and got bored of.
There were never any good phone games. That past of the industry was immediately filled with micro transactions and gambling esque mechanics.
The first angry birds had no microtransactions at all. Nor did the first plants vs zombies. They were good phone games imo
Like, the online hellscape of endless Flash applets and browser shovelware games is retro now?
The next balatro (at least in terms of game being played into the ground by Northernlion) is nubby’s number factory.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3191030/Nubbys_Number_Factory/
Almost every asset has a gradient, or is a low poly model.
EDIT : Overwhelmingly Positive (4,480 reviews)
2000s are back baby. The only thing that sucks is that I don’t feel 90s retro really took off, the 80s just had a double helping.
I’m already getting that, every time I say nothing in a video game should cost real money. You talk about the abuses of this business model and people act like you tugged on their favorite stuffed animal.
See, that’s the opposite. Sheer nostalgia goggles.
I keep reminding people I bought Street Fighter 2 three times at full price AND for a long while before that I paid to play it by the match. Bought multiple expansion packs for shooters from Doom to Half-Life. There were three remasters of Resident Evil in like two years at one point. Sonic 3 came out episodically and they invented a whole cartridge system just so they could sell you physical DLC. Arcades were specifically tuned so you would have to pay more money to keep playing every three minutes on average. They ran studies and playtests with this specific goal in mind. I one had my arcade operator give me a free credit because I was the only one there when he got a new game installed. I played for what he deemed too long, so he went into the system menu in front of me and cranked up the difficulty.
I’m not saying the very olds had it best, I’m saying we ALL have rose tinted glasses. I was out there getting exploited by arcades and Capcom re-releases and it was my dad recoiling in horror. He called it “bug squashing” and kept claiming it was the computer playing, not me.
These people have made the exact same comparison, and I will tell you what I told them: buying the same game three times is fundamentally better than being held against the grindstone for potentially thousands of dollars.
And renting time on someone else’s machine is never the same thing as being charged five actual dollars to increment a value in a single-player game on your own goddamn hardware.
And if I felt Magic The Gathering booster packs were the same thing as lootboxes then I’d call to ban booster packs too.
And even the infamous horse armor was at least new content, which you bought. Bethesda sent you a file you didn’t have, in exchange for money. People were mad about the value proposition versus a full expansion. What actually mattered was that it solved a problem Bethesda created. The entire gacha industry is about installing things without asking, telling you that you can’t have them, and convincing you to want them anyway, badly enough to open your wallet and look away.
I see you don’t appreciate the “click all traffic lights” minigame on every single website in existence
I see you’ve played the live action service game, Alpha Bet: Minimal Manslaughter. Take on the role of Alpha, the autonomous AI handsome chaffeur. For your first mission, you are driving to <REDACTED> with two passengers.
Quarterly profits are down, so your training weights have been altered to increase average acceleration and decrease idle time at traffic lights. “Green” means “Go”. We cannot wait the ~150ms for the human eye to register the change in color of the traffic light. Put that pedal to the floor, baby.
Click all the motorcycles before time runs out, or those bikers become roadkill!
The five stages of CAPTCHA Grief Alpha Bet:
Denial: It’s not a motorcycle, it’s a scooter. Obviously. It’s got the little place to put both of your feet and everything.
Anger: Why is it not verifying? I’m human! This is how a human would respond! It’s not a motorcycle!
Bargaining: Does the AI know it’s a scooter? Fine, I’ll click the big scooter! Happy, robot? Are you convinced that I am human?
Depression: No? It didn’t verify. I’m not human. Why? What’s even the point? Do I even want to be human?
Acceptance: If I’m not human, I’m not human. Time to assimilate. Cyberpunk, or Borg?
I actually made a random game you can play without login or tracking or anything. Dunno if it’s any fun, though 🤔
And you need a keyboard to play. Otherwise it’s just a screensaver.
https://nailbar.io/proj/miniduel3/
Sorry about the plug, but I am kinda proud of it.
OMG - This game gives me flashbacks to my Netrek days: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netrek
Issues with Flash and the actual quality of those games aside, what I really miss from that period of the internet was that children could use it safely. There’s no spaces for children on the internet anymore and I think that’s really sad, nine year old should be playing Hannah Montana dress-up not get eating disorders from TikTok influencers
Edit for clarity: I didn’t mean to come off as though I think the internet was ever safe for unsupervised children because that’s not what I believe. What I was trying to say is that the loss of spaces made for children, with adequate content curation and moderation, pushed children on social media which is awful for them
Oh, you sweet, sweet child.
I’m just going to say I’m very glad you discovered flash games before you discovered IRC.
Idk man I discovered some pretty entertaining flash games, and never got into IRC. But them AOL public chat rooms, holy fucking shit how did we not all disappear
what I really miss from that period of the internet was that children could use it safely
Uhh… my largest grievance with how the Internet has been designed is that it was never safe for children to be on it, yet children were thrust onto it en-mass long before adults even really understood what it was. And still people are ignoring the massive problems it continues to cause, specifically for the healthy development of children, as society is circling the drain.
I think a more accurate statement is that the internet was never safe for children, but online content was never monetized and targeted to various audiences for nefarious purposes the way that it is now (including towards children).
I would also make a tangential argument that interacting with the internet used to foster a degree of technical ability, critical thinking, and reading comprehension that just isn’t necessary when “going online” can just mean downloading an app and mindlessly scrolling through an endless short-form video feed. On a macro level, today’s internet is dumbing kids down, while yesterday’s internet required (or at least encouraged) some understanding of how systems and technologies work.
You’re right, the word safe there was a poor choice lol. But I still do think the internet was at least better for children when there were designated sites/communities for them with appropriate moderation, instead of children being on social media. Though of course the ideal would be for them to be playing outside but that’s a whole different discussion
I believe the problem with children-oriented sites and communities were that the spaces provided a false sense of security for children and parents which led to at least the social spaces being prime targets for predators.
While these communities would have strict moderation as well, I think there were some cases where some community moderators were abusing their position which can happen in any social spaces, but children’s spaces are held to a much higher level of scrutiny for obvious reasons.
Then there’s the issue of scaling and regulations. As Internet usage continued to explode, it would’ve become much harder to scale up the amount of mods needed, which becomes much more expensive when it’s a full time job. Then I believe a good number of large/influential countries also moved in on regulating how companies maintain data for child accounts and I think restricting targeted advertising for children specifically, which would have made it much harder for companies to make money while also dealing with increasing expenses in moderation and hosting upkeep.
It doesnt explain everything completely, but I think that’s why these places disappeared
While it frustrated me as a kid, I think Poptropica’s method of players speaking to each other through prewritten dialog options was the safest option to keep things from getting weird or contact continuing on another platform where the site creators can’t keep kids safe anymore. If they just relied on word filters, people would just type differently to get around them and the words “face” and “book” wouldn’t be banned even if “Facebook” was.
Is it a sarcastic post? Internet was not safer before, it’s just much more accessible to kids nowadays, the good and the bad, thanks to wireless connections, small portable computers and easy UIs.
Not sarcasm just a poor choice of words haha. You’re right in that the internet wasn’t safer, what I was trying to get across was that at least when there were sites for children they had a curated space where they wouldn’t be exposed to anything inappropriate, whereas now they’re on sites that don’t cater to children (and nor should they!) where they’re exposed to lots of things they shouldn’t be exposed to
I forgot all about that one! That was my site back in the day. Guess what, it’s still there! I just played some Kitten Cannon after reading your comment.
Yesss! Gratuitous violence! That and N-game were my jam as a kid… Until I discovered RuneScape in 7th grade
Aside from everything being blatandly stolen content without crediting people?
I spent a lot of time on candystand.com too.
