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Classic Games (Games) Entertainment Games

Can Kids Tolerate Classic Games? 141

Posted by simoniker from the pixels-not-cool dept.
Thanks to EGM for their feature subjecting today's children to yesterday's gaming classics, as they "...rounded up nine children of the PlayStation generation - ages 10 to 13 - and forced them to play titles from the '70s and '80s." Games the kids comment on include Pong ("I would never pay to play something like this"), Tetris ("Which button do I press to make the blocks explode?"), and, evilly, E.T. for the Atari 2600 ("Didn't they bury this game in Mexico or something?")
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Can Kids Tolerate Classic Games? More

Can Kids Tolerate Classic Games?

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  • i'd be surprised if a kid actually knew... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Flunitrazepam ( 664690 ) on Thursday October 16, 2003 @12:16AM (#7226608) Journal
    Did You Know?
    Atari buried 5 million unsold copies of E.T. in the New Mexico desert.
  • It just has to grow on you. Add in a defective family and a nonexistant social life and you'll play anything to get away, even if it's pretending you're a ping pong paddle.
  • They don't know a good game if it slaped them in the face. Pong, is a truely insirational game, Andthe mind testing skill for tetris...and ET....well...if anyone has ever played that, they should have burried it in the desert.
  • we all know there just playing dumb... Al Gore invented video games, ya know...
  • Alright, yeah, nostalgia, we get it. When graphics and games were simpler, and kids (apparantly) had larger attention spans.

    But there's still something wrong if they can't figure out the basics of TETRIS.
    • But there's still something wrong if they can't figure out the basics of TETRIS.

      That's not their fault, the blocks weren't exploding!!!

    • During the 1980s, it seemed like every programmer wrote his own version of Tetris. It still is quite popular on children sites. Each of those sites has a version of Tetris and Pairs, either a Java applet or a Flash version.

      My 8 year old stepdaughter doesn't have problems understanding Tetris. Given a choice, she'd rather look around to find a Flash game she likes.

      • Hell, my daughter figured out Tetris last year when she was 4!! These 10-13 year olds are either isolated from classics or their parents don't give a damn about them. Check out their use of language and they play GTA3?? Time for the parents to step in a show them what it is to be a kid...I remember going to the park on my bike was more fun then spending all day inside playing games, even if it was to go to the local Arcade...we still went outside and rode our bikes to play games =)
  • Recently, some neighbors of ours had an "80s Retro House Party" (yes, it really WAS as lame as it sounds ;) and being the good neighborhood geek I trundled out an old p2-300 and stuck MAME on it with the 80s gaming classics: Galaga, Joust, Pacman and so forth.

    I think perhaps 2 adults of the several dozen that were there ever got a chance to play. The kids were fighting over who got to have a chance at jousting each other.

    Maybe these kids are particularly "urbanized" (once you play GTA:VC it's hard to go

  • They take pre-teens/barely teens and ask them to play classic games. They've been raised to expect instant gratification, extremely narrow (regular) gameplay and plots that are always the same, to like eye candy instead of depth, etc. This is exactly like the situation of theatre or reading, or say, The Birds VS Crossroads("Woah, no explosions! Too small boobies" [etc]). It does not mean anything except that the kids they used for the article weren't geeky enough.

    I read classics at that age. I still play b
    • As far as I remember, the "classic" games didn't have much in the way of depth. Nor did they try to get by without eye candy (ever remember thinking gfx couldn't get any better than Contra?)

      Most of the value of those games today *is* nostalgia. I made the horrible mistake of loading up a C64 emulator and trying Summer Games. Man, I remember that game being SO REAL, but it really is crap when you look at it now.

      Some games (like 1945) I still like, because that type of gameplay never gets old for me...

  • oh the things kids say! (Score:4, Funny)

    by quakeslut ( 107512 ) on Thursday October 16, 2003 @12:26AM (#7226662)
    From the review of Donkey Kong:
    EGM: Who's that chick Mario is rescuing up there?
    Brian: It's Princess Peach.
    Kirk: It's a hooker.
    • My favorite is when they were playing pong:

      Tim: My line is so beating the heck out of your stupid line. Fear my pink line. You have no chance. I am the undisputed lord of virtual tennis. [Misses ball] Whoops.

      I don't know any kids who talk like that ("fear my pink line"?), but it's still funny.
  • The games back then were much better than games today in getting kids interested in programming. Who among us didn't look at a game and think of ways to make it better? It wasn't that hard to think of improvements, c'mon, look at the games!

    So we got a copy of the BASIC source on our Apple ][ and changed the background color. Or we added beeps (chr$(7)) to certain events. It was pretty easy to implement the improvement because everything was a piece of cake to get to.

    Today's games are polished beyond b
    • Well, for kids who could be interested in programmnig, there are still plenty of options to explore with modern games. Look at how id software, Epic, Valve, and other companies released source code and content-generation tools so anyone could do their own coding or game modifications.

      When I was younger I taught myself 6052 assembly and Basic with my Apple ][e, and made a few text adventures and simple graphic games, but I know I wished I could have designed something to go beyond the assembler code, monoc
  • This isn't so much about the 70s and 80s games, but recently I found some games I used to play in the early 90s on an abandonware site - one of the ones I remember was A-10 Tank Killer by Dynamix (I think?). Anyway, I recall spending HOURS playing this game because it was so immersive and stuff, when I fired up the copy now I couldn't see how I could ever have played the game that much as the graphics were very primitive. I think modern gaming has in some way spoiled us, obviously I must've been using my
    • Interestingly though, Doom, from around the same time, is still quite playable and the graphics aren't TOO bad - obviously nothing like UT2K3 or the Doom III screenshots, but not as bad as a comparison between the aforementioned A-10 game and FS2003

      Yeah, DOOM has held up pretty well, thanks to its good use of Sprites. These Sprites were great, they let them put thousands of bad guys on screen, and then they could leave the bodies to mark where you've been, rather than sweeping them away (which is the la
  • After reading some of the responses from the 10-13 year olds, I think that some of the conversation has been dramaticized for the article. I hope so, otherwise the youth of America has excellent vocabulary, but only uses it for profanity and dripping sarcasm.

    hed.

    • i had the same thought.... well EGM isn't exactly a 'trusted news source' i guess

      the article was probably totally made up during some bender one of the writers was having
  • I remember waking up at 5 am on saturdays to practice playing combat so i could beat my sister.
    ANd it kept me occupied too. WE had that and space invaders.

  • That's it (Score:3, Funny)

    by Apreche ( 239272 ) on Thursday October 16, 2003 @12:34AM (#7226709) Homepage Journal
    For real this time. I've said it before. When I have kids, I'm making them play video games right. No johnny, you can't have zelda 2 until you beat zelda 1. Now sit your ass down and find some triforce pieces. You want a PS4? Hah! You haven't even beaten pitfall yet! How can you expect to play those new fancy games if you suck at the old ones so much.

    I will raise my children to be the video game masters. Out of the womb and into the hands goes the joystick. The kind with a single orange button.
    • Yep, I gotta agree with you on this one. I've stuck to a similar policy with myself. I didn't buy Final Fantasy X until I'd finished Final Fantasy IX. I didn't get Final Fantasy IX, until I'd finished Final Fantasy VII. Don't ask about Final Fantasy VIII. I heard Dark Cloud 2 was coming out, so I made sure I was completely finished Dark Cloud. I still need to finish Dark Cloud 2, but I figure I've got some time on that. I suppose I shouldn't spend any more money on games til I finish Disgaea and SW: KotOR
    • Uhhh no you're going to raise your kids to hate video games. They're not going to want to play any games at all if they have to start off with ol games like that. Sure if they did start with old classic's they'd be great as a lot of the old classics were VERY hard games. Not like today's games which take hours to beat instead of months. But who would want to play those archaic games. They'd be at their friend's houses playing GTA4 all day while you're trying to get them to play pitfall, they're never g
      • My daughter (5, will be 6 in January) wanted to play on the orginal GameBoy I have, you know the green screen one =) I think she likes Tetris and Kirbys Pinball better on it then on the GBA =)
    • Yesterday my (3 year old) daughter spent some time at my office, playing Drol on the Apple //e on the other desk here.
      I glanced over at one point and noticed that she'd made it to level two.

      I think I've beaten level three a handful of times, FWIW.

      --
  • The comments seem a little too poetic, really. And between the heavy sarcasm ("John: Yeah, let's watch the lamp. It's more fun and less predictable.") and the flip flop between naieve and the cereberal comments from the same person ("they put quarters in there? [pointing at console]" vs " Maybe this is what seafood will do in a thousand years." Not to mention whoever knew that they had to dump off extra copies of E.T.
    • Nope. They said these kids ranged in age from 10-13, iirc. At 13 I sounded exactly like these kids. I suspect that these kids are a bit nerdy, and would probably remind me of me. :)

      Brandon
      BR7 Racing
  • I received the shock of my life a few months ago. I've been out of the emulation scene for a few years, so I popped onto IRC one day to get back into things for a bit, and I asked the channel what the best, current NES emulator was (since new ones always seem to be popping up).
    Man... the replies I received! I could tell they must have all been ~13 or younger. "I'd shoot myself if all I had to play were 8-bit games!" (Dunno where that came from).

    I wisely chose to say nothing, but filed it under the effec

    • I get a kick in a similar fashion out of hearing different ages reminisce. People a few years ahead of me, who were brought up with a coleco or intellivision in their hands, never stop talking about the golden age of games. Back when "graphics didn't matter and the gameplay was the core attraction". Amusingly enough, all my friends from my generation (who were raised primarily with the C64, 8-bit NES, SNES, Atari, and Sega generation hardware), seem to think the golden age of gaming began and ended with t

      • Actually my point was just that the real value of the entertainment at hand lies in the individuals experience. I think all generations of games are equal on multiple levels. The only thing that's really changed drastically are the visuals, as you can find just as much depth in 8 and 16 bit games, that you can in any of todays titles depending on personal experience.
        Plus, I knew many older individuals who loved their 8-bit games just as much as today, but the level of exposure to games has to be taken int

      • Certainly the entire concept of a "golden age" of gaming is flawed, but you have to agree that many of the foundations of gaming were set in 8-bit and 16-bit...

        GTA3 is based on free exploration, something established in the 8-bit era by games like Zelda. HL, I can argue with you on the point that it is 100x better gameplay than mario. I disagree. Mario games from 8-bit like mario 3 are far simpler, and certainly not based on storyline like Half-life, and therefore far more replayable. I can see myself p

        • Certainly the entire concept of a "golden age" of gaming is flawed, but you have to agree that many of the foundations of gaming were set in 8-bit and 16-bit...

          I certainly do agree. Games are, like many things, an evolving format. Most games are built upon ideas and concepts from their predecessors. Usually with a slight twist. Infrequently with a novel and new idea thrown in. Always with minor improvements to graphics and sound, but do those changes really matter?!

          But I wasn't arguing against the e

    • I asked the channel what the best, current NES emulator was

      my vote is for NesterDC :) Totally rocks and still get the console game feel using it. Plus lets my dreamcast be good for something other than House of the Dead 2

  • Every time I got a better game (i was a vic20-c64 kid) I thanked a higher power.

    I liked computer games because they were novel, and something to do when I was bored or my friends weren't over. I personally got more enjoyment out of building legos, models, and painting.

    The first game that really hooked me was Wing Commander, the second was Civilization. Even with those games I don't get nostalgic. Hell, I don't feel special about ANY games. 'Real' memories are built from interaction with friends and th
    • Even with those games I don't get nostalgic. Hell, I don't feel special about ANY games. 'Real' memories are built from interaction with friends and the world around you.

      hmm I remember that my friend and I spent many days helping each other get through Metroid, or Mike Tyson's Punch Out!!, or sharing tricks for Super Mario Bros.

      In college my friends and I would get together, have a few beers, and setup a tournament in KI (speaking of which, why don't more fighting games have tournament modes like KI did?
  • Well, not that they're crappy games, they were indeed revolutionary, and quite a bit of fun, but none of the games they had the kids play were games *I* get urges to go back and play. Classic games aren't necessarily classic because of their fun factor.

    If I had to recommend some classic games that I would ask kids to "tolerate", it'd be games like Pitfall, Asteroids, Space Invaders, Galaga, Legend of Zelda, Super Mario 3, King's Quest, Space Quest, heck even Nethack. These games were all a lot of fun, unli
    • Thinking about it, video games have only recently become mainstream and poppy. By that I mean that even the cool jock (hell, *especially* the cool jock) sits around with his buddies and plays games. Typically (and I'm making a horrible generalization) the 'cool' kids will play the most mainstream of games...fighting games, GTA type games, etc, where the main objective doesn't take a lot of thought.

      Zelda wasn't for someone who couldn't take a few hours each day for a couple of weeks to finish. Back befor
  • This reminds me of Back to the Future 2, where he plays an Arcade game and the kids go "Oh he has to use his hands, like a baby game" or something like that.

    Speaking of electronic football, "Dancing Dots". Had a watch that had 4 games on it, use to play it all the time before the NES game out. :) Now its backlight, SNES with stereo sound, and networked handhelds.
    • Do you know who said that in Back to the Future 2? It was Elijah Wood, his first movie roll as an actor. Funny, huh?
    • This reminds me of Back to the Future 2, where he plays an Arcade game and the kids go "Oh he has to use his hands, like a baby game" or something like that.

      I'm reminded of that line so often in modern arcades.
      What with DDR, and the bike/ski/tank games with a full-size controller. It makes old games with merely a jotstick (and 3 or less buttons to boot...) seem so tame by comparison.

  • You're expecting me to believe some random kid said "The concept of a power-up hadn't been invented yet." The Tetris one looks totally fake.
    • Nope, I'd have to say, having dealt with kids this age before, that they are surprising clever and funny--almost insufferably so, in fact, especially when they keep running off at the mouth without really knowing what they're talking about. The Tetris section is a case in point. They are both so verbally acute and so out of touch with the game that the results are pretty hilarious.

      I'm sure my friends and I talked like this at that age. I'd probably wanna smack me upside my head.
  • because adults only like classic games because of the nostalgic factor?
  • My 8 yr old kid kid was pestering me all the time about buying a Playstation, so I put the SNES emulator on his pc. He's ver content with that.
    I like to play Bust A Move on the SNES, it's pretty addictive.
  • I really mean that, are they very social out going kids? Or do they sit home playing games as soon as school's over till 2AM?

    I would imagine the average child being very bored with those games. They're probably the kids that are occasional gamers. Find the kid's that sit home all day and play video games and they'd be much better at these classics. With different views on them too.
  • Some of those old "classics", just did not stand the test of time. My opinion is, that a whole lot of them have serious problems. They just didn't age well.

    For example, take Pac-Man. Same Maze, every time. Very repetitive. (Ms. Pac-Man has aged much more gracefully.)

    Zelda 1:VERY annoying gameplay. The fact that the sword goes straight out, and the controls are very blocky almost make it unplayable.

    On the other hand, a few games have stood the test of time IMO. Bubble Bobble, Wonder Boy in Monster Land, G
  • The premise of this article is like taking a turn of the century steam-powered buggy and comparing it to a modern luxury car like a Mercedes E-class or something. OF COURSE the 100 year old buggy with it's 12 horsepower motor, 40 MPH top speed, wooden spoke wheels that jar every bone of your body, unreliable boiler that craps out every few hours (etc.) is going to seem completely worthless and outdated to anyone that's driven a modern vehicle. But that doesn't mean that the steam-powered buggy wasn't a re
  • Yeah, it does [codepuppies.com]. Pong even has it own Google category [google.com]!

    [...] It goes through it. I don't even think that thing in the middle is a net.

    Oh.... he didn't mean the internet... my mistake.
  • My 4 year old enjoys playing arcade classics and SNES games (via MAME and SNES9x) more than most new console games. Sure, he loves the eye candy in games like "Super Mario Sunshine", but he finds games like "Wizard of Wor", "Donkey Kong" and "XMen vs Capcom" more fun.

    Many (most?) times games with simple rules are much more enjoyable than games with complex rules that require joysticks with 20 buttons.

  • I recall that snarky comments and intellectual sarcasm were de rigeur in my crowd back in the day. Probably a previous poster was right when he said these kids were edited, but I've heard eleven year olds have similar conversations without benefit of editing.

    The lava lamp comment was hilarious.

  • I've wasted a lot of time tricking out my PC to play the latest and greatest 3D frag fests, city builders, fleet commanders, moody adventures, etc. And I've wasted even more time finding emulators, old cartridges, and 5.25" floppy disks to revive the old games I used to adore growing up.

    Problem is nostalgia colors the view of the past. Those old games just don't play like the current ones, and not even nostalgia improves the clunky graphics, primitive gameplay, limited options. Not even MULE was as muc
    • HERITIC!
      BLASPHEMRE!

      MULE ROCKS!!!

      lol.. i d/led a C64 Emulator a few months ago when someone mentioned MULE, i still enjoyed playing it, but i didnt find it as challenging, knowing that i was beating a computer of ya kilohertz wasnt as much fun as beating a computer of so many gigahertz.
      • Yeah, Mule was an all-time classic...a really original and addictive game. Too many games today lack such originality, instead falling into the same molds (first person shooter, real-time strategy, etc.). Those old ground-breaking games were on the edge, experimenting with new ideas and goals. Sometimes they worked, like Mule. Sometimes they failed (ET?).
        • Alas, I never grew up with MULE, and unfortunately, it's kind of hard for 2 or 3 people to pick up and play...we tried it 4 player on a Dreamcast NES emulator, and there just wasn't enough explanation of what was going on, what we should try to do.

          I guess games back then were either simple pick up and play, or you were expected to read the instruction manual.
  • My father-in-law and I fired up my old Atari 2600 a few months back. First of all an Atari 2600 on a 36" Trinitron just seemed wrong in its own right, but that didn't stop us.

    After a couple of bouts with of Combat covering tanks, planes, and Zepplin vs planes the kids were getting really interested (6 year old nephew was there to). It didn't take long to get the kids hooked on Circus, they loved the how the little guy kicked his feet in the air after he hit the ground. They found my Spiderman cart. Spi
    • Yeah, Diddy Kong Racing is such a good game...not quite as good a Kart racer as Mario Kart 64, but with decent Karts, planes, hovercraft, decent graphics, a terrific "quest" mode with great boss races, non-random and stackable powerups...the only problem is that sometimes races can be decided in the first quarter of the first lap.
    • That's pretty funny, because I used to be the same way with my dad. I'm 23 now, but I would sit there and watch him play games all the time. I don't know if I made the "this is boring" comments, but I probably did. I think I was pretty annoying, I don't know how he put up with me. But we did play a lot of adventure games together and such, but he wouldnt really wait too long for me to finish up reading stuff, so concequently, when reading video game text on the screen I power through it faster then a lot of
  • Throwing E.T. into a mix of classic games is cruel and unusual punishment for these kids.

    Also, I think they went too far back in time. It would be more interesting to see how they react to classics such as DOOM or Duke Nukem 3D, since (odd as it may seem) I'm sure there are plenty of teens out there who've never played either title. I believe they'd be able to recognize how the elements present in those games shaped the games the play today.

    And is tetris really that old that these kids didn't know

  • The main draws of older games for people that enjoy them are familiarity and nostalgia. There's none of that for young kids. How many Slashdot readers born after the '50s regularly watch Mr. Ed or I Love Lucy? While there are exceptions for amazing works in every medium, old technology generally doesn't appeal to younger people, particularly when the technology is dated or limited. (For instance, black-and-white movies tend not to appeal to people who weren't raised on them.)

    Personally, I'm a member of

    • I suspect a lot of young people watch Mr. Ed and I Love Lucy. Mostly because they're growing up with it even more than people of the generation it originally aired during. I know those old shows were one of the few non news, soap opera, or game show related things that were on quite a bit during the time shortly after school had gotten out. I'd be surprised if many people since its initial airing hadn't grown up with, say, the brady bunch.
  • I'm having a tought time deciding if this is all out fake, or just staged. Like the kids finishing eachother punch lines sounds like something someone would just make up out of thier own head, but one kid's partial AYB reference makes me think there may have been actual kids there. Scripts maybe?
  • How funny.. on the main page:

    Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday October 16, @02:10PM
    vb4hire writes "What if you took today's "3D Grand Theft Auto" playing 12 yr olds, and put them in front of the classic games of the 70s and 80s?? Electronic Gaming Monthly has a hilarious article where the author has done just that. "(Pong) It takes this whole console just to do Pong?" "(Mattell Football) EGM: It's one of the first great portable games. Brian: I thought it was Run Away From the Dots." "(Tetris) Which button
  • ...what they think the game "Jet Set Willy" is about :)

    Rus
  • My wife and I teach kids at church, and a few months ago we invited them all to a party at our house. We have a GameCube, PS2, N64, SNES, and Atari 2600 and had them all set up so we could easily switch game systems for them to play. When they saw the Atari, their eyes got all wide and they said, "What is that???" I said it was the video game system I had when I was a kid. Forget the GameCube and PS2, those kids loved nothing more than to sit and play Space Invaders on the Atari 2600. And Maze Craze, a
  • It makes you wonder what kids ten years from now are going to be saying about GTA3... "What the hell? You mean I actually have to use a CONTROLLER? You mean I actually have to use my hands?"
  • EGM: Who's that chick Mario is rescuing up there?

    Kirk: It's a hooker.
  • I have a large VCS / 400 computer collection and the kids liked it. One day, I brought the whole mess down for some cleaning nostalga time.

    Most of the games I have on disk have died, so the 400 was cart only... They spent some time playing the 10 or so games that worked. Interesting thing about Star Raiders, they liked this game. One would run the controls, the other the keyboard. The team part let the youngest get into the game without having to deal with coordinates and such.

    The 2600 was a differen

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