Honestly, might be nostalgic for guys, but as a girl who was playing games in this era, it made me feel like I wasn’t a part of the culture, rarely if ever were there ads marketed towards me, but man were there a lot of half naked ladies. Glad we don’t do this as much, but god this caused a lot of younger girls to feel ashamed of playing games “for boys”.
It really sucks looking at the detrimental effect this had on gender ratios in gaming to this day. It's gotten a lot better but it's still not there yet.
Doubt that's going to be enough, I think if you want to make a sexually objectifying 90s magazine ad that appeals to female nerds you're going to have to break out the homoerotic innuendos
People used to bring up Kratos in these discussions but before these new games he seemed far more likely to bite someone's face off than to kiss anyone. There's a difference.
I think there is space for both sexualized and non-sexualized characters, as long as they are treated evenly. This is entertainment, they don't need to be all business serious.
I dread that in trying to be perfectly respectable, the medium might err to the side of prudishness and sexual repression.
After a woman says she doesn't like being sexualized, your response is to not worry because the sexualization of women will continue, but you'll start to sexualize men, too?
I can imagine. I'm glad this is less prevalent now. Seeing it now in middle age makes me go ick. I wished I had been much more aware of this kind of sexism as a boy.
I was a senior in high school at the time and even back then I thought this kind of advertising was crass, gross, and unnecessary. No nostalgia here, just second-hand embarrassment.
Yeah as a boy I didn't like these either. They were sexy but made me feel a little weird. I was young enough not to realize it was targeting only boys, but now that I'm older I think that's why I didn't like them. I wasn't in to sex at the time.
The weird thing is, as a guy, I never even paid attention to the sexualized stuff in games. To me these are like two different brain activities. So, as far as I'm concerned, there was never any point in this kind of marketing. I've never in my life purchased a game because it featured sexy ladies.
It's not really nostalgic for me, TBH. It's actually kind of embarrassing that marketing like this existed and that it worked. I love T&A as much as the next female-loving guy, but ads like this are condescending. But again, they sold units...
There were lots of half-naked men, too. Including in this ad.
Most of them in games were more male fantasy stuff...ripped, shirtless dudes with big weapons. Not really appealing to most women, but checks the "I want to BE him" aspect for lots of guys, lol
No, I was supporting the previous comment. The idea that the ads were mostly about "male fantasy", and probably wouldn't be (positively) nostalgic for most women gamers.
Yeah. Even just around a decade ago I'd explain the demographics shift to more women gamers to clients and they'd not believe it.
Stereotypes stick around for a long time, even when (or maybe especially when) untrue.
It's a shame that "girl gamers" were considered such a rarity when it really seemed like a self-fulfilling prophecy.
"Oh, a game with only male protagonists with activities only primarily associated with boys doesn't have many girls playing it? I guess girls aren't that into games and we should double down on the focus on dudes."
As a result, the market effectively abandoned around half of two generations of a potential continued audience and had a significantly reduced pool of interested labor to make games.
It's a bit frustrating given my love for games that they could likely have advanced even further had it not been an exclusionary industry for as long as it was (though that can be said about pretty much every business vertical in existence too given our generalized collective history of exclusion).
Jokes aside, a lot of devs love watching stuff like speedrunning. It means someone loved their creation enough to minutely analyze it and spend countless hours with it.
(I'm pretty sure there was similar version of this where they guy wasn't in the room and they were just watching the earlier recording of the speedrun but I can't find it now)
I would have conflicted feelings about it if I were the devs, often speed runners even forget or don't even know the story of the game they run lol I imagine it's like spending all day cooking something really nice and your serve it to someone who absolutely loves the dish but mainly because of the plate you served it on, they come back every day to order it only to throw the food away and stare at the plate
Seems more like someone taking a picture of the food, and then leaving without trying it. They still appreciate the food, just not the part that makes it great.
Yeah, I haven't ever met a speedrunner that hadn't played the game casually at least a few times. Just because its a running joke that speedrunners don't care about the story because of the effort taken to skip it to save time doesn't mean speedrunners literally don't care about it. Kingdom Hearts speedrunners are the only ones I have met that can hash out the entirety of that convoluted mess.
Your experience doesn't invalidate mine. I watch speedrun events very often and and runners will say stuff "Im not really sure why he wants to kill us but skips the entire fight with clever use of game mechanics that was the boss fight!". Many of them did play the entire game without speedrunning at first, but many dont.
You're correct. I've watched many live speed runners mention that they only know how to speed run the game because they started playing the game with the intention of speed running it to begin with.
Thanks for confirming, I know it's true but it's funny seeing people downvote my comment as if there was an unspoken rule for speedrunners to experience the game in full before speedrunning
More like someone giving you a lecture about where every ingredient came from, who gathered it and how it found its way into the dish before letting you eat. Just give me the fucking food I don't have time for this nonsense.
a lot of devs love watching stuff like speedrunning
True, but some of them hate it. But with the growing presence of speedrunning friendly features in new titles (looking at you, Supergiant), I think that's becoming less of a problem.
Either way, these "devs watch" reaction videos are fantastic.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't believe ecstacy is actually dehydrating. Dancing at a rave for hours on end without drinking anything is though.
Ehhhhh so this was in 2000. Your standard ecstasy pill (we’re assuming they’re not pipers; these don’t look shiny and they’re not shaped or outpressed) have between 70mg MDMA and 120mg (if they’re absolute fire.)
This would be about 400mg of MDMA total. While that is quite a lot, you’re not going to have a horrible time—I just wouldn’t do it in public because you WILL be a chattering mess. It’ll still feel amazing, though.
Source: oldhead, last time I rolled it was a total of about 450mg but spread out over hours and I was absolutely not in public, just writing naked with my partner)
Oh GOD I fully agree in that case. Rolls nowadays have up to 300-400mg in a single pill (sounds like you already know that, but I’m just saying this for context in case another reader doesn’t)
That’d be like eating a gram or more of Molly at once, and THAT is for sure not safe and not a good time.
AKSHULLY that wasn’t a thing in the 2000s, just marketing hype. Rolls back then had between 70 and 120mg of MDMA, and 120 is a basal amount you want to take if you fully want to get rolling.
Now it’s TOTALLY a thing, tons of rolls have 300-400mg in a single pill now. It’s insanity.
Recently did 400-450 each with my partner in a night but over the course of a couple hours… definitely not something to do in public hahaha. We were naked, quivering piles of hedonism, writhing in bed for hours in absolute insane, well, ecstasy. It’s aptly named, that’s for sure.
For once, got incredible sleep afterwards and felt awesome the next day! Thank you, sleep.
Worse than that, that one website dance something that would test pills found that a huge percentage of the "ecstasy" people took didn't contain MDMA. A surprising amount didn't even contain illegal drugs. Just over the counter speed.
Yah, there were TONS of pipers going around (BZP/TFMPP) when that was legal to buy. I’ve never had one because I could instantly tell when a pill was a piper (shiny, hard, outpress, or shaped.) I could also tell by the taste if I licked it. Headache city apparently.
Curious. When I last looked (quite a while ago) most of the tested pills were MDMA, with many containing caffeine as well. I guess it varies a lot over time.
Dancesafe.org was it! I'm going back over 20 years to the late 90's early 2000's. I can't comment on the state of ecstasy today, I haven't rolled in over 20 years.
The dolphin team is unironically a group of some of the best software engineers I can think of, solving problems outside the scope of basically any standard industry practice for free and getting results
The RPCS3 team who figured out how to emulate the wacky core design of the PS3 are truly mentally unwell and I hope they never get better because the world needs more people like them.
It turns out that, just like fancy graphics, not constantly trying to empty your customers pockets actually represents some kind of economic value. The ironic thing is so many of these old games were literally designed to steal your quarters.
Well, only the arcade versions of games were designed to steal your quarters. The home console versions were much better about not harassing your wallet.
For instance, Gauntlet Legends on its arcade cabinet hardware drained your health at a consistent time based rate. Add more quarters to gain more health. All home console versions abolished this health drain mechanic.
That's mostly true, except for games made specifically harder so that you'd have to rent them multiple times (eg: ActRaiser 2 NTSC-U/C / SNES is much harder than its NTSC-J / SFC counterpart).
Probably some games did after the home rental market got started, but a lot of older games were difficult specifically to extend the experience. Cartridge storage was small, so if it was too easy you'd get through all 10 levels in less than a day and then feel like you hadn't got very much for your money.
Well I guess I am just wondering how more rentals from a video store would benefit the developers financially? I mean I’m sure I could research but surely game studios didn’t get any kind of percentage from the rental places based on how many times a title was rented right?
They didn't want you to rent it multiple times. They wanted you to rent it once, be unable to beat it, but be intrigued enough that you purchased the game from a store. If you could play and beat a game in a single rental, there was little incentive to buy it (so the developers thought, and I imagine had some data to back it up).
There was definitely the occasional tom-foolery with publishers and designers here and there but it was also generally never at the expense of game play.
But is making a game harder to discourage rental and encourge purchasing stealing your quarters? Id argue no. You still get value if you renting the game, and the idea of rentals is really that if you like it then you pay to own it.
The game companies also wanted gamers to call their hotline if they get stuck, where they would charge by the minute to give tips (and they weren't known for their brief calls).
For anyone wondering, this was done on the virtual console version, so the floating point glitch that lets you skip the climbing pole from Bowser in the fire Sea is available.
The A Button Challenge still stands for the console versions.
Pannenkoek does have a few videos documenting stars that can be beaten with No Joystick Allowed strats (these are old and there are more on the secondary UncommentatedPannen channel but I don't see a playlist compiling them). A full run is definitely not possible, but at least some stars are doable.
Oh boy, is the A Button Challenge still ongoing. There is quite a hunt to further reduce the approx. 18 presses to get 120 stars in a full-game TAS, or to find faster and human-viable strategies to avoid these A presses.
It was the style at the time! Lots of CD players had flip up tops, as did the Sega Saturn. I assume it was because the slide out tray mechanism was more expensive and also more fragile.
A friend of mine had one of those. It was super sleek to look at, but the flip top doubling as a wrist rest turned it into a CD grinder after a few years.
So I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time. Now, to take the ferry cost a nickle. And in those days nickles had pictures of bumble bees on them! "Give me 5 bees for a quarter" you'd say.
board game baggies usually have a tiny hole in them, to let the air out when you're packing the game away.
not so great if you're muleing some molly to your weekly game of Wingspan
Those few years between 1992-1998 were as .. game-changing .. for games as probably the two decades that followed. We started it with side scrollers, Dune and Doom and ended it with Diablo II, StarCraft and Half-Life.
For the kids here who haven't experienced Half-Life, you should play Black Mesa. For the retro farts who have played Half-Life, you should also play Black Mesa. It's the Half-Life you couldn't have in 1998 because of the slow hardware. I weeped from feels playing it.
I spent sooooooooo much time on StarCraft and Diablo II. First video game I remember playing was Wolfenstein 3D, then Duke Nukem. Found RTS soon after.
The incredible imaginations that some people had kept me playing the custom games in starcraft for so much longer than the base game ever would have. I can't believe how much time I spent in various rpgs, defenses, and the wild cat-n-mouse modes.
Old fart here. I played Wolfenstein 3d, then played the shit out of Doom and Duke Nukem 3d but missed out on Half life until recently. Knowing the context of the era it came out in, I can totally see how amazing it must have been. Hell, it's still incredibly fun for me in this era.
We're gonna have to rethink definitions at some point. Yes, video games are still a comparatively new medium, but nobody would call a 2010 film a retro film, nevermind books or paintings.
I define "retro" as anything made before an average Army Private was born, so about 19-20 years. By this standard, games released in the early 80's were retro when the current generation of Privates was born, so how do we call that ? I propose the term "paleogaming" for those.
Bro, we lost that fight. I was watching a Youtube video of a guy clearing games from his Steam backlog and introduced one with, "So, many of you watching probably weren't alive when this game came out. Everyone talks about what a classic this is, but I don't think I've met anyone who has actually played this game."
I died a little inside when it turned out he was talking about the first Half-Life.
I understand saying you don't feel like 2010 is retro, but 1998? That's been retro for a long time. You're in a really extreme place in your head when you stick to not calling something that's 25 years old retro.
Not exactly, Maxis was with EA for a long time, both SimCity 3k and SimCity 4 were published under them, and the Sims would have never happened if it weren't for EA.
However you're right that EA (or more specifically, John Riccitiello) did eventually fuck Maxis over. SimCity 2013 got fucked over by always-online drm and tiny cities, while The Sims 4 - which wasn't originally meant to be a mainline Sims game but instead a successor to The Sims Online - got cannibalized and made into The Sims 4 because Riccitiello wanted a new Sims game ASAP.
Why do I ascribe blame to Riccitiello and not EA as a whole? Because EA seems like they've improved since Riccitiello left. That's not saying much, but it honestly seems like the quality of their games has improved since he left the company.
Oh man, the maxis games were the best. I spent a few hours making a windows 98 VM and trying to get streets of sim city to run. I got close but it kept crashing. That and sim copter were my jam as a kid.
It doesn't matter if you are downloading it, what matters is that you'll play it and/or won't get the "Definitive Edition" or whatever is called the crap they are changing for this one.
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