Vintage gaming in now a thing you need to say about 90s video games.
Was talking to a young adult relative the other day, and he was telling me about one of the new Call of Duty games. I haven’t played one in forever, so I mentioned something I thought was neat in World at War or Black Ops 1. And he’s like, “Wow, that’s an old one. I don’t think I was even born yet.”
💀
I like to think I gave my nephew some perspective. About 10 years ago, I gave him one of those combo consoles that played NES, SNES, and Genesis games, and bought him several classic games from each. So for a couple years, he grew up playing the originals of Super Mario Bros., Mario Kart, Sonic, Mortal Kombat, etc. And every time I visited, I whooped his little butt at Mortal Kombat too. I think it made him appreciate it all the more when he eventually got a PS4 and beyond. Someone who starts with a Xbox 360 has no understanding of just how far games have come and no context for what made some of these classic IPs great from the get go, and what it was like to sit next to your friend, sibling, or cousin and play couch co-op together.
P.S. I didnt let him win in Mortal Kombat because he was a complete shit talker. He’d be on a 12 fight lose streak, and manage one KO by the skin of his teeth, and then look me straight in the face, puff up his chest and grunt out “Uh! Yea! Winners never lose!” He simply had to be punished for that arrogance.
He’d be on a 12 fight lose streak, and manage one KO by the skin of his teeth, and then look me straight in the face, puff up his chest and grunt out “Uh! Yea! Winners never lose!”
That’s awesome lol good for him.
I’m caught between wanting my daughter to play a bunch of my old favorites but I’m also recognizing that some of them I only really like because of nostalgia. Like I bought the sonic collection for GCN and played it recently and didn’t really have fun with it tbh. Like the original one, while a great game for its time, is really about memorizing the levels so you don’t run into spikes or enemies at full speed which just doesn’t seem fun.
Or Super Metroid is another favorite that does stand up to the test of time, but I’m playing Hollow Knight and Super Metroid just feels awkward compares to the newer one, even though Hollow Knight only has a melee weapon as the main attack.
GoldenEye is another one. I spent countless hours playing that back in the day, both single player and multiplayer, but even when Perfect Dark came out, I had trouble going back to it, let alone all the other games that advanced console FPS (Halo where they finally figured out a decent control scheme, or CoD with loadouts instead of the scramble to find guns lying on the ground, though I suspect neither of those games invented those mechanics). While I do treasure the GoldenEye time of my life, I don’t think my daughter would gain anything from having to do that herself.
She’s making her own memories on games like Minecraft, Pokemon (as much as adult gamers complained about the lack of depth, she loves Arcerus or whatever it’s called), or Smash Bros.
I do still plan on introducing her to some amazing games, but I’m not sure that list should be essentially my own video game path. Figuring out that list is kinda tricky.
Not saying your approach was wrong btw, just that I’m not sure how to approach it myself.
My thought process wasn’t really even so much about the games themselves as much as the approachability of someone who has never held a controller before. As much as I prefer a dual joystick, shoulder button, and 4 face button controller now. It is a lot less daunting for a new player to have a simpler input schema. NES had a d-pad, 2 face buttons and the the start button and that was it. For a 5/6 year old who never played a video game before, that seems like a good place to start. The modern controlled is much more complicated and also not sized well for little hands. The few times my wife has tried to play a game with me, just controlling the camera while moving is too much for her. I have a 2 year old daughter who is just starting to figure out what a video game is. I’m wanting to start having her play with me, but I don’t think she will be able to use the controlled correctly anytime soon.
Yeah, that also makes sense. My line of thought was more about how returning to old great games might not seem as great after experiencing all the QoL and gameplay improvements that came since, so starting with those ones means they can enjoy them. My daughter is already handling the dual stick controllers well, so I guess is beyond that stage already (though when she was younger I remember her not even understanding that Mario Kart was something she could control and she thought we were picking characters for a movie, especially since the auto-steer and auto-accelerate still give a fighting chance even if you don’t otherwise touch the controller).
beyond good and evil is a classic and i have a copy on there somewhere
My knees crack when I stand up and lately I’m getting weird joint pains in my right elbow and left thumb.
Checks out.
It will be weird in 20 odd years. “Dad has given me his old PS6, it’s a great bookend/paperweight”
It’s too bad Sony revoked everyone’s game licenses in 2030
In 2030 we game through a gamespeaker, that’s a person who learned the layout of game maps and attack patterns of monsters in the before time. You game by asking them questions and describing your actions.
“I like retro games, like Halo 2 and that”
Temp worker at my old job, 2022, verbatim. I will forever be haunted by that phrase.
“Now listen here, you little shit”
Xbox 360 had Call of Duty 2, we are on CoD 36 or something right now, of course Xbox 360 is retro
Tbf CoD 2 was actually CoD 4 lol.
The 360 is as old today as the Nes was when it came out.
1985->2005->2026
Fucking helllll
Pretty sure the NES was brand new when it came out. That’s just how age works.
The 360 is 21 years old today.
The NES was 0 years old when it came out.
Mans over here doing the math and spitting the facts
The person who introduced me to the NES died a long time ago of old age.
My body hurts
nuh-uh
Ok jump off the second step and try and walk back to comment.
Every time I see the name 360 I remember how much of a pussy Microsoft is for calling it’s successor the Xbox One instead of the XXXbox. What a waste
My money was on calling it the Xbox 720.
I remember that I thought it was going to be 720 too. Then they tried to make ‘xbone’ work and we were like no lol
Thanks to XBMC and Team Xecuter my first Xbox definitely was an XXXbox. 😬
Xbox one, you mean the first one. right?

Ah, Xbox One, the third Xbox. I’ve never seen one in the wild and I do not care to.
I still have mine. It’s my splitscreen Halo and Plants vs Zombies coop machine!
:o Since when can you play Plants vs Zombies co-op?
The Xbox 360 release of PvZ is the most feature complete version. It has the zen garden, the mini games, and a co-op mode where you and a friend each control a cursor to go around planting and digging while sharing resources. You can also butter the zombies to buy a little more time. It’s a great deal of fun and I don’t know that any other version has the co-op. I may have my physical copy floating around somewhere but I bought it digitally for my Xbox One since it’s backwards compatible.
You’re shitting me. That sounds like a ton of fun.
I miss Mashed on the original Xbox.
Damn right they are. Probably the last great console generation before modern monetization practices fully took hold.
“Kinect is going to be the future of gaming!” Except this is the only generation that is going to natively support it. But hey, Apple will shrink it down, put it in a phone, and use it to authenticate you. That’s not nearly as fun as using it for dancing and rafting though.
Too late.
Fifa Ultimate Team was already going strong on 360. Started all the way back in 2009, but the insane gambling player packs came a little later.
CS: GO cases technically started during Xbox 360’s life cycle (a little short of 2 years before Xbox One launched), although the game was PC only.
As others have mentioned - Oblivion horse armor DLC was already a thing.
Microsoft first introduced paywalled online functionality with Xbox 360’s Xbox Live subscription.
You could add some more to the list. By this time gaming was already going downhill. What you remember as the ‘last great console generation’ is probably just nostalgia. Although you could make a case that early Xbox 360 days were pretty great.
Xbox Live started with the original Xbox
But it wasn’t strictly paid on the original Xbox, was it? Or am I misremembering?
I am pretty sure my parents had to pay $10/mo or whatever for me to lose all those matches in MechAssault.
We were well into horse armor by this point
It was the start of it, but it wasn’t common practice, at least not towards the beginning of the generation.
It was the first generation for DLC to be more common, but it felt like an addition and not just restoring intentionally cut content.
I do agree that towards the end of the generation, some of the greedier companies started some of their worst practices.
360 era DLC was just more game to tide you over while you waited for the sequel. But then they realised they could cut half the game and sell it as DLC later on. But then they realised they didn’t want to wait for later on and started selling half the game over the counter and half the game from inside the game.
The last console I ever purchased.
What’s the matter? The passage of time wearing you thin?

Man, I totally forgot about that scene.
This is my own personal rule, so therefore I obviously think it’s the most correct definition:
Once a “next-gen” (eg. PS5) console becomes “current gen”, then the previous “current-gen” (eg. PS4) console becomes “last-gen”, and the previous “last-gen” (eg. PS3) console becomes “retro”.
Maybe that whole train stopped when consoles became PCs?
You’re probably not wrong; consoles moving to x86-64 likely was a death knell.
It’s too long to post here as a comment, but I believe that the PS3 stumbling early (price, giant enemy crab etc.) resulted in Sony JP losing control of the Computer Entertainment division to Sony US, and it was that shift that signed console farming’s fate all the way back to before the release of the PS4.
The fact that the whole X/O remapping was forced onto Japan is just one example of this relative loss of power.
I fell the differences between the most recent two generations aren’t enough to warrant a shift in stages.

We’re well past the point where even if a console generation doubles the number of polygons it can process over its predecessor - it will be difficult for us end-users to be able to discern much of a difference.
We will likely get to a point where 4K120Hz may be possible for some titles with AI support in the next generation; but given Sony’s decision to not make discs of future games - they can go fuck themselves.
And with bump/normal mapping, they were able to bake the appearance of 6 million triangles into the texture and wrap it around the 600 triangle model.
Slightly off-topic, but has anyone ever checked if the tri-counts given here are actually correct? The first one, sure, you can count that by hand and it seems to be more or less correct (since we can’t see the backside). The thrid and fourth are too hard too count, so we just have to believe that. The second one though? I don’t see how that can be more than 300 tris or so.
Really only matters much in frame rate and VR anymore.
Dad picked it up after retiring at the end of a long career. Shooting zombies sounded more fun than fishing.
I’m still sad that I sold my xbox360 and special edition PSP
I’ve still got my 360 and PSP. Some shit head broke into my storage unit years ago and stole my modded Xbox tho. I regret convincing my parents to sell the NES tho to buy an Xbox as a kid, wish I still had that one and the games.















