Lol well he is decently gonna love battltoads.

I'm not sure why we bother with age ratings. Halo 3 is an M rated game. Yet this kid has been playing it (most probably) since he was about 9.

Games aren't rated by anyone but the companies themselves. Everything comes down to Parental Guidance being suggested.

Payback, don't forget there are other countries in the world where the rating is organized in a different (more serious, lawfully binding) way.

A lot of older games like this are very unforgiving. Unforgiving games appeal to a smaller demographic, though, so in order for the industry to grow, they've had to ease up.

One thing I notice when I go back and play NES ROMs is that a lot of the games were hard because the controls sucked. Not the physical controller, mind you, but the responsiveness of the game to your input. Some games were even based on this crazy idea that mashing a button ("Press X to not die!") was entertaining.

3 lives!?
Check this out Dylan...
up up down down left right left right B A select start

No kidding, I was thinking the same thing when he mentioned that.

Goddam it, when I was his age we had to scroll up hill both ways! With our thumbs!! And it would snow outside!!! Assuming we HAD electricity!!!! And any cats we laughed at we had to FEED!!!!! ...and we didn't have those fancy "1"'s when we yelled...!! *waves cane*

Get off my l4wn!!

[redacted]

"Get off my lawn!"

[redacted]

Even the Angry Video Game nerd thinks Battletoads is way too freaking hard.

>> ^conan:
Payback, don't forget there are other countries in the world where the rating is organized in a different (more serious, lawfully binding) way.


Oh I don't, but including them would be out of context, much like gun control laws outside of the States. This is a North-American video series, aimed at North Americans.

I don't like the concept of "Project D"

My generation is basically one of the last to realize the gap between where we've come from, and where we're going. Being born in 89, I grew up with PSX, N64, genesis, ect. but we all knew about the previous consoles, and knew about where it came from.

You can't take someone who has no idea about how games used to be made, or played, and expect them to prefer it to a game that's been hyped out the wazoo, and had years spent on it making it look better.
He asks about if he likes the music..well, being as all the kid has ever heard prior to this in video games is fully orchestrated, you can basically expect the same answer for EVERY game you give him from a system made before the 90s. Same goes for graphics, it's the technology they had at the time, and that's the best they could do with it, they didn't spend 2-3 years making a game, they were fired out once a year, 6 months if the team was good enough.

It's like taking someone who has only ever eaten steak their entire life, then make them hamburger helper and ask them which they like better. It's going to be the same answer every time with this kid.

>> ^Shepppard:
I don't like the concept of "Project D"
My generation is basically one of the last to realize the gap between where we've come from, and where we're going. Being born in 89, I grew up with PSX, N64, genesis, ect. but we all knew about the previous consoles, and knew about where it came from.

Kid, I don't mean to sound like a cranky old fart and I kinda see what you're saying, but if you missed the 80's, you don't even know. There were these places called Ar-cades that we used to go to. They were just these whole rooms full of games. You put a token in and then you got to play the game for a bit.

It was nuts.

>> ^Shpydir:
>> ^Shepppard:
I don't like the concept of "Project D"
My generation is basically one of the last to realize the gap between where we've come from, and where we're going. Being born in 89, I grew up with PSX, N64, genesis, ect. but we all knew about the previous consoles, and knew about where it came from.
Kid, I don't mean to sound like a cranky old fart and I kinda see what you're saying, but if you missed the 80's, you don't even know. There were these places called Ar-cades that we used to go to. They were just these whole rooms full of games. You put a token in and then you got to play the game for a bit.
It was nuts.


Well, to be fair, the arcade scene persisted very much into the 90's. Street Fighter 2 was not released until 1991, for instance. In Japan video arcades are still popular. But if you were born in 1989 in the US then you definitely missed a big part of gaming history. I was born in 1981 and I still too young to experience the real start of a gaming culture. I don't know when exactly that was, but Pac Man was released in 1980. Pong was back in 1972 so some old farts could claim that to understand the history of gaming you would need to be alive back then, but I'm skeptical of that.

I played the Atari but I never really liked it. It wasn't until the Nintendo with games like Final Fantasy (1990) that I was drawn into gaming. PC games like King's Quest, Hero's Quest, Sim City (1990), Civilization (1991), and Doom (1993) played just as big a role.

Having spent a fair amount of time hanging out in arcades, I can safely say that I don't miss it at all. I find the idea kind of sleazy, actually -- make children give up their money as fast and reliably as possible, in an environment with minimal parental supervision. PC or console games are so much better because they're not trying to quickly kill you so that you need to put in another quarter. They also have persistence, so you can build your character over many sessions. I've seen some clever Japanese arcade games that accomplish this by synergizing with RFID enabled collectible card games, though.

>> ^Shpydir:
>> ^Shepppard:
I don't like the concept of "Project D"
My generation is basically one of the last to realize the gap between where we've come from, and where we're going. Being born in 89, I grew up with PSX, N64, genesis, ect. but we all knew about the previous consoles, and knew about where it came from.
Kid, I don't mean to sound like a cranky old fart and I kinda see what you're saying, but if you missed the 80's, you don't even know. There were these places called Ar-cades that we used to go to. They were just these whole rooms full of games. You put a token in and then you got to play the game for a bit.
It was nuts.


Please, don't call me kid. And you missed my point. I know the roots of video games, my generation does, We're not the generation that grew up into what we have now, and I can still appreciate where the industry started and came from.

This kid..not only does he probably not even care, but knows nothing about what came before a Ps2 most likely. Ask anybody around age 10 these days, and they don't even know what an atari, or NES are. You won't get someone to appreciate something if they have no interest in it, and that's what they seem to be trying to do with this project D thing.

I'm one of the few who actually beat Bionic Commando on the NES. You know, the game that was intensely impossible to get through on certain levels? The one with no save feature? The one that took nearly six hours to play through? Yeah, that one.

But at that time, games like The Legend of Zelda, Mike Tyson's Punch Out, and Contra, were the fun games. Before that time, for computer games, was ones like Empire, Wing Commander, Space Quest, and even Zork. And before those games: Pong. While the graphics of games have improved tremdously, the game play has remained a constant.

Castlevania 2, Rescue the Embassy, Russian Attack, Jackal, JAWS, and others, were enjoyable games for their day. COD, WoW, EQ, and others, that are popular now, will soon be retired in favoror of newer, more graphic intensive games in 5-10 years.

>> ^Deano:
I'm not sure why we bother with age ratings. Halo 3 is an M rated game. Yet this kid has been playing it (most probably) since he was about 9.


I was thinking the same thing. I have reservations about my 11-year old playing T rated games.

I realize this is probably all nostalgia talking, but I think the robots we Europeans got in Probotector (what the PAL version of Contra was called) were sooooo much cooler then these bare-chested Arnold types.

These sorts of games existed well into the 2000s. They just became handheld GameBoy/GameBoy Advance games. In a portable environment I prefer them.

I have a pretty comprehensive console emulator interface set up on my TV that we use a lot when guests come over. The young ones never had much trouble with the older NES/SNES games. What really threw them off were the Atari 2600 games. Make this kid play Yars Revenge or something.

Anyone else find the guys' questions annoying?

My 9 year old nephew won't play any kind of first person shooter with a mouse and keyboard. Go figure.

Once someone gets used to one type of controller for FPS's they swear off the other. I have a friend who swears she's better at Left4Dead on the 360 controller when I know just about *anyone* will do better with a mouse and keyboard in that game. It's just once someone gets used to one type the other way suddenly feels off.

And yes the questions where kind of annoying in a "Hey crowd, wait till you hear his response to THIS one...", kind of way.

What will be great is when the kid has kids of his own, and his own kids will inform him how Halo3 and COD4 are for babies, you don't even wear a VR headset or bodysuit.

>> ^ant:
"Get off my lawn!"


Only if I can help. After all it's my lawn too, and they're hurting the roses.

>> ^Shepppard:
>> ^Shpydir:
>> ^Shepppard:
...Please, don't call me kid. And you missed my point. I know the roots of video games, my generation does...

Hey now, "kid" was just a term of endearment. I meant nothin' by it.

I got your point, I was just mocking your gravitas by playing the role of the 80's kid. I'm surprised some geezer hasn't come out to show off his Space War cred yet. My point is we really shouldn't ding this kid because he's only played (apparently) Halo and Call of Duty. Right now we're both too young to be doing that. In 50 years, I'll be right with you complaining, "Those kids these days, why back in our day we had to use our thumbs! THUMBS!"

haha shit, battletoads. great vid

Gamers today are seriously spoiled.

They don't even have health boxes on the ground in FPSs any more - you just go hide around a corner for 5 seconds and you regenerate up to full. It would seriously blow a kid's mind that people would take the time to beat games like Super Mario Bros 2 or Bionic Commando. I did it, and the thrill you get from beating a hard game is much better than any of these checkpointed/infinite retries games we have today. (Of course, Contra was so ridiculously hard I only beat it with the Konami Code.)

While I loved Bioshock, I hated how bloody easy it was since you'd just pop out of a resurrection chamber every time you died. I'd get bored during a Big Daddy battle and just keep respawning on him over and over again until he went down... about halfway through I decided to just ignore the chambers entirely and play the game without dying.