Ever since 1Up.com ran their stories on “What Today’s Kids Think of Yesterday’s Games” (Child’s Play I<\/a> \/ Child’s Play II<\/a>), I’ve been fascinated with the results. I’m not sure why I’m surprised that 9 to 12 year olds had never seen or played Pong before — my 15 and 16 year old neices told me a few years ago that they didn’t know who Mr. T or Ronald Reagan were. I guess when you start getting older you lose track of just how quickly time is passing by.<\/p>\n

While flipping through games I haven’t tried over the weekend, I ran across AMF Bowling for the Xbox. Mason and I grabbed controllers and we gave the game a whirl. Unfortunately for us, the “throwing system” was so complicated that halfway through the game neither one of us were able to knock over a single pin. <\/p>\n

Then, something clicked. I rebooted my Xbox and went into the emulator menu. From there I pulled up the Atari 2600 emulator and launched Bowling (1979). While no one could ever argue that the first game had better graphics (screenshots below), Mason and I had an infinitely better time playing the latter. In fact, the first game, he even managed to beat me! I challenged him to a rematch, of course, and somehow managed to edge the best out of 3 (my Xbox, my rules).<\/p>\n

While graphics are a lot, gameplay is everything. Why can the gaming industry not see what my 4-year-old sees?<\/p>\n

| <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ever since 1Up.com ran their stories on “What Today’s Kids Think of Yesterday’s Games” (Child’s Play I \/ Child’s Play II), I’ve been fascinated with the results. I’m not sure why I’m surprised that 9 to 12 year olds had never seen or played Pong before — my 15 and 16 year old neices told me a few years ago that they didn’t know who Mr. T or Ronald Reagan were. I guess when you start getting older you lose track of just how quickly time is passing by. While flipping through games I haven’t tried over the weekend, I… (read more)<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-382","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/382","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=382"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/382\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=382"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=382"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=382"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}