Yeah, but...

Obligatory
- suburban hell
  stroads
  
  Lack of trees as well

[off topic?]
Just read an interview with the young actors from 'Stranger Things.' They said that one of the craziest 1980s thing they did was get on bikes and just ride around town, unsupervised. One said he looks around now, and never sees kids just riding bikes.
- We even did that without maps. If we got lost, we just rode around until we recognized something familiar.
  
  I've noticed with my kids I have to know where they are basically at all times. Leave school, go to friends house, I get notified. On weekends if they go from one house to the other, I need to know.
  When I was a kid, I would get up and on my bike around 7-8am, would not be back until dark at least, and just go... anywhere? Ride 10 miles across the whole town, through construction, to the creek or up the big ass hill a little outside of town? Sure. And the wild thing about this is that it was completely normal.
- I was born in 1993 and I did that with my neighborhood friends too.
  
  I posted because I have seen it go from expecting a bike rider to be a kid to expecting them to be an older adult. But I guess it's different depending on where you live.
  
  Back in 1993 I used to ride my bicycle on the highway that had a 55 mph speed limit.
  It was so far out in the country though, that there were only about 4 cars per hour.
  I was 10 years old.
- I see kids doing that in my neighborhood all the time. There's some that go with poles down to fish in a nearby creek. It all depends on where you live.
  
  Hell I was born in the mid to late 00s and i grew up in the 2010s, but I still did this, we did have dialup internet (i lived and still live in the middle of nowhere, but now we get satellite internet) and I distinctly remember the time we went with my sis and some friends and a fucking massive storm appeared, I thought we were gonna die lol, I think I was like 10 or 11 at that time
  Yes I am an European, specifically one of the eastern kind
- True, I rode all over the place when I was a kid. We let my daughter ride everywhere she wanted within our (very large) subdivision, but it's semi-rural and the entrances are both country roads that cars hurtle down, so we didn't feel safe letting her down those. When I was a kid, I lived in town, so it was different. Maybe kids in town aren't like that anymore though.
  
  The problem is that there isnt really anywhere for kids to hangout any more. Playgrounds are for small kids, but even just biking to the library is completely out of the question for most middle schoolers/early teens who dont have a car. There's no malls, few small public parks, no arcades, small local dinners/ice cream joints, or any other "third places"that aren't just school or home. We, as a society, have spent the past 40 years destroying the concept of a public space and are now shocked that we dont see kids hanging out in non-existent spaces.
  
  When I was a kid in the 90s, we biked all over. Loved going 5 miles down the highway to the surplus store. It wasn't a busy highway though and had a big shoulder.
- I'm squarely gen-z and I did that all the time in the 2000s and 2010s. I was also lucky enough to grow up in a less car dependent city with good cycling infrastructure which helped a lot. Seeing how the incidence of pedestrian and cyclist deaths due to car collisions has steadily risen over these past decades (accounting for more deaths than from both drugs and thugs combined mind you), I'd also argue that kids don't do that anymore because it's now a lot less safe to exist outside if you're not in a car. Not every problem can be blamed on that damn phone.
  
  Not an expert, but it sounds like a vicious cycle. More car vs. bike accidents means fewer bikes on the road means drivers don't look out for bikes which causes more accidents.
  And no, I'm not telling you to go out and ride until you get hit to raise awareness.

That was the thing about old games, they weren't worried about being difficult sometimes. Gamers were happy to get a challenge.
- The old old games - the arcade games - were made difficult on purpose to farm coins for continues, in fact. Then with video games, publishers gradually started flipping it over to encourage players to complete their games and buy new ones
  
  Yeah I was never into arcade games as a kid. I realized right away that they were made to be difficult for that reason, so it felt like they were not worth it.
  But games at home, at my commodore 64 or Amiga, were often difficult too. There was often no tutorials even. You just started playing and figured things out. I remember feeling like I had all the time in the world back then. As an adult, I often feel my time is limited and I should be doing something useful with it.
  
  The real scams were games with countdown timers that went down constantly unless you were able to get a lucky object. Notably, Gauntlet. You had to keep putting in quarters or you would die even if you were really good.
  
  Kinda. Publishers often found arcade difficulty spikes useful in home console games because it would mask how little content there was. Super Mario Bros could be beaten in an hour or two by most people if the lives system didn't send you all the way back to the beginning of the game when you ran out.
  
  Making the game harder also made a smaller game last longer. If you remove the difficulty factor of lots of most old games, either by tweaking it or mastering it, then it becomes possible to beat the game in a matter of minutes.
  
  Dragon Slayer.
- Gamers these days!
- I meannnn I'm old, but easy games like Kirby were such a treat, it's no surprise things went the way they did.
- I don’t know, but perhaps in america, in addition to the original consoles from Nintendo, no-name consoles were sold?
  
  In post-USSR countries, those were definitely more prevalent. I had one of the "off brand" consoles and a bunch of cartridges, some without casing, even. Also had that light gun thing that you could point at a TV screen for the duck hunt game
- That is the most boomer shit I have ever heard. Games were difficult because the rental market was huge.
  
  Arcade games were difficult because they were the microtransactions of the day, and console games were difficult because that's how you made a simple game last longer.
  
  Game developers didn't profit from rents.

I spent an entire summer playing Atari. An entire month beating Pac-Man. I leave my kids alone.
- A big difference between then and now is the portable nature and ubiquity of the devices.
  Back then you didn't take your NES to bed and keep playing it, or play Sega on the toilet, or Atari at the dinner table.
  The devices are in every space of our lives now.
  
  The GameBoy is from 1989 and could do all of those things.
  
  Maybe you are forgetting about the Sega Genesis Nomad and the fact that the gameboy was effectively a handheld NES?
  TBF were talking about the 90s but still
- I think its a bit different with the internet on all devices now, games and tv and stuff like that is fine after the age of 3 or so but those micro-transaction addictive games and social media is something else you have to keep an eye on

I think it was easier to make this jump if you were small. Maybe it's an illusion, but it felt that way
- Believe, technically speaking, it merely increased his size and hitbox vertically. Realistically speaking whatever helped your developing brain overcome it is true even if it isn't technically so because what matters is you did it 💪.
  
  Incredible. I could have sworn

You literally run across the first two and jump, wtf 😂
- I take it you weren't 10 years old in 1987.
- Pipe in the way though
  
  You run from the exact position Mario is standing in the pic
- you just walk over it?
  
  Run then jump at the second edge

The problem is not so much the total time spent on the device but more the time spent per content nowadays. There is a certain value in spending 3 days to accomplish something whereas imo no value in spending 5 seconds per content.

Use the pipe, Luke!
- Yeah .... don't needle around carefully jumping onto one block then spend half an hour positioning yourself right to the edge to give yourself enough room to run and jump ... You have to learn to make a full on run over the pipe, just touch the far edge, land on the far block still running at full speed and time your jump at the last possible moment .... It's a skill that takes months to achieve ... I know because I spent an entire summer one year doing that.

I played a playstation on a similar tv. No one thought about it at the time, but such a screen is not suitable for looking at at close range.
- Oh I was certainly reminded to sit far away in a well lit living room. Which made it so fun when we got to play to close like in the picture

Remember how I played Bounty Bob without knowing that if you jumped straight up, ju could start a side-jump any time you were in the air (by wiggling left or right), making livel 23 finishable...
That one tile you had to walk on, I spent so much time trying to jump in the craziest patterns to get to it with no success of course 😅
- I played probably around 100 hours of "a boy and his blob" on the gameboy. Never finished it, never understood it, couldn't read english (not that it would've helped but i didn't know) never even finished the first level if it even has levels.
  
  It has the city and the planet of Blobalonia. That was a hard game even if you knew what the heck you were supposed to do to advance.

"Y'all kids today spend too much time on devices."
Yeah, because that device literally gives us access to all the information the entire human race has amassed. Not only that, but we also have our work and/or school tied into it, so for those things we literally need to be on it at least part of the time. Instead of hoarding expensive books that you've never read to justify having an oversized McMansion with a "library", we access our information as needed.

I honesty think “screen-time” is overblown. Screens are tools and while creative old-fashioned play is very important, screens play an important role, too.
I’ve got two kids, 4 and 7. I differentiate between games (as long as they are age-appropriate or maybe a little older for them), “good-tv” (age appropriate educational shows or shows with “lessons” I.e Curious George, Daniel Tiger, Odd Squad, etc), “great-tv” (purely educational shows like Nova or How It’s Made…my oldest loves both), and “junk food tv” (SpongeBob, Gumball, etc).
They all have their place and none are “bad” as long as moderation is applied and content is age-appropriate.
- Kids definitely have better options these days. There was basically a world of shit for kids older than Sesame Street age when I was growing up in the 80s. Every Saturday morning show was an extended toy commercial in between toy commercials.
  
  The real ironic thing is, the doctors that are publishing papers saying screentime is bad are the same people who plopped us in front of Nintendo and Nickelodeon because stranger danger (and that, even more ironically, because of prime time news magazines like Dateline and 20/20 and Current Affair)).
  Shocker, stranger danger kids are using the TV more in raising their kids.