Mass effect is 19 years old.

My nephew was telling me about how he dusted off his old console and laughed at how bad the games looked. He was of course talking about his PS3.

One of these days I need to sit him down and subject him to some early 3d games like Battle Arena Toshinden or FFVIII to give him some real pizza-face perspective.

Been playing Twilight Princess on Dusklight android and it's amazing. Can't believe it's 20 years old.

I submit as the most wince-worthy example of 20 year old console game graphics:

I expected to see Zelda Ocarina of Time in the second picture 💀

Fuck

I used some the other day and it felt so much better.

We have manual winders. (We down graded our car on purpose for cheaper repairs)

I prefer winders for the front. No need for key in accessory position, and fine control.

Back is tricky

It's hilarious to me how many people are shitting their beds over the Slate pickup coming with crank windows.

It would be interesting to see a timeline of when certain features became standard. For example, pushing a button to start a car instead of turning a key. That still seems new to me, even though I've driven some cars with that feature that were old enough to be falling apart.

my daily driver is a 2015 wrangler with crank windows. 158k. automatic transmission. only “big” fixes were oil cleaned housing and the latest was last month, radiator broke its seal on bottom. simple swap.

I'm reading this while sitting in a rather new electric Renault Zoë where the windows in the back are manual!

Crap, the time between when the moon landing happened and when I was born (late 80s), is smaller than the gap between 9/11 and today.

And it always will be, by an ever-widening margin.

... I think I gotta lie down

For me anything with 19' in it is a long time ago. It was the time I was a kid, still growing up, and that's seems so long ago.

Yellow hatchback club 💛

I bought a 2014 Swift Sport but the CVT had too much distance and was clearly a time bomb. Moved it on but loved driving a non-monochrome car so much, I ended up with a slightly newer model with a normal torque converter (ZC33S) and still in yellow at 1/6th the distance.

The fit is gaining a lot of popularity as of late

Is it any good in the snow? I think it might be dangerous in the winter due to it being lightweight

Just did a road trip in the same generation jazz, because my 25 year old car shit the bed on the day of departure. Great little car, that is deceptively spacious. Although that 1.3L engine with 3 of us in the car really struggled sometimes, especially on mountain passes.

I blame ford pickup trucks for that. Did you keep getting bigger and the front end keeps getting flatter. Eventually they're going to be so high up you'll be able to run over small trees without noticing.

Back when they cared about aerodynamics.

My truck just turned old enough to drink in the states, I feel like that must be some kind of country music initiation

I learned to drive stick in an e30 BMW. I have a real soft spot for boxy 80s cars.

80s cavalier z24?

I'm not quite sure that's how it works

The wild thing is to go on Google Street view, which feels like a relatively new feature but it was actually been around for a very long time, use the historical images function and go back and look at how old, and small, the cars seem.

Same, I just recently had someone offer me a Buick Lasabre for cheap. I was very excited until they said it was a 2003 😑

Reliable sure, but man did the '00 models look gross. Go back 10-20 years from that ugly thing to these beauties and it would have been a deal.

My experience with such old cars, where their age is starting to make full restoration advisable:

• mechanically reliable and simple to fix (and critical parts are usually available, quality varies)
• everything electrical is shit (and old), you need to go through everything to check the connections, completely rotten through ground wires aren't necessarily visible and will cause endless pain until you find them
• the rust-proofing wasn't great but it was there so usually if they're still alive by now they just need the usual spots where those models rust checked before purchase and/or crash damage thoroughly checked
• crash safety is nonexistent, ABS and ESP aren't that useful if you learned how to drive without, if you rely on ESP, better learn not to
• the fastest affordable cars from the 1980s are slower than family cars from the 2020s, still feels like you're going way faster
• if you buy something predating catalytic converters in your country, be prepared for it to smell atrocious
• carburettors that haven't been tampered with and aren't leaking don't need to be touched unless they malfunction, if they malfunction they usually only need a good scrubbing with diesel then a wash in petrol, replacement of extremely dead gaskets, and the jets usually need a clean, the tiny drill bits for carburettor jets can be used for cleaning if you use the size just below the marked size. Ultrasonic cleaners aren't necessary, replacing all gaskets usually means it's going to leak more than before.
• EFI was shit until the 1990s, avoid it if you can

Get one while you still can, they haven't been going down in price for a long time and may in fact already be going up in price. They're pretty iconic, but not as many on the roads these days.

I daily drive one. I love it to bits but it's been through three engines and gearboxes, four coils, two carburettors, and two distributors in the last 70,000kms and I still have a niggling ignition fault and can't get the mixture quite perfect.

As I've been through all these faults I've slowly been doing more and more of the work myself as I don't trust "specialist" shops to put the time and care into my job to do it right, and as a result the car is a lot better now than when I bought it. But its a lot of work.

In short, buy a 40 year old Japanese car, not a British one!

It's a mk2 Golf, if you want a cooler one - there's a Cross Country variant that's a lifted 4x4, or if you're super lucky - get a Rallye version, it's a homologation special

Keep in mind it is a death trap due to the weak frame

What government mandated surveillance equipment are you referring to?

Honesty the best era for cars is around 2003-2016 depending on the manufacturer. The older ones from around 2008 or so are especially good.

Now they cost 4 times as much

Pricing on cars with similar features and performance have been going up slower than general inflation, but as you mention they keep increasing the features/performance of the base models.

When I was really getting into cars in the 90's, it seemed like the base models of economy brands were pretty barebones. But over time what previously was optional became standard: air conditioning, automatic transmission, power locks/windows, floor mats, a decent car stereo, cruise control, etc.

And the things that used to differentiate luxury brands/models just became standard over time: traction control, good acceleration/handling, clear coat over the paint, rust resistance. In the 90's, it was still possible to buy a vehicle that took more than 10 seconds to accelerate to 60mph (~100km/h).

And of course, a bunch of safety stuff became standard in large part because of regulation: airbags, anti-lock brakes, crumple zones, backup cameras. And fuel efficiency has gotten much better on the engineering side, for any given level of performance and vehicle weight. Emissions have similarly improved by regulation.

So cars have gotten so much better, while basically getting more expensive slightly slower than general inflation. So it's hard to compare apples to apples between decades.

The swimming pools...? Did I miss a scandal or something?

I have seen Honda motors that will continue kicking well into 400,000 miles

I think car manufacturers are mildly screwed as the old cars are way overbuilt