You're in for a fun evening. Let her pick up a peripheral and she might stick with it long enough to actually learn the real thing. That's how Rock Band drums got me playing a real kit.

Playing the crap out of Guitar Hero with my friends ages ago is one of my most cherished memories, your daughter is in for a treat.
It could also serve as a cool way to bridge past and present since Fortnite now has a GH gamemode, made by the original creators of GH and Rockband

Yes. It was a big fish in a small pond when it came out, compared to where indies were at back then. And where indies were back then was a niche. I'd say it's largely been forgotten compared to the most popular indie hits today.

today it's probably less niche than the n64.

A real hidden gem

Only if you teach them. My son is playing casual games on Steam and emulated games.

While my son's friends were talking about new Call of Duty/Fortnite updates. And they're like 8yos.

You could argue the other way around - growing up with decent and non-predatory practices makes you less tolerant of when companies try to extort you because you already know what "good" looks like.

I'm sure the corpos would love nothing more than kids getting exposed to predatory practices from a young age so they grow up feeling those things are acceptable and normal.

Most kids aren't discerning about those kinds of things.

The problem is that kids dont make or have money. Its like burning their hand the first time, they need to attempt to pay for their own lives fully at least once to really understand it. I think its fair to restrict these types of things to mature rated games as a general rule.

My kids didn't see an ad connected to videos until the youngest was about 7 (outside of a movie theater, at least). When they first saw them, they were flabbergasted about what they were or why people would just sit there watching them, and absolutely refuse to put up with them. I'd say they are better off seeing how things could be, so when they see how things are now they recognize how utter shit it is.

yeah the problem is this doesn't line up with the horror stories I've personally witnessed. Sudden, massive credit card charges. The problem can occur when kids aren't spending their own money, they're using their parents', some way some how.

Regardless, kids are already surrounded by ads in every corner of life trying to convince them they need XYZ in exchange for money. I'd rather work to make the kid's environment less consumerist, to give them a vision of how life could be.

Can you elaborate a bit more on that? Most of the games with dlc or microtransaction stuff that I play have it all verified with some sort of online system (steam, mostly). What games are you hacking, and how?

Collared shirts only.

Due to circumstances, I've had to emulate more on phones. You very much can figure out the file structure so long at its Android (and 9 times out of 10 shit is just in the download folder). I swear my wife's iPhone is a little black box, though.

Do yourself a favor and install a FOSS file manager system, if you can / its not too much trouble on your particular phone.

Basicslly every phone OS goes out of their way to make their particular file browsing app batcrap overcomplicated and unintuitive if you want to do anything other than exactly what they want you do do.

Which is usually sync everything on your phone to their cloud and your account.

I am running a sort of jerry rigged, half baked, de goodled android, ... basically I have torn out, replaced or disabled everything I can without root, but left in play store and core g services so i can actually still use it for common apps... done the best I can to lock down everything to its bare minimim privelege set, never use a big ole shared account for anything, everything is a separate, old school email account.

You're in a virtualized container that only exposes some directories, also those directories are mostly hidden from you, also within this container you generally don't have any permissions to them, and also every application completely obfuscates it's folder access via some file access API.

It's crazy to me how hard consumers got fucked right from the start on phone software and how normalized we are to it.

I haven’t got a fucking clue how to do it with phones.

In a certain way, probably me neither. I use ls, df, md5sum, cp, mv, rsync, tar, gzip, gpg, vim, touch and mkdir in Termux (terminal emulator for Android). For example, say I am replacing MP3 for FLAC. I really like to keep the timestamps of when I added the specific song, but I can't find any better way than touch -r oldfile.mp3 newfile.flac

But I also use FX File explorer for certain tasks, as it thankfully keeps timestamps. I absolutely hate how moving photos in Google Photos updates the modified timestamp to the date of when the file was moved. Why?
And I also have an ancient version of ES File explorer, version 4.0.2.3. Before it enshittified.

But I am not sure whatever that is installable from within the device, or it's old enough to require adb install --bypass-low-target-sdk-block app.apk like some other old apps I use.

Anyway, I have no idea what's going on with iPhones and files, or whether that's a non-existent concept there.

With android the default file thing is integrated with cloud. The version of files that was local only like a real operating system is in there somewhere but not something a user can access on demand. So it's literally not 'in here somewhere' anymore.

I had to find a third party tool on f.droid.

Yeah the nerds usually find themselves in very powerful social circles if they survive school. Circles of emotionally mature experts with strong careers.

You're assuming they'll be hired and promoted by emotionally mature people.

4 CDs of text to be read!! Though I'll gladly replay the 2 CDs of Chrono Cross for the beautiful graphics, music and characters.

I mean, as a 90s kid, and tech dork... yeah, I largely did drop TV almost entirely, in favor of console and pc gaming, and exploring the early public internet on a 56k modem.

I would imagine most tech dorks of the era did as well?

Like, as soon as I learned how to block ads on the internet, then later on youtube, as well as uh, obtain audio visual media without cost... I did that regularly, never looked back, began to actually not be able to stand TV due to ads everywhere all the time.

And yep, I am still calling anyone who watches ads for anything, anyone who buys into incredibly exploitative business models that waste your time, money, or both, yep, I've been calling them idiot consumer zombies since the 90s, consistently.

You are right that there are more non bs indie games now. That is great! That is good.

Are more games more diverse now?

Yes! Also good.

... But I've had basically the same opinions on all this since the 90s, I am not rembering an idealized past, I am one of the nerds thats been this way the whole damn time.

They call Gen Z the digital native generation, but this omits the ubernerd Millenials such as myself (and others from other generations) who forged the way, who were early adopters from a young age, who were digital visionaries that forged the path before the ecosystems got to be more user friendly, more accessible, more mainstream.

Like uh, without potentially doxxing myself, of those indie games you list?

Yeah, I know a few people on one of those game's dev teams, personally, met them online when I was first like like 13, back when multiplayer games had server browsers with private custom servers, some of those also had their own websites and forums, all we had for voice comms was ventrilo... I met these people way back, have regularly voice chatted and gamed with them for... 20 years?

I myself have been modding (as in making mods) for that long as well, I literally taught myself how to code so that I could do it, before I got out of high school, before any high school offered coding classes, before Adobe bought out Macromedia, and flash games on Newgrounds were all the rage.

Not to try to gatekeep nerddom with some kind of official checklist you have to measure up against, but I think you are considerably underestimating the potential nerdiness of a lot of really dedicated nerds from that era, and thus writing them off as 'old men yelling at clouds'... when we've been yelling at those same clouds since we were kids, then we went on to actually implement the changes we deemed necessary, as best as we could when up against the corporate and financial behemoths constructed by Boomers.

Ive heard of the financial exploitation and pedo controversy but what is the slavery controversy for roblox?

The simplicity of the mini games make Rhythm Heaven easy to understand, mostly pushing A or B with proper timing. Mario 64 by contrast they're just excited to find butterflies or make it to a door, moving and jumping at the same time is more hand eye coordination than my 3yo has atm.