brandonsh

What are you defining as childhood in this case? I started writing a little bit, but ended up breaking up my response into different ages. My memory might be a little fuzzy, but here goes:

In elementary school, some of the most important games I played were X-Wing/TIE Fighter, Wolfenstein 3D, Super Metroid, Mega Man X, and Pokémon Red (at least off the top of my head). I loved getting lost in the different worlds, and Super Metroid in particular was really cool because it seemed like there were so many secrets waiting to be discovered. Pokémon Red launched when I was at pretty much exactly the right age to catch the wave, and I took a lot of pride in grinding out levels for my Pokémon so I could win battles against friends. Ever used a game link cable?

Around middle school, Perfect Dark came out and I basically played it for an entire summer. Practicing against bots and playing co-op multiplayer against them was a lot of fun, and I also ran through the campaign cooperatively a bunch of times with my best friend. Smash Bros Melee was also a great one, and Rogue Leader blew away any previous expectations I had about graphics in video games.

In high school, I got hooked on Phantasy Star Online after borrowing my friend’s Dreamcast for a week or so. I never got a Dreamcast, but I picked up the GameCube version and the broadband adapter so I could play online. By the time I stopped playing, I had a couple memory cards with four characters each. My main character had well over 2,000 hours, and all of them had at least a few hundred. The chase for loot, the grind to level up, and the silliness of playing online (look up PSO symbol chat) captivated me like no other game I had tried to that point.

Oh, I’ve been a uBlock Origin user for years. On the desktop, at least, it’s just neat to see the adblocker sitting idle for once.

Kbin reminds me so much of what I loved about Reddit when I first joined 14 years ago. Is anyone else struck by the complete lack of ads on any of these instances? It’s crazy how quickly almost everything loads.

There’s probably a large percentage of Reddit users that are still getting everything they’re looking for with the official app and what’s left of the site. Quick hits of memes are fun, and I do take some pleasure in correctly guessing the top comments in a thread.

The level of conversation on Kbin/Lemmy reminds me more of what old Reddit used to be like back in the day, and I think I’m okay with that being a smaller community than Reddit at large. I keep reminding myself and others that these communities don’t ever need to be as big as Reddit, they just need to be big enough.