20 year old video game in my head:
20 year old video game in reality:
Mass effect is 19 years old.
No it isn’t. Can’t be more than 5 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.
The PS3 is of that era where there was huge hype at the time about how realistic the graphics were (deservedly, to be fair) but when you look at it historically the shortcomings are all too clear, and it’s almost comical.
Games on older consoles couldn’t gun for realism the same way, and so they ironically look better now in retrospect because they just come across as having a particular style of their own.
Even on consoles like the ps1 the games that chased “cutting edge” graphics look so much worse than games that had distinct art styles.
True. There’s always that subset and it kinda looks good, but only for a moment in time.
Some of them did go for realism.
Persian Gulf Inferno was almost banned for being too realistic…
This shit was on the index in Germany for “inciting violence in players” 😅
The first 3D game I ever played looked like this:
3d monster maze calling in.
Such a good game and in 16k of RAM
I will say that with a handful of exceptions the PS3 generally looks worse than the 360, for example Infamous and MGS4 still hold up well enough but Red Dead Redemption does look a good bit rougher on the PS3.
early 3d
Show him Jumping Flash! and see if he can even make sense of it.
I vote you include sonic 3-d. That game makes me throw up with how they made the 3d effect.
Though retro is so popular that lots of modern games still look like the 90s…
Been playing Twilight Princess on Dusklight android and it’s amazing. Can’t believe it’s 20 years old.
I expected to see Zelda Ocarina of Time in the second picture 💀
I submit as the most wince-worthy example of 20 year old console game graphics:
Fuck
I still consider electric windows to be futuristic show-off fluffery, despite not having actually seen manual winders in a few years.
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
Electric windows go really poorly with that other pair of modern features, turney-offey-when-you-stoppey-engine (that’s the technical name) and button-make-engine-go-not-turney-key.
I was in a car recently where I forgot to close the sunroof, and there didn’t seem to be a way to close the sunroof without re-starting the engine.
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 car is a 2023 and has a turn-key ignition, so pushbutton ignition wasn’t completely standard yet at that point.
Edit: Clarity
Yeah, it’s a gradual process. I’m a bit surprised that in 2023 it wasn’t yet universal. I’m just saying that that feature probably first appeared between 2000 and 2010, so maybe even a quarter century ago, but it still seems new.
It’s hilarious to me how many people are shitting their beds over the Slate pickup coming with crank windows.
All my homies hate repairing window regulators
Done it on a '04 Subaru, absolute pain in the ass that needs two people. Meanwhile the cranks on my '95 Mazda continue to function completely fine.
I’ve never once had to repair power windows in the 20 some years I’ve owned cars.
lucky so and so. every fuckin car, from fuckers bouncing off the car while it’s parked.
i’m a car wreck magnet. of the 20ish car “accidents” i’ve been in, i was in the passenger seat eating lunch for like 15 of them (you lose track after like number seven) i’m not the best data point
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!
I understand now, when my dad said, “I don’t know, they all look alike to me.”
Fact: every year of the 90s was exactly 10 years ago and always will be.
I’m not quite sure that’s how it works
I’m telling you, it is!
Boxy cars looked the best.
Lancia Delta
Citroën AX
Honda CRX
Ford Escort
Postman Pat’s Van
VW Golf gen 1-3
I learned to drive stick in an e30 BMW. I have a real soft spot for boxy 80s cars.
80s cavalier z24?
Third-gen Camaro while we’re at it. And the equivalent Firebird.
That audi design aged like wine
I love the styling cars had circa 2000. This whole “let’s make cars look like futuristic tanks” thing lately is not it
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.
you’ll be able to run over small
treeschildren without noticing.
Back when they cared about aerodynamics.
Wanna feel old? The moon landing was in 1969, that’s 57 years ago from 2026, the halfway year is 1997…
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.
I love my manual 2015 Fit. Over 212k miles and still going strong. I bought it a few months ago. 1 owner before me. Had to put a little work into it but it was all general maintenance stuff (brakes and a bad fuel injector). Not quite 20 years old but still.
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
lightweight cars are fine in the winter. just get snow tires and drive well
source: drove a Tercel in the winter for years, did it later on with a Yaris as well
I dislike heavier cars because they have so much more momentum. hard to change direction with little traction and you run into things with more energy. little cars you can just spin the wheels, find some traction, and go where you’re pointing.
I drove a Tercel through many Canadian winters. It’s lightweight but it’s a 65/35 split, 65% of the weight over the front wheels so it really helps with traction. It did well in the snow.
Yeah, I had a Honda Civic and I think it was similar. Front wheel drive in a lightweight car with the weight over the front wheels makes it easy to drive in slippery conditions. But, it probably also helped that it had manual transmission.
Agree to the other guy next to me. Light cars are no bad in snow. Just wear winter tires. No all season crap.
And actually lighter cars sometimes are even better in the snow. They usually have thinner tires as for example a heavy suv. More pressure on thinner area. More space for snow and walter to flee towards.
Also because of the heavy weight of suvs and such such heavy cars are more likely to slidder. Just imagine a wet floor in a shop. Now imagine yourself as a kid sliding over it and how far you would go. Now imagine the same as an full grown adult - but with the same speed. You will go further. Wayy further.
Also if you have suuuper much snow under your tires - lets say you slided and went off the road into a field that has tons of snow.
Your small car wont weigh down in the snow that much. Making it not sink that much. Wich makes the chance higher that you will be able to recover/drive back to the road by yourself higher.
All around lighter car? Better for winter.
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.
manual 2006 yellow ford focus hatchback, here
I’ve always heard CVTs were a bit of a gamble. The manual was a challenge to find, but the upside was that most people were looking for automatics anyway, so the few manuals I found weren’t getting a ton of clicks. I was originally looking to get a Civic hatchback, but they were too old and there were too many half-baked project cars.
Those Swift hatchbacks are killer! I love Suzukis. My friend in high school had one of those little 90s Vitaras. We would ride to the beach in it to go surfing. So much fun to whip around town in.
My wife and I are both all in on the anti-monochrome club. Our other vehicle is a 2021 Kia Sorento turbo AWD in sapphire blue. The colors compliment each other nicely in the driveway 😂
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 drive a car from the early 2000’s. When I got it I was stoked to finally have a car made in this century. It turns 20 in 2 years 😬
My truck just turned old enough to drink in the states, I feel like that must be some kind of country music initiation
Ha my truck just turned 40!
Lol so did I, decent vintage at least
Cars used to be made to get you somewhere. Now they cost 4 times as much and are full of government-mandated surveillance equipment and random gadgets that are expensive to fix when they break. And they’re twice as heavy.
The only thing that’s gotten better is safety.
I miss when cars were cars
What government mandated surveillance equipment are you referring to?
From 7 July, all new cars and vans sold in the EU must pack a fresh batch of safety features, including infrared cameras that watch the driver’s face.
Exactly what I was referring to. Along with GPS tracking that alerts you if you’re going over the speed limit. Totally won’t be used for anything else, right?
The government mandates all telecommunications to be intercepted and and monitored. Car manufacturers willingly installed celluar modems in their cars for OTA updates and their own data tracking reasons… therefore, the government has surveillance equipment in your car.
Also the EU mandated driver monitoring so you can’t even drive tired anymore (yay for repression), at least let me drive home from work.
Thats mandated in the US aswell, suppose to be implemented by 2030.
Maybe not govt mandated, but used by the governments. New cars have infotainment with GPS trackers, cameras etc. Toyota and Teslas were the worse from a year or two ago for selling your data to companies, especially insurance companies.
A week ago alstate data came out that they paid millions to many apps for your phone to track you like life360, gasbuddy and so on.
Don’t get me started on TVs. Watch gamers nexus on LG TVs. They store 4gb of data including audio, screenshots - even if it’s not connected to the internet. Doctor’s offices, companies or other places that rely on hipa or trade secrets have these TVs sitting around.
Your wifi routers uses beam forming to track you around your house and can be accurate enough to make out complex shapes like faces.
Anyways, I came here to say I have the same generation a4 avant with the 3.2l, I think b7. Just the right loudness exhaust from factory when you floor it and at right rpms it reverberates like a super car because of the vvt.
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.
It’s strange to live in a time where things change so much on the scale of a decade or two. Most of human existence was much more consistent. Multiple generations could come and go without much changing but the seasons.
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.
I remember when they publicly released that and people were freaking out there were pictures of their house and backyard online.
Yeah, it’s wild. If you were going about your day around 1400ish, you were practically doing it the same way as your folks did it around 1100ish, or even 800ish.
Essentially, for the majority of human existence we were hunter gatherers. So no massive cultural or technological changes on the scale of decades or years.
In 20 more years old cars will look like the first picture, because of planned obsolescence.
awhile back i saw a toyota prius hybrid with ‘collector’ plates that are used by classic and antique car owners (and cheapskates that want the cheaper plates in exchange for some use limits).
I want that 40 year old car so bad
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.
I secretly like the fugly biodesign cars from the 1990s and 2000s. Not that many in Europe.
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
I can’t imagine how awful the electronics / digital stuff on modern cars will be in 20ish years. It’s a lot more finicky to begin with and electronics even under the best conditions age poorly; on a vehicle exposed to the elements it’s going to be a nightmare.
Luxury cars from 2006 can be a nightmare (Mercedes brake-by-wire systems) or just fine (Lexus).
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
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