You should definitely go back, it's so fun to learn about the inscrutable manual pages.
Rather than feeling like I was four, my experience was more like as if I was a kid in the 90s and my Dad was a businessman who brought home Zelda from Japan but it was all in Japanese and I didn't know Japanese lol.
One thing to note about Tunic is that it has really good accessibility options. You can go in and give yourself extra hearts, or you can even turn on invincibility if you are really struggling and need to.get past a tough part sonyou can continue with the.story :)
I have a soft spot for Myst too, so I totally understand this. I own the "big box" PC versions of all the Myst games up until V (Revelations) which are the only big box games I still kept. It was magical to me at the time, Riven especially which I used to play together with my mother so there's fond memories there.
It's great that you can trace your love of music back to that specific game. Go ahead and share! I'm not really a musical person myself and only just started learning piano as my first ever instrument. That's one childhood regret I'm working on fixing :)
I think as adults we're still looking for a game that recaptures that childhood wonder.
One game that comes very close is Tunic, which is a zeldalike with a lot of spirit. I won't spoil it for you or anyone else who may not have played, but it's brilliant and I highly recommend it.
Best enjoyed on a lazy Saturday morning snuggled in a blanket pretending you're nine years old again.
I'd never heard of that game or the associated editor, but it seems fascinating.
I just had a poke around on the site, and it gives me some very good and happy vibes of how websites used to be, and the cosy communities that they hosted where all the regulars knew each other by name. Or by handle rather, since nobody ever uses their real name on the Internet, right? ;) Good times.
The exact same trends go round and round in web design too (and now apps).
At first things were square (because that was all the technology could do) then in the 2000s CSS exploded and everything went colour gradients and rounded corners, just because people could, then that became old-hat and everything went flat and square again, and then rounded came back (but without so many gradients)
The ship was one of the best parts for sure. Once you are competent it feels super liberating how nimbly you can zip around a planet.
The other good parts of that game were progression, and death.
I love that knowledge is the only thing retained between loops - the only currency of value. And I loved the feeling of making new discoveries.
And with death as an expected mechanic, the game doesn't have to put up any guiderails to save you from it. There are no training wheels. You want to go outside without a spacesuit? Bad idea but we'll let you. You want to literally lose your ship so you can never get it back? Sure, go for it. You want to fall into a space anomaly and see what happens? Be our guest.
You're not wrong, but I only came here to try and explain the meme.
Three quarters of a century ago, a different society than ours suggested flying cars as a possibility for the world, and now we make funny pictures about it.
Whether that was at the time objectively right or wrong for them to believe is a whole new topic that I'm not equipped to get into.
It was an imagined future based on boundless optimism that things would keep getting better and better, both technically and socially.
Inventions and discoveries at that time were happening so rapidly it surely felt like some revolutionary new thing was always just around the corner. We'd probably invent some amazing new levitation technology that would let things hover without making any sound, and it would all be powered by individual nuclear generators in every car, because why not right, nuclear is the future!
It was a dream from a time of optimism that never came to pass. The current day meme isn't about literal flying cars, it's about the contrast between this imagined world - no matter how realistic or not - and the reality we actually got.
When the 1950s thought flying cars would be real they didn't mean military VTOLs or expensive and noisy helicopters.
They meant flying cars that are efficient, quiet and affordable. Flying cars that are so ubiquitous they are parked on every driveway in the country. Flying cars where you go to the showroom and test-fly one in your favourite colour, and it only costs as much as an SUV does today.
More importantly, it's not really the car itself that matters for the meme, it's the idea of the society that goes along with it. The imagined future where we have flying cars on every driveway is one where we also have robots doing all the menial labour, one of utopian prosperity, where everyone is educated, happy, and spends their days in fulfilment of personal pursuits.
That's what "flying cars" alludes to, and it's a long way from a society where people have to be warned not to eat a sandwich wrapper.
And the power switch was like KA-JUNK when you pushed it, because it was a big ol' switch that actually physically connected and disconnected the power.
"It's now safe to turn off your computer" went away after we moved to software power control, where the operating system could signal the power supply to turn off.
You are huge!