True. There was no surer a guarantee that you were about to have a Bad Time, than to be sat down in front of "educational software" of the 1980s. Dreadful, for

True. There was no surer a guarantee that you were about to have a Bad Time, than to be sat down in front of "educational software" of the 1980s. Dreadful, for the most part. Kids are just young, not stupid. They know when they're being cheated out of a good time. >> I would get her a good computer and hint that she should download Unity and mess around with the examples That's funny. I'm going the opposite direction these days. We have a top-notch gaming machine at home (and spend more time on it than I am comfortable admitting) but my young-teen kids are THRILLED with the chance to use my old Apple ][ and make pixel games or text adventure games. When I bring it out, it's a special occasion day! We made a really simple "adventure" game, with me doing most of the coding and them adding ideas about locations and events and characters. They loved seeing it take shape. Then we encountered a nasty bug where player health points could go negative but the player wouldn't die, and my daughter reasoned out the solution! (Need to test for <=, not just less-than. And need to update the health BEFORE the test-for-dead.) needless to say, their old dad was pleased. And they sat there and played that silly game for and hour. It was like showing a kid a yo-yo or a top for the first time. It was more fun than it should have been and they were rightly proud of what we made. Letting them play Zork, Choplifter, Kareteka, and Dung Beetles and seeing the disc drive whirr and clack then the screen light up is as amazing to them now as it was to me 40 years ago, at their same age. Somehow it's just as entertaining as Assetto Corsa or PubG, without the million-dollar budgets or 100-person dev teams. 1mhz. 48k of RAM. 280x192 "high resolution" graphics. How could that be fun? Even more -- WHY? I have a theory. It boots right to a Basic prompt, and off we go creating our own world, or running someone else's. And a lot of games are based on skill. Just like the arcade, the more skill one has, the longer you play. And with these old machines, just as in the 1970s, our imagination is the limit. And not only the limit, the key ingredient, since the fidelity of the graphics is so low it is necessary to use our imagination. Maybe that's why the box art of the golden-age games is so alluring. With promises of spaceships and nebula, dashing swordfighting ship captains with golden epaulets, monsters and robots with similar detail -- when in reality it is indistinguishable from the average Tetris block. Somehow it was fun. And it was enough. As "Thomas Was Alone" has proved. edit: Ugh. I forgot the main point of this thread -- we bought Bloxels as an impulse purchase last weekend and my kids have enjoyed the ease with which they can create and animate characters and quickly lay out levels. It's a thrill seeing your little blocky character come to life. For us, it was a good purchase and I'm really pleased with the product. I found it at Target, for around $35, by the way.