Volhout said  

It fills me with doubt about the acceptance of the so much laboured game this son will produce, and what he is proud of. Will it be "laughed away" by his friends, without them even trying ?

I personally love games for their gameplay, not so much the beauty of picture and sound

You are so right. I spent a couple of hours the other night writing an ASCII version of Boulder Dash in QB64 as a starting point to show my son what could be done in a short amount of time.

I was quite proud of my work. My son, not so impressed. At least I enjoyed it :)

Unfortunately he has seen AI produce a working 3D game in 5 minutes so it's not easy these days.

  Volhout said  

There is a whole generation difference between us grey beards, and the iPhone generation. And that shows in the video (and also audio) capabilities of the PicoMite (not so much the CMM2).

I used to think this as well. But we had a retro party a few weeks ago for a bunch of us oldies. There were a few younger folk there, and they got a huge blast out of some of the games. The big hit was Frogger on the Atari 2600/VCS. That was being played non stop by the young-uns.



I do agree that some of the games didn't gain any traction with the kids - like Summer Games on the C64, but I think that was because it wasn't obvious what was needed to do.

Another big hit was Lemmings. Once they'd watched the old folk do a few rounds they were all over that.

My pet peeve with modern phone games is that they are too simplified. All of that power on the phone that could run something like Populus, and they using it for Farmville - "Click on the screen to collect the wheat. Click on the screen to sell the wheat. Click on the screen to sow the next crop".

Look at Flappy Bird, Wordle, Tetris, Candy Crush - all of those are within the realms of the picomite. And of course, there's the classics, Missile Command, Asteroids, Breakout. I suspect there's a plethora of old games that would gain traction with "some" of the youngsters.