A huge chunk of my childhood was spent playing in the dirt and mud. I lived in bumfuck nowhere Pennsylvania, so that's all I had to do when the neighbor kids were busy.
Smaller kids still love playgrounds, even if they also want/love screentime. Heck, it is not infrequent there are a group of younger teenagers at the playgrounds we frequent.
These things were NEVER fucking left open at the park near me. Could wait there the entire day and the same fucking kid would be using it the entire time, completely oblivious to your attempts to get him to move.
I swear, I probably only touched the thing once when i was a child. I came back with my daughter a few years ago and nobody was giving it a second glance. Used my kid as an excuse to finally get to play with the thing...
Hahaha you and I had the same experience. Always watching, never actually getting a chance to use because of some kid hogging it the whole time you were there.
These sand things just don’t exist where I am in the US. I remember when I was staying in Europe as a kid the setups with sand and water pumps being the most interesting part of a lot of playgrounds.
I had something similar. Mine claimed 14 hours on Gameboy or 4 hours on Game Gear. Got the Gameboy for my birthday along with Tetris and FF Legend II, but got it a few days early because I went into the hospital the Saturday before.
The present I got on my birthday was finding out I could go home the next day.
Edit 2 electric boogaloo: We got spoiler tags up in here!
spoiler
FF Legend II is a fucking crazy game. If you get a game over, you meet Odin, and he makes a deal with you to bring you back if you promise to fight him later on.
Well sure enough, you gotta fight him, and after you win, there's no option to come back on a gameover, cause you killed the dude who brings you back. It's just the option to reload a save after that.
Not sure if I've ever seen a game before or after that with that kind of mechanics change on a boss kill.
And like the other FFL games there are multiple races for the PCs who all follow different rules entirely - For example in FFL2 in addition to humans you have mutants who develop stats slower but get magic powers with limited uses that recharge on rest, Robots who when they equip items they lose half the durability, but the durability refills to half on rest and their equipped gear is where all their stats come from and monsters who more or less are what they are and advance by eating the meat of other monsters to shapeshift into more advanced forms.
FFL3 also allows you to change between those categories over time too as well as adding hybrid categories of Beast and Cyborg for when you're changing but aren't all the way there yet. FFL3 also gives you an airship/time machine at the beginning of the game, but it's broken and a big part of the game is fixing it so you can actually use it's various features.
But yes, I loved the whole deal with Odin thing. Also if you never lose a fight before encountering Odin, there's no dialog at all and he basically just sneak attacks you, and gets a free surprise round. Because he can't be optional - the whole game is about collecting 77 McGuffins, and he personally has 8 of them.
