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Comment by eternityforest | Hacker News Reader

The tech was amazing relative to what the basic science of the time allowed.

I love modern phones, but I often wonder what we would have done back in the day with current silicon.

I loved how I could take out my DS at lunch in highschool and connect directly to another person across the room to play Mario Kart, no network required.

It's a shame "download play" went away with more modern consoles, the DS and the PSP both had a version of it, but the DS one was far more common.

I recently discovered that the switch has a feature to "Match Version with Local Users", if you want to play over p2p wifi, which syncs everybody's game to the latest version that's available in the group. Never used local multiplayer on a switch though, and I imagine it wouldn't play too nicely with pirated games. (though, I'm constantly surprised by what the NX homebrew community creates)

I’m older than you.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c8/Du...

Maybe. I remember doing that too. I'd play Pokemon Red at the ice rink if I wasn't skating.

You can still do this on Switch, I played local Mario Kart co-op with my friend on a camping trip a couple years back.

Though there's no Download Play any more. Though I can't say I really miss it all that much. It was practically an upselling/demo feature. I recall playing Mario Kart DS local co-op, and if you didn't have the game you had to play as a Shy Guy. It's not really going to be a fun competition with friends if the host has an advantage.

I also recently had some pokemon link battles, trades, ane raids with friends without wifi. (It has a “connected to online services” and “disconnected” states, fun thing is that while disconnected the codes to join rooms (ie local) are 4 numbers instead of 6 alphanumerics)

Switch still allows local multiplayer if the games implement it.

Probably figured out a way to cram maximum telemetry/analytics/surveillance and make advertising pervasicenin those devices

I'm sure they would have, but they also might not have made them quite as locked down, and had some features we don't think to do now.

At the very least there might be less endless scrolling, which I think kind of is a major factor in culture.

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