Console Wars: The Obsolescence Strikes Back

Remember when you could buy a graphics card without taking out a second mortgage? The "expectation" shows a humble GT440 from 9 years ago - probably cost you a reasonable $100 and could run Minecraft without setting your desk on fire. Fast forward to "reality" and we've got a monstrous GTX 1080Ti that costs more than some used cars and requires its own nuclear power plant. The best part? Both cards are equally impossible to find in stock. The crypto miners got the new ones, and your weird cousin who "builds gaming PCs" hoarded all the old ones.

Frame-independent game physics is the hill many junior devs die on. Multiply all movement by deltaTime or watch your character zoom at light speed on a gaming PC and crawl like a snail on a potato. Skip this step and your boss will find you, and they will kill you. Not the crime mentioned in the meme, but an actual crime against humanity.

This meme perfectly captures that moment when every programmer who's also a gamer thinks, "Hey, I could totally make my own game!" The highway sign shows two paths: the sensible left exit for "Playing a game" (the thing you're actually good at) versus the right path for "Making a game" (the much harder endeavor). Meanwhile, the car is dramatically swerving right with the caption "Me thinking I can make a game, because I'm a good gamer" - representing that classic developer overconfidence. It's that classic trap so many of us fall into: "I've played hundreds of games, so how hard could it be to make one?" Narrator voice: It was, in fact, very hard. This is basically the programming equivalent of watching a movie and thinking you could direct one. The skills for consuming and creating are completely different beasts! Game development requires learning engines, graphics programming, physics, sound design, storytelling, optimization... but hey, at least you know which buttons should make your character jump, right? 😂

The existential crisis every new game developer faces when they realize their entire career is just figuring out how to make different shapes not pass through each other. After years of education and dreams of creating the next Elden Ring, it all boils down to "wait, is that box touching that other box?" and "why is this character's arm suddenly disappearing into the wall?" The veterans with the gun have always known the truth - collision detection is the real final boss that never goes away.

DARLING, it's the TRAGEDY of our TIMES! There you are, clutching your ancient GTX 1080 Ti like it's the last slice of pizza at a hackathon, peering through the blinds at the ray-tracing elite playing DOOM with their fancy-schmancy GPUs! The AUDACITY of game developers requiring hardware from this DECADE! Meanwhile, you're over there convincing yourself that Minecraft's blocky graphics are "an artistic choice" and that frame rates above 30 are "just showing off." The digital equivalent of watching the cool kids' party from outside while pretending you didn't want to go anyway! But honey, keep huffing that copium - those 2012 indie games aren't going to play themselves! 💅

Modern gaming is just a purple cat getting mugged from all directions. Day-one patches because who needs finished products? Lootboxes to empty your wallet through randomized "surprise mechanics." Crypto scams promising you'll totally own that JPEG of a monkey. And let's not forget the AI slop—half-baked "features" created by algorithms that somehow make games worse. Meanwhile, game studios keep recycling franchises and flipping assets while charging full price. The real game is seeing how much abuse players will tolerate before they stop throwing money at microtransactions. But hey, at least we get that dopamine hit of nostalgia bait when they remake that game you loved as a kid... for the third time.