Nintendo is off the table. The rot set in long ago. It coddles. It soothes. The West’s testosterone is in freefall, and I won’t be a party to its further decline.

Modern games? Forget it. AAA is an industry of bloat and deceit, teetering toward collapse under its own weight. My son won’t waste his youth on the shambling corpses of better eras.

Jaguar, maybe. It was doomed, yes, but doom builds character. Anything but GameCube—that’s an absolute. Insipid. Jejune. A machine built for soft minds.

N64 could be a dark horse candidate because of its total lack of JRPGs. JRPGs are a plague. They take the masculine impulse—conquest, struggle, triumph—and smother it under layers of excess. Endless dialogue. Effeminate protagonists. The illusion of hardship, when in truth, it is numbers going up, a dopamine drip for the docile.

Testosterone declines when men are severed from struggle. Look to Selye’s General Adaptation Syndrome—a body grows under stress, but when the stress is artificial, self-imposed, or mitigated by indulgence, the body atrophies. JRPGs are precisely this. The “challenge” they present is a facsimile, one of optimization rather than perseverance. Grind XP, equip the right relic, and watch cutscenes between battles. There is no reaction speed, no gut-wrenching punishment for failure, no instinct honed through repetition. Compare this to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of Flow—true engagement requires struggle, risk, and immediate consequence. You get none of that watching a melodramatic androgene sigh wistfully at a skybox.

Consider also Spengler’s Decline of the West—a culture that embraces excess, ornamentation, and passivity is a culture in terminal decline. The rise of the JRPG in the 1990s coincided with the Western male’s retreat into escapism. Coincidence? Hardly. While Gen X men were pumping quarters into Mortal Kombat and Doom, cutting their teeth on pixelated violence, a growing minority was retreating into menu screens, chasing the false rigor of turn-based combat. These were the early symptoms of the sickness we see today—grown men pining for their childhoods, weeping over remakes, clutching their collector’s editions like relics of a lost identity.

Even the biological angle damns them. Studies on dopaminergic pathways suggest that excessive reliance on predictive reward models (loot drops, stat increases, cutscene payoffs) weakens the prefrontal cortex’s ability to manage impulse control. You train a generation to expect reward without struggle, and what do you get? Soyboys. Incels. The male malaise.

My son won’t touch that poison. He’ll play real games. Games where failure is real and brutal, where victory is earned, not scripted. If he wants an RPG, he can play the only ones that matter—Ultima, Wizardry, maybe a roguelike if he’s worthy.

But JRPGs? Never.

I ask you, men of this board: Where do your sons begin?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5688198&forum_id=2#48709367)

Once proficient in those, move on to NES. Mario Broa, SMB, Punchout, then harder games like rygar, Zelda, Metroid, and bionic commando. Maybe give a taste of metal gear

Then up to genesis. Not long. And not many Games. Do a couple sonics, Rambo III (one of my favorite genesis games by the way), altered beast.

Then it's time for the real "desert," the SNES. Will spend a lot of time here. Too many to go through, but Turtles in Time will be among the selection.

Then we move up to 90s Capcom arcade Games. Street fighter, Fibal Fight, TMNT, Mercs, that sort of thing

Then up to N64, not long, but enough to do Mario 64 and Zelda. And blast corps.

Then Dreamcast.

Then GameCube. For a long long time.

Maybe after that, pS2.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5688198&forum_id=2#48709400)

lmao

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5688198&forum_id=2#48709821)