Does anyone else genuinely miss the 2000s?

[W00K #17]

It's the last decade that video games were still fun.

 

[JM 590]

The 2000s were very up-and-down for me. I was a teenager throughout them, and I don't miss all the ridiculous high school drama and cattiness from those days at all. I also don't miss hearing idiots blasting gangster rap from their shitmobiles, and all the awkwardness of sitting in the back seat of my parents' car at Taco Bell listening to some impolite fellow go into detail about what a lucrative business the illicit narcotic and prostitution trade can be. You still hear some of that today, but not nearly as often.

Then again, music was otherwise pretty good. Music's very subjective and every decade seems to have its own style, so it's hard to talk about in any kind of objective sense. Though unlike today, we didn't have an endless stream of Soundcloud rappers and songs made entirely out of disposable techno loops. Also, rock music still existed, which just... doesn't really seem to be around much, anymore.

Video games were kinda... eh, for the most part, what with motion controls and DLC showing up. It was also the era where hardware limitations were all but gone, so you'd never have to worry about space, or work around limitations. Ironically, a lot of mediocrity seemed to come forth. Almost universally, that generation seemed to have games with limited color palettes, where most games were all just kind of... one color. Like, Deus Ex: Human Revolution was overwhelmingly gold. Saints Row: The Third was purple. And so many games, just so many of them, were brown brown brown. I love me some Fallout 3, but that game was as brown as a freshly laid turd. There were certainly some good games in that decade, but the styles of the 90s had all but faded away by the halfway point. It's hard to think about how Jet Set Radio and Fallout 3 came out in the same decade, but they did. Though on a brighter note, I can easily name some games from then I consider all time classics, like Dead Rising, Mother 3, and No More Heroes.

The 2010s weren't that bad until around 2015 when the world lost its fucking mind because Mr. Funny Pants decided to run for president and drove half the planet batshit insane. That's really when all this clown world uptightness kicked into high gear. So much mainstream comedy is just so mean-spirited and politically loaded. It'd be great to find some decent Trump jokes that don't imply that the comic would murder his family in front of him, before murdering him, if given the chance. Same deal with the widespread fame of feminists. If you wanna show true girl power, maybe don't make it drop-dead obvious you feel like you're perpetually living in the shadow of every single man.

Welcome to the 2010s, here's your vape, a YouTube playlist of trap songs, and a list of articles which are designed to offend you. Now go type a thinkpiece about how pissed you are at the president, take your antidepressants, and dye your hair blue, you tool.

I think the 2020s will be a great decade. A decade where the ever-growing resentment for insane, woke, mentally ill crowd will go mainstream. Rebellion just kind of works like that, as the kids growing up today see what's happening in the world with clear eyes, and call it for what it is.

I can't say those years were the best of my life. They're actually the worst years but god we had cool ass gba games.

Yeah dude. The GBA was a major platform for me, but it's crazy to think it was only current for three years. Released June 2001, obsolete November 2004 by the hand of the Nintendo DS. Even though the DS had fuck all on it until late '05.

 

[saisegeha]

There was just something special about coming home from school and playing Halo with friends, looking forward to a new Toby Maguire Spiderman movie or when your phone was only used to call your parents during an emergency. Sure, that could just be nostalgia and not the 2000s in particular – but something is missing. I see it when I pick my little brother up from school, everything just feels so disconnected. The kids interact differently with each other and most look way older than they actually are, nobody seems to have a genuine smile on their face and is overly sensitive.

 

[UntimelyDhelmise]

Let's not pretend video games were perfection during the 2000's, at least halfway through.

After the Wii came out in 2006 the Big 3 were fucking swamped with shitty motion control gimmicks and shovelware was at its absolute peak as a secondhand result. Not every instance was bad (Mario Galaxy 1 is my favorite Mario game) but 9 times out of 10 a good or otherwise serviceable game was dragged down to the dirt by stupid waggle physics.

 

[JM 590]

Let's not pretend video games were perfection during the 2000's, at least halfway through.

After the Wii came out in 2006 the Big 3 were fucking swamped with shitty motion control gimmicks and shovelware was at its absolute peak as a secondhand result. Not every instance was bad (Mario Galaxy 1 is my favorite Mario game) but 9 times out of 10 a good or otherwise serviceable game was dragged down to the dirt by stupid waggle physics.

Twilight Princess on Gamecube was a valuable game for a long time due to it not shoehorning in motion controls that the game wasn't even designed for. And they never even patched in the option to use a controller on the Wii version. Same deal with No More Heroes on PS3 and 360, but at least the game was designed with motion controls in mind.

I'm just not a fan of the entire 6th generation. PS2 had the vast majority of the game library, but the lasers inside PS2s failed constantly. It wasn't unheard of for someone to have owned at least three PS2s. The overpriced 8mb memory cards, and how they never ever produced a larger capacity, didn't help the console, either. But the PS2 had full backwards compatibility with the PS1, could play DVDs, and the 2005 slim models were pretty sturdy (albeit, too little too late), so props to them for that.

Xbox was my favorite of the three consoles, but it got very few releases the PS2 didn't also get, and a whole lot of people didn't like the controllers. And you couldn't play DVDs without the DVD remote, entirely because Microsoft was cheap on licensing the ability to play DVDs. But having a giant-at-the-time 8gb HDD and the ability to rip your CDs for custom soundtracks was pretty convenient.

And the Gamecube... it's looked back on as a very beloved console, but to me, it was a Smash Bros. machine. Tiny 59-block memory cards, arguably the worst Mario game, and, just like with Xbox, very few exclusives the PS2 didn't get. Gamecube even famously got cucked by Capcom in 2002:

But at least it had the best controller. I don't know, I guess most of the Gamecube love today comes from the generation that grew up with it. I can see it being a great system for kids, but not so much for teenagers. Another annoying thing about the Gamecube is that there's exactly one game left I'd like to find: Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance. But it's one of those $200 on eBay games and Nintendo's not about to rerelease it anytime soon, and piracy on the thing is next to impossible. So, fuck it, emulation it is. Oh, and the Gamecube couldn't play DVDs unlike the PS2 and Xbox, so that's another strike against it. It's like releasing a system today that can't play Netflix, completely ridiculo-oh, hi Mr. Nintendo Switch!

 

[BrunoMattei]

Absolutely not. There's certain nostalgic things like early Adult Swim. The 2000's was mostly a shitty time for me. Now it's just less shitty.

 

[Dom Cruise]

Absolutely not. There's certain nostalgic things like early Adult Swim. The 2000's was mostly a shitty time for me. Now it's just less shitty.

The 2000s had some challenging times for me as well, but I still look back on it with a lot of fondness, maybe it was just the age that I was?

But in the interest of fairness I will talk about some things I disliked about the 2000s and things I like about the 2010s.

I think the main thing I disliked about the 2000s was it was a very modernistic culture, the mainstream was only concerned with what was current and anything prior to them was seen as "dated" and not worth paying attention to.

A good example of that is all those horror remakes that came out then (not that horror remakes have gone away completely, but they're a lot rarer), only a very small number of which were worthwhile, remember that horrible remake of John Carpenter's The Fog? Or Rob Zombie's remake of Halloween?

But now in the 2010s there's a healthy appreciation of and respect for the past, retro stuff is cool, not "dated" or "lame", look at something like Stranger Things for example, today a remake of a John Carpenter movie would actually try to capture the vibe of those movies.

So yeah, a love of retro culture went from a niche thing in the 2000s to a mainstream thing in the 2010s, that's cool.

And for another example is music and the revival of synth, there was a time in which nothing could be more dated than 80s style synth music, but I've always loved it, I used to listen to Tangerine Dream film scores, the Miami Vice score, the Flight of The Navigator score, stuff like that, a lot around 2007-2009, so I was actually ahead of the curve on a mainstream trend, isn't that cool?

In fact that right there is one of my top favorite things about the 2010s, the synth revival.

But what does it say that the coolest things in the 2010s have been stuff that evokes the past?

 

[bigdongle]

Well...

Vidya was better. I still have my DS Lite somewhere.

Musically, the 2000's were a decade of dogshit punctuated by some truly excellent moments. Daft Punk's Discovery came out in '01, for instance. Then Untrue by Burial in '07.

Of course, I didn't develop my taste for electronic music until the 10's. lewronggeneration.jpg

My view of cinema from that period is a bit rose-tinted by Blockbuster rentals still being a thing. Fun times.

It's painful to realize how corporate and sanitized the internet is now compared to then. I miss the YouTube gold sub button and unregistered hypercam2. In a way, Kiwi Farms feels like the last vestige of the old spirit of 4chan and Newgrounds. Trolling is wayyyy too politicized these days.

Post-2005, everyone was united in their hatred of Bush and the war (at least where I lived). You knew who the retards were: there was a clear line between the exceptional team (o'reilly-tier conservatives) and the functioning adults (jon stewart-tier libs). For a lot of people, I guess that's still the way it is. But lib comedians were actually somewhat funny and not godawful moralizing fags.

Generally I hate waxing nostalgic, but the 2000's are interesting because they're kind of a forgotten decade. All in all, I don't miss them. The 2010's have been shitty on a macro level, but my own life has exponentially improved. NGL I'm actually excited for the 2020's.

 

[Replicant Sasquatch]

Mostly I just miss playing classic World of Warcraft on Saturday mornings.

 

[Larry David's Opera Cape]

I was an adult in the 2000s and I remember the clear precursors of all the stuff you mention being present. Third wave feminism was going strong. Protests had a growing "black bloc" group of violent agitators. Racial tensions didn't really escalate until Obama, but it started 2007-8ish. People had Bush Derangement Syndrome instead of TDS. After 9/11 there was a lot of real fear and chaos. I remember all of us being sent home from work and having to get loans to pay rent because the paychecks were not printed or sent while everything was shut down. And lots of truly terrifying false alarm or near miss follow up terroristic threats and incidents. Also 9/10/2001 was the last day of my adult life until circa 2016 that the economy was not utter shit. Most of that decade was spent scraping together funds from two or three odd gigs and shitty jobs and stressing out about health insurance premiums. In fact I did not have full, comprehensive insurance again until 2012.

The music and movies were way better, though, I will agree with that.

 

[CumDumpster]

Some people might miss the "bubblegum" aesthetic of that time period, but we already have the bad economy of it.
Also, I really should buy Crossniq+ when that comes out. That game looks good.

 

[The Cunting Death]

Yes and no.

Yes in that I miss the times when Homestar Runner updated frequently, the Internet was more of a wild west type place, some of the music was okay, Early Adult Swim, and my grandparents were alive.

No in that most of this is just weird misplaced nostalgia, it also had some of the worst moments of my life, I'm also content with the people I'm with now, and it was depressing as fuck because everyone was depressed years after 9/11 happened and you could tell just by the mood of everything.

Like every decade, it had its ups and downs.

 

[AF 802]

If anything, the 2010s have been a shitshow for me, but I'd prefer not to go back to the 2000s. Mainly because I think I'd end up on the side of the anarchists if I ended up re-doing things over again, even more miserable than I am now.

2010s have been marked with mental health issues and late starts in adult life (I'm almost 24 and haven't entered college yet) and I really think I would be in a horrible place if I took the side of the anarchists and cut my dick off, living off a government welfare check and posting to Twitter about the ebil Nazis.

I've realized that your identity in Current Year is entirely based on your politics, and being whatever the right is being called now is better than being a communist.

 

[JM 590]

I think the main thing I disliked about the 2000s was it was a very modernistic culture, the mainstream was only concerned with what was current and anything prior to them was seen as "dated" and not worth paying attention to.

A good example of that is all those horror remakes that came out then (not that horror remakes have gone away completely, but they're a lot rarer), only a very small number of which were worthwhile, remember that horrible remake of John Carpenter's The Fog? Or Rob Zombie's remake of Halloween?

But now in the 2010s there's a healthy appreciation of and respect for the past, retro stuff is cool, not "dated" or "lame", look at something like Stranger Things for example, today a remake of a John Carpenter movie would actually try to capture the vibe of those movies.

So yeah, a love of retro culture went from a niche thing in the 2000s to a mainstream thing in the 2010s, that's cool.

Couldn't have said it better myself. Any retro game collector can tell you how much they lament not buying up tons and tons of SNES games when they were cheap, up until around '09 or so. Mike Matei of Angry Video Game Nerd fame once told a story about walking out of Funcoland with garbage bags full of NES games they were clearing out in like 2003, since nobody cared about the NES at that time. I even remember that, but passing up those games because I had emulation. I really regret that, but oh well.

Yeah, the attitude was that whatever was current was literally the only thing that mattered, and if you enjoyed media from even just five years ago, you were a weirdo. It seems strange today, but that just kinda seemed to make sense back then. Go figure.

But I do remember 80's stuff starting to be popular in that decade. Grand Theft Auto: Vice City did extremely well, and there were a lot of TV commercials for 80's music compilations all the time. I figured 80's nostalgia made sense back then, because people who grew up in the 80's were hitting college age and could afford to buy stuff themselves, but that just kind of... never went away. I guess the 80's were just so culturally rich, they became an evergreen decade. We're about to hit the 2020's, and 80's styles seem about as popular now as they were in 2002.

Of course, I didn't develop my taste for electronic music until the 10's. lewronggeneration.jpg

Nothing wrong with that. Electronic music was largely dead in the 2000's, so even if you knew what you liked, it was obscenely hard to find online, even in the days of Napster and KaZaA. I really had to scrape some obscure-ass websites for MP3s, and sometimes just be satisfied with low quality, one-minute clips when that was all I can find. Those days are long gone, now that absolutely everything is on YouTube.

 

[Dom Cruise]

Couldn't have said it better myself. Any retro game collector can tell you how much they lament not buying up tons and tons of SNES games when they were cheap, up until around '09 or so. Mike Matei of Angry Video Game Nerd fame once told a story about walking out of Funcoland with garbage bags full of NES games they were clearing out in like 2003, since nobody cared about the NES at that time. I even remember that, but passing up those games because I had emulation. I really regret that, but oh well.

Yeah, the attitude was that whatever was current was literally the only thing that mattered, and if you enjoyed media from even just five years ago, you were a weirdo. It seems strange today, but that just kinda seemed to make sense back then. Go figure.

But I do remember 80's stuff starting to be popular in that decade. Grand Theft Auto: Vice City did extremely well, and there were a lot of TV commercials for 80's music compilations all the time. I figured 80's nostalgia made sense back then, because people who grew up in the 80's were hitting college age and could afford to buy stuff themselves, but that just kind of... never went away. I guess the 80's were just so culturally rich, they became an evergreen decade. We're about to hit the 2020's, and 80's styles seem about as popular now as they were in 2002.



Nothing wrong with that. Electronic music was largely dead in the 2000's, so even if you knew what you liked, it was obscenely hard to find online, even in the days of Napster and KaZaA. I really had to scrape some obscure-ass websites for MP3s, and sometimes just be satisfied with low quality, one-minute clips when that was all I can find. Those days are long gone, now that absolutely everything is on YouTube.

There was some 80s nostalgia in the 2000s, but it was more "hey, do you remember when?" than it was something that really influenced the culture at large, that didn't really start until the 2010s.

But you're right that Rockstar was ahead of the curve on it, in addition to Grand Theft Auto Vice City there synth music for The Warriors video game is years ahead of its time and Manhunt had a little bit of that too.

Racial tensions didn't really escalate until Obama, but it started 2007-8ish.

The only racial tension I really remember in the 2000s was the aftermath of Katrina, which in hindsight was like giving everyone an early preview of the 2010s, but there was still nothing like the post Black Lives Matter era.

 

[Slap47]

The 2000s was an internet golden age where everybody made their own forums and tried to be as edgy as possible. Probably the best part of that decade.

I'd also say that it was a golden age in gaming. MMOs weren't shit and PC gaming was golden (Half-life, Rome 1, etc).

Politically its the same situation as the late 2010s. Everybody hates the president and the deep state is out of control.

Dunno, aside from the internet stuff, I'm not a fan. Its more of the same. 2000s music wasn't particularly all that great (crazy frog?) and the economy was shit for most of it. Watching all of the liberties disappear also kinda sucked.

 

[Xenomorph]

Only thing I hated from the early 2000's was the shitty fashion from Eurotrash house music. Everyone in my city looked like shit with metallic fabrics and glitter everywhere.

 

[Concentrate Juice]

I miss the 2000's when social media & technology weren't so corporate and "connected" as it is today. It's all so narcissistic the way the masses shout their individually meaningless lives into the crowd of the other n-billion users doing the same thing. Only the right type of people were able to get access to the internet. Oh how it has fallen.
Let's hope the best for the 2020's.

 

[The Fair Lady]

Mostly the 90’s, but the early-mid 2000’s as well. I’m a sucker for nostalgia.

 

[Faket0Fake]

I did my growing up in the 90's and I miss parts of that. The early to mid 00's represent peaks of my life where I was achieving many things I wanted to do growing up so it holds a lot of memories. It was also a time where creativity and thought on the internet were at a high, things like Youtube and Newgrounds were full of cool things and there was a feeling of freedom online that you don't feel today. Some of it was bad but a lot of the internet was full of really cool people trying new things. It was my favorite time in anime too, lots of creativity and deep ideas compared to the splattering of isekai anime and Digibro pleasing moe-waifu garbage each season in the last 10 years.

I also miss old Tokyo too from when I was a student in Japan. In the early 00's it still wasn't a very mainstream tourist destination like it is now as being a nerd or a weaboo wasn't really seen as a cool thing until a good few years later. A lot less tourists and many areas were still what they were before they were made more tourist friendly due to a push to increase tourism with the whole "cool Japan" thing. I think like everywhere else the level of freedom and creativity left Tokyo in the 10's and places that used to be about that are tourist friendly shells of it's former self selling overpriced souvenirs to giggling Thai women and obnoxious Americans/French people.