2000s on Locodigital

NFSU: I beat the boss with zero upgrades — and this was the first part I bought

Sun, 02 Aug 2026 16:00:00 -0300

In the previous post, I took on the first boss in Need for Speed Underground with the Civic locked at zero — no upgrades, no tuning, just the factory car against an already modified rival. The challenge demanded perfect execution because there was no car left over to make up for a single mistake.

Did I beat the time? Yes, but not on the first try. And the video showing the actual attempts — with none of the near-misses cut out — is even more tense than the final result suggests.

NFSU: can you beat the first boss with zero upgrades?

Tue, 21 Jul 2026 10:00:00 -0300

Everyone who played Need for Speed Underground remembers the first big roadblock in career mode: the race against the boss that separates the players who were still driving showroom cars from the ones who already knew the tuning screen by heart. The standard answer from any player was obvious — run to the garage, spend everything you have on engine, turbo and suspension, and only then take on the race. I decided not to do that.

Sonic Adventure 2 turns 25 — the Shadow game that changed everything

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 10:00:00 -0300

You probably remember the first second of City Escape — that aerial shot of San Francisco as an armoured van skids across the road, the back door swings open and Sonic appears surfing the asphalt while the bassline of Escape from the City lodges itself in your ear like it's never leaving. If that just triggered muscle memory in a Dreamcast or GameCube controller, welcome to the club. Sonic Adventure 2 turns 25 this month — released in June 2001, it was the present Sega gave itself to celebrate a decade of Sonic.

The Day After Tomorrow: 22 years of the end of the world

Thu, 28 May 2026 10:00:00 -0300

On 28 May 2004, a 30-metre wave surged over Manhattan on cinema screens. New York submerged up to the tenth floor of a building, then freezing solid. The Statue of Liberty buried up to the neck in ice. This was Roland Emmerich in maximum catastrophe mode — and it worked: the film took more than $540 million worldwide. Exactly 22 years ago.

What The Day After Tomorrow is about

Jack Hall (Dennis Quaid) is a palaeoclimatologist who spends the whole film trying to convince the US government that Earth is on the brink of climate collapse. The mechanism: global warming is melting Arctic ice too fast, dumping fresh water into the North Atlantic and shutting down the thermohaline circulation — the current system that regulates the climate of half the planet.

LAN houses: the room that connected a generation to Counter-Strike

Sun, 17 May 2026 09:00:00 -0300

The internet cafe had a very specific smell. It was CPUs heating up, air conditioning losing a fight against twenty machines running at once, and a pastry being reheated in the microwave behind the counter. You walked in, paid for your hour, picked the least clapped-out machine available and already knew exactly what you were going to open. Today, 17 May, is World Internet Day — and the internet a lot of Brazilians learned to use was that one: shared, noisy, with the ping bouncing around and somebody always shouting "flanker!" from the other side of the room.

New Super Mario Bros.: 20 years since 2D Mario came back

Fri, 15 May 2026 09:00:00 -0300

There's a scene everyone who owned a DS in 2006 or 2007 knows: you switch the handheld on, pick the grey cartridge with Mario's face on the label, and within three seconds you're hearing that opening jingle with the bouncing letters. No long loading screen, no epic introduction, no five-minute cutscene. Just Mario standing there waiting for you to move the D-pad. Twenty years ago, on 15 May 2006, Nintendo released New Super Mario Bros. in North America — the first genuinely new 2D game in the franchise in 11 years — and the world discovered it had missed side-on Mario far more than it realised.

Nintendo GameCube: 24 years of the cube everybody rented

Sun, 03 May 2026 14:00:00 -0300

There was a purple cube on the rental shop shelf. Not always — most of the time the game you wanted was out with somebody else — but when it turned up free, you took it. It didn't matter what it was. It was a GameCube. And that was enough.

Today, 3 May, the Nintendo GameCube turns 24 since its European launch. It had reached Japan in September 2001 and the United States in November. But it is on this European anniversary that it feels right to stop for a second and remember a console that sold less than the PS2, lost the generation — and still left behind a library people collect to this day.

GPS: 26 years since the night Clinton switched off the error

Fri, 01 May 2026 09:00:00 -0300

The GPS you use today — on your phone, in the car, in a running app — is fundamentally different from the GPS that existed until the end of 30 April 2000. Not in technology, not in satellites, not in infrastructure. The difference was a political decision signed by an American president who, one minute after midnight on 1 May 2000, ordered the shutdown of a deliberate error the United States government had been injecting into civilian GPS signals for years.

A Honda Civic in Need for Speed: a childhood dream became a challenge

Mon, 27 Apr 2026 10:00:00 -0300

There was a time when opening the garage screen in Need for Speed Underground and seeing a fully tuned Honda Civic was the pinnacle of existence. Tall spoiler, body kit, metallic paint, neon under the sills. For a kid who had never even sat in a real car, that was the peak of adult life. "When I grow up, I'm getting a Civic exactly like that one."

It took a bit longer than I expected. But while the real Civic hadn't turned up yet, the NFS one carried on being mine.