I Have Reached My Final Form
I have been playing video games since I was a four or five. One of my earliest memories is of playing Zelda so much on a NES that I injured my small hands trying to hold the rectangular controller.
Over the past decade, however, I’ve been undergoing a transformation from a person who games constantly to someone who games occasionally and rants about how much better things used to be ‘back in my day’. In other words, I’ve reached my final form: cynical asshole.
I first realised this when I began thinking up a list of all the games that I wanted to play. The vast majority of those games are not on the current generation of consoles or PC. In fact, I can only think of a few games on the current generation of consoles or PC that I’m interested in.
My suspicions were only further confirmed when I began thinking about all the long-running video game series that I’ve played and how I feel about them.
Mario? Bah. I remember when we all played Mario in two dimensions and we were amazed to get see a Yoshi for the first time. I remember hearing people complain about some Mario Galaxy levels being hard and being completely amazed. Hard? You think that’s hard? Back in my day, we barely had any extra lives, we didn’t have save points, and pretty much everything killed you in one hit.
Zelda? Bah. I remember the days before there were puzzles everywhere, the days when things were a top-down view. You think parts of Twilight Princess were hard? I haven’t died in a Zelda game since the NES, and I complained about A Link to the Past being too easy.
Metroid? Bah. Before Other M tried make us care about feelings, I was happily turning Samus into a genocidal killing machine wiping out threats to humanity with no small amount of glee. You like having level maps? Back in my day we had to draw our own maps or buy Nintendo Power or something.
Warcraft? Bah. I don’t know what this World of Warcraft thing is that you people keep talking about, but I remember a time when the story didn’t involve time travel and the orcs were actually bad guys who needed to be wiped out. Those were the days, back when the only real difference between the races was in the spell casting units and when the only thing we complained about was how stupid the naval units were since whoever got them first basically couldn’t lose.
Final Fantasy? Bah. I remember when it was on Nintendo consoles and when the definition of awesome graphics was Cloud’s pointy head. I remember screaming at vaguely humanoid figures on the screen when Aerith died and cursing Squaresoft to the depths of Hell when switched to Play Station. Oh, and I remember the Spirits Within Movie, no matter how much I don’t want to.
Mortal Kombat? Bah. Back in my day, we didn’t get to have the blood unlocked automatically. We had to put in the blood code and hope our parents weren’t watching since apparently too much Mortal Kombat would turn us into raging lunatics. X-Rays, Brutalities? We considered ourselves lucky to have fatalities where punching someone made them explode into a badly animated pile of bones!
And don’t even get me started on Tetris. 3D Tetris? Tetris with coloured blocks? Tetris with a wide choice of music? No, we didn’t have those things. We had Tetris on the Gameboy and we were happy with it in all its monochromatic glory with a grand total of three soundtracks. And if you wanted to play against someone? Screw the internet. We used a Gameboy linker cable and considered ourselves lucky.
So, yes, I have turned into that crazy person sitting on their porch with a shotgun and screaming for the kids to ‘get off my lawn!’ while reminiscing about the good, old days. Now, excuse me. I have to go play some Sim City 2000.
razieltwelve 
Those were the good ol’ days