I never realize how much worse I've gotten at playing games until today. I don't mean FPS or an occassion game of Starcraft which I've always sucked at... I mean those old 2D shooters and side scroller that I use to be able to ace with painstaking effort and look back on the scoreboard with a sense of achievement.

I just fired up Hard Corps for the first time today, the successor to Konami's legendary Contra. I remember I used to be able to go through the entire game before on under 10 lives and I could stay alive for AGES before my first death.

So being an overconfident ass, I fire up on hard difficulties and started the game.

30 minutes and many death later, I slink away to lick my wound not even passing the first level.

I am old and obselete :(

Ya it happens to all of us. It has partly to do with how much easier games are now. Partly to do with as you grow older  you have much lass time to play them. Partly because before it might have been the one game you got all year, so you just kept at it. Partly because well im sure there is more.

Basically, you are this guy, and the modern games industry is your girlfriend.

10 years ago I was a gamer... now I'm just casual... >_>
*goes back playing Angry Birds on his iPhone*

Hey now I am not obese! Everyone knows us Asians are skinny four-eye nerds that works in IT :)

Wow, I thought I've fallen... you're not even trying!

You suck worse than me :D

You're a casual now? I guess that means...

... you're not hard corps.

@mibuokami: Right. I meant that Sony, in pushing the industry towards cinematic but easy games, is the girlfriend who has enabled you to become welded to a chair with your own dried piss and shit... so to speak.

The only obese Asians, of course, are sumo wrestlers, and I've never heard of a bogan sumo wrestler. For one thing, I don't think a bogan would ever trade in his sick mullets for a topknot.

It comes back, if you are up to the challenge. If not, just focus on enjoying. That's what this is all about anyway.

Never really had that problem myself. I've always been better at 2D side-scrollers than... Pretty much anything else, really.

On an unrelated note: Man, I need to buy Hard Corps soon.

reminds me of how I used to play Gunstar Heroes on my cousin's SEGA MD probably about 9/10 years ago and was pretty good at it.  However, in 2009, when I downloaded the game on the VC I was shocked at how crap I had become at it, I was a shadow of my former self.