As somebody who played a very limited selection of games as I was younger, I'm more baffled by games now than ever before.  I play Donkey Kong Country Returns, and I am absolutely baffled how amazingly artistic some of the levels are.  I play a game like Assassins Creed, and rather than just flying through beating the normal game, I want to open all the treasure chests, beat all the side missions, just all of the random stuff.  Hell, I hardly ever used to even beat my games.  Yes, I was one of those people that just played games, but never actually beat them.  This summer, I intend on beating more games than...hell, probably any 3 years combined in my life.

I think I've become a "better" gamer as I've aged and matured some.

Me to when I was younger.

The biggest factor: Less games.

When I was 16ish I only had Warcraft 2 and would pretty much play it every day. I was in a professional gaming league on a peer to peer service called Kali. My record was basically 85% wins, losing to the most elite of players.

These days "good" for me  is considered say 50-60% win ratio in fighting games, or a 1.25 K/D. Yeah pretty low, but when you have 100 games like me and play a majority of them every so often things get rough.

The last game I got really good at was Halo in recent years, my K/D was way over a 2.0 and I was playing the game every night. Basically unless you can dedicate yourself to a certain game these days your going to be out classed. There are way to many professional gamers these days. Hell I remember playing online in Soldier of Fortune Payback and there was a guy running around going 30 -0 beasting at a crappy game that no one felt was competitive. Even older games on the XBox like Dead Man's Hand had some beastily players.

im better now, i made hating to lose my strength and i play all games with complex tactics and reverse psychology.

if i cant win a game, i lose putting up a fight...maybe thats why when im on the losing team i usually have highest k/d, possession, or whatever may be relevant to the game...before i just used to quit when i was losing, but now by playing out bad games, its made me much better.

i honestly dont understand how someone can get worse. if you stopped gaming for a long time then yes, but if your gaming regularly but still getting worse, it just doesnt make sense.

Did a lot of you even read the OP?  He's not talking about skill in the game.  He's talking about enjoying a game for what it was, wanting to explore every last area, and not criticizing little issues in games, because they are prone to happen, etc.

Tell me about it!

Overall I think I'm a different gamer. Now I'm a far better player at FPS or adventure games than 10 years ago, but I'm worse with 2d games like NSMB or DK.

And then there are genres/games were I'm still like before: I'm ok at racing games and suck with point'n'click games.

yeah but enjoying a game for what it is, is related to how good you are at it through understanding the game engine.

i know nothing about OOT but thats the way it sounded from the castlevania bit. although i admit i went a bit too much on pvp side rather than SP.

The longest save file that I've ever had on a game is still held by Pokemon Gold. 350 hours - I was 7 years old. I can't imagine spending that long playing a single game now xD

it seems rather logical now that your frontal lobes are fully developed as an adult. You are now able to think about things more logically and use less gut emotion in the way you think about things. It is just a natural process of the human brain development and the fact that the frontal lobe matures fully about 22 years resulting in more mature thinking. Unfortunantly, we lose more innocent ways of thinking, amongst many things.

I'm better now, just had more time to play when I was younger