It has come to my attention that I am actually bad at video games.
I mean, I thought I was good at them. I've grown up playing them, after all; Super Mario Bros., Tetris, Legend of Zelda, Ocarina of Time, Mario Kart, Mario RPG, Gran Turismo, Contra, Super Smash Bros., Pokemon ... those were the games that raised me just as much as Blues Clues, Hey! Arnold, and that horrible, horrible Puffed Rice cereal my mom used to get. With a history of old SNES Nintendo games of my early childhood and the introduction of GameCube and a PS2 in my pre-adolescence, the logical path I should have followed would have been to become a pretty solid gamer.
And I still was playing games, you see. WindWaker, Kingdomu Heartsu, more Smash Bros, Guitar Hero, more Mario Kart, Wario Ware, Sly Cooper ... and for the most part, I was beating these games, doing all the normal video game playing stuff: leveling up, winning. Whatever.
But as I got older, I played less games, and certainly less of the RPG style ones. The most recent games I've completed were Twilight Princess like over a year ago and the first Metal Gear Solid several months ago.

It was MGS that made me realize something was up about my game playing.
It took me an absurdly long time to beat that game. And it wasn't just me going slow, or being interrupted by school and life, it was that I was nervous playing it. Scared when guards came around the corner. Apprehensive and unassertive. WTF? It was just a video game! And I was getting frustrated every time I played it. Eventually I just sat myself down with a guide and worked my way through step by step. As much as I liked the game, I couldn't play it without a serious crutch.
And then I started thinking back on all my other gaming experience. I remember fighting Cerberus in Kingdom Hearts, and how frustrated I was because I kept dying. Over and over.
And then I remembered how I could never best my brother in Smash Bros. I always equated it to him being older, wiser, more adept in finger dexterity, but I played just as long as he did and fought just as many battles. But I never improved.

And then I remember all the way to Super Mario Bros and The Legend of Zelda. I could never get past the first part of either of those games. I never beat Super Mario Bros, as long as I played it. I never beat the first dungeon in Zelda no matter how hard I tried.
At each game I looked at, all I could see was my ineptitude and utter, utter failure.
So I recently started playing "modern" games. I tried my hand at Halo first, and my utter failure was pretty noticeable. I tried to tell myself it was just first-time unfamiliarity. But I knew that wasn't true.
I tried some more Indie games, N+ and that game, with the zombies in it. I just wasn't as good as my friends. I died, a lot.

I even tried going simpler, I played Canabalt for a good while. I improved, but eventually just hit a plateau and never really got good at it.
Now I've been playing a fair bit of Modern Warfare online, and I've been playing long enough so that I really shouldn't be dying 15 times each round and average 3 kills, maybe. I was certainly terrible the first time I picked up the controller, but after I learned how to aim, sort of, and other basics, I didn't get any better. Rounds where I did well were few and far between, and generally based off other players' lapses in concentration or sheer bad luck.
Today was the straw that broke the camel's back.
I tried out a lineride/canabalt crossover game and just really really sucked at it. And then I sat back and allowed myself to think: "MAN, you are really bad at video games."

It's not a bad thing, really. It's kind of a relief. Although I always wanted to be a cool "gamer" and impress people with my Guitar Hero MAD SKILLZ or hide behind a disguise of "girl" and then turn out to PWN MAJOR A$$ or whatever, I think I've finally accepted that that kind of skill is just not in my power to grasp.

I'm never gonna beat MGS2, I'll never get a nuke (let alone an air raid ...) in MW2. I won't be able to play expert in Guitar Hero and I'll probably never even beat Pokemon Heart Gold.
But you know what? That's ok.
Because I'll finally be able to play video games for the fun of it. Not to try and impress others, or rather myself, not to be the best.

I think I'll embrace my console disabilities and sit down and savor each time some bro gets up for another beer and lets me shoot him thirty or forty times before finally killing him ... and be able to move right along when I die two seconds later for staying too long on the radar.


(SOURCE: http://www.geekologie.com/)

I seriously can't stop playing Tetris.
I remember going to my grandparents' house when I was a wee little thing and "playing" Tetris on my grandpa's ancient NES. By "playing" I mean stacking all the blocks into a single skinny tower every single round. I never got very far.
Eventually someone must have taught me how to play the game, how to stack a tower so that when you got a straight block you could clear four lines at once, because I at some point started paying Tetris religiously.
Very religiously.
We bought Tetris for the Gameboy Color at some other point. My whole family, save ol' pop, played. We would leave the Gameboy out on the coffee table and in our spare time would battle against each other's high scores.
My mom was the unbeatable one; my belief is that she's so good at Tetris because of her OCD. I mean ... the whole game is organization.
My brother was next highest, also with OCD.
Then my sister.
Then little ol' me.
Regardless of how hard I tried, I could never beat my family's scores. I could never get that giant rocket to blast off! So in times of frustration I would stop playing. Maybe for a few months, maybe for a few years, but I could never seem to kick the habit entirely.
Two years ago or so I played Tetris DS for the first time, and realized that all the pitting myself against my family actually made me good at Tetris (my family, however, was always better). Turns out I could beat all of my friends easily.
So I played Tetris again on the same old Gameboy Color. I was too cheap to buy Tetris DS for myself.
And then I stopped playing again for a while. I played a little bit during the last two years, finally getting that giant rocket to blast off consistently every time I played, finally beating some of my family's old high scores.
And then ub3rslug linked me just a few days ago to tetrisfriends.com.
And my ego has been completely crushed.
I started out having a really grand old time, beating the crap out of all the other Tetris players, leveling up, kicking ass and taking names in general. And then I got to level 11, "professional."
I lost games.
Turns out I get pretty angry when I lose at Tetris. I thought it was my one special talent! But alas, I lost multiple times. Got angry. Said I hated Tetris. Swore off Tetris!
And yet back I go.
I won't let those Tetris Fiends keep beating me ..!
I won't stop playing Tetris!
(I can't stop playing Tetris, someone for the love of anything, help me.)

(Also: Retro? Sure, why not.)

Today, I had the happy opportunity to play the "indie" game, I MAED A GAM3 WITH ZOMBIES IN 1T!!!1.
My usual group of friends and I were hanging out, playing some Street Fighter (I was getting my ass thoroughly kicked, mind you), when ub3rslug told us he had to show us a game he'd found. You know a game called "I MAED A GAM3 WITH ZOMBIES IN 1T!!!1" has to at least be amusing for a few minutes. This was not the case. I MAED A GAM3 WITH ZOMBIES IN 1T!!!1 is my new favorite game. Seriously (cereally).
You start out on a grassy field with some traditional zombies ambling towards you. You fire your weapon with one analog stick, move around with the other. And then the music kicks in, and you realize you've begun something much greater than your average home-spun game. You gather weapons as they spawn from the enemy corpses' corpses; lazers, machine guns, missiles, right to the godly flame-thrower. You fend of the oncoming hoard of the undead as the background flashed the words "I MAED A GAM3 WITH ZOMBIES IN 1T" as the corresponding lyrics are sung. The game morphs into a rave as you go further along, with different enemies to shoot, and brighter lights to distract you and some kind of lazer show, presumably just for the win.
A bombardment of seizure inducing color, hard-core-head-banging music, and of course zombies; if you don't check out I MAED A GAM3 WITH ZOMBIES IN 1T!!!1, I'll set some frikkin' zombies on you (it's only $1, you have NO excuse not to). This game is like the visualization of awesome. 11/10.
Now excuse me, it's fanart drawing tiems.