I'm a gamer. It's something I've been pretty proud of my whole life. I don't entirely fit in with the community of people who call themselves "gamers." I'm talking about the people who only play Call of Duty, who only buy Xbox or PlayStation because Nintendo consoles are generally underpowered these days in comparison to its competitors and they don't have the graphical capabilities of Nintendo's competitors. And I have to agree that this is true starting with the GameCube. Nintendo probably has a different target market. Anyway, the console war is a debate in itself that should be spared for a different time.

Now I have to say that most games do present a challenge these days. There are some hard games out there. I just finished Borderlands 2 on True Vault Hunter Mode. And it was a challenge. I'm not sure that I want to try Ultimate Vault Hunter Mode. At least, I'm not doing it solo like I did the previous two modes. And Borderlands 2 wasn't even that tough on the harder difficulty. Now I know there are some truly hard games out there like Demon Souls and Dark Souls. I haven't played them yet and I'm not sure that I want to spend money on a game I can't beat. It makes as much sense to me as buying Dickens' "Great Expectations" as a first grader. When I was six years old, I couldn't hope to be able to read that book. Hell, when I was 13, I missed most of it.

Now lately, I've clocked a lot of hours on Borderlands 2. I mean, A LOT. I have it both on my PC and on the PS3 I just picked up a few days ago (I had to get a PS3 because after months of trying, I can't convince my roommate or my brother to kill their consoles and switch to PC and the PS3 is relatively cheap nowadays). Steam says I've got 104 hours on Borderlands 2. It's second only to Skyrim, which I've played 282 hours. But I've owned Skyrim for nearly 2 years now. I've only owned Borderlands 2 for a few months. And I know I've clocked at least 20 more hours this week on the PlayStation. So I decided to take a break from Borderlands today.

In fact, I wanted to get retro with my gaming today.

Now when I say "retro" I'm talking about a game on a platform that is so old that even though it looked good then, it looks like crap today, the console it was on is no longer relevant and 99% of the games on said console is all abandonware anyway. Like the companies know they won't make any more money from these games so they don't see the point in going after the copyrights that have been infringed upon. There's no profit to be made. That cow is out of milk.

I started today with a little GameBoy Tetris. You know, the game with the famous A theme? Tetris has been around for a long time and everyone knows what it is. There have been hundreds or thousands of variations of Tetris. But I just like the classic play-til-you-fill-the-play-field style of Tetris. Now I generally play Tetris on my phone. I'm pretty good at it on there. So I thought I would do pretty well on the Game Boy Tetris. It turns out that it doesn't translate very well. My best game on my phone was 882,107 with 488 lines made. The best I could possibly do on the Game Boy Tetris was a meager 71,418 with only 91 lines. Button presses are much slower than finger drags in positioning a piece and the delay between when the piece hits the bottom and when it sets is much smaller on the Game Boy. In a nutshell, coming from Tetris on my smartphone to going back to the past, Tetris is a brutal game.

Then I played some Super Metroid. This is actually an old game I've never played. But I did play Zero Mission on the GBA not long ago and I wanted to try it out. I just can't platform very well anymore. I can't get used to the way Samus jumps. And I keep running out of rockets! I'll be coming back to this game later, but for now, I'm done with it.

Finally (after watching an interesting documentary on the coelacanth) I ended up playing Mortal Kombat II. I used to be awesome at the game when I was 7. But I haven't played the game in 14 years. The last time I played this game was before some of you were even born. So there. If that helps to put it in perspective of how long it's been. Now I can remember being 7 and the only person I could never beat at this game was my father. I did beat him every now and again but I think he just let me win that one time every hundred or so just because he knew I'd say something like, "Yeah Dad! I kicked your ass!!" just to gauge my mom's reaction. So yeah, I haven't played this game in a long time and I just wanted to check it out again after 14 years. It was easy when I was young and the game hasn't changed since it got its first release. And as it turns out, I suck at this game too. The furthest I made it was Round 2 of the second fight. I did find the difficulty settings. I turned them down to "Very easy" and went back. The farthest I made it was the 4th fight. And then I gave up. The game is that hard for me.

So at the end of the day my day has been unproductive and less than enjoyable. It does have nostalgic going for it, though.

I'm beginning to believe that I was a much better gamer when I was a kid than I am as an adult.