It's recently become blatantly obvious to me that, gamers of a recent generation have no appreciation of the games they play. A neighbour and a friend of his visited me recently, and saw me playing on my Wii on Super Mario Bros. The first game I ever properly played at the age of 5, and instantly started ripping into the games graphics, and calling it *hit. Enlightening them was a total waste of time. In fact I think I’d of gotten a new born hamster to do backflips everytime it did a poop in its cage.

So teenagers thinking they are the geniuses they most certainly aren't, were then asked by me what do they play? Halo Trilogy, CoD's, Gear's, Ghost Recon, Far Cry's etc, the obvious pattern of shooter, shooter, shooter.

"So you must love Fallout 3 then." Thinking I had hit the target here, only to be greeted with more profanity. Yet my head ticks off mini guns, rifles, grenades of a varying nature, the fatman. So I fire my 360 up and show them 5 minutes of fallout 3 where the super robot is marching through the DC ruins and me firing mini nukes while I remember they are in the room and being silent. New underwear please, the "geniuses" have apparently lost control of their functions. Yet despite this and a recovery later they still begin bitching about its RPG elements.

Wait a second. They are about 15, I've just turned 25. Sure it’s 10+years of gaming difference here but if these teens are the gamers of the future, how will they even come to appreciate the games of the past? Or at the very least respect them. I dislike pong, but it still doesn't mean I don't respect it because if it wasn't for this back in 1972, recreational videogames wouldn't exist... technically.

Back to these posers, thinking they are gamers. don't know what a platformer is in fact have hardly heard of the term but at least my neighbour has at least by this point gone over to the Wii and had a go on Super Mario Bros, I try and educate his mate on Donkey Kong the first real Mario game that would set up Super Mario Bros. but he says, " Oh Donkey Kong is pretty cool dude" (I assume he surfs, hair hasn't seen a comb since he was 4 and is mildly tanned and called me dude :p) till he facepalms himself when I load a flash version of Donkey Kong on my laptop. With apparently even *hit*** graphics, but it’s a damn fine recreation of the original. Boy doesn’t have a clue, till something worse is uttered by my neighbour who shouts out "Oh my god he just turned into a milkman!" (You can't make this crap up; you really can't especially at 4:30am.) I then turn to see fireball Mario and slump my head in frustration.

I was born in 1983 yet even I got to play the Atari 2600 and space invaders, pong, centipede, defender etc. which were way before my time even in 1989. I still appreciated them even if they were horribly crap, because I knew they helped in some way spawn the awesome games I had back home on my NES.

Why is it, that no matter how much I showed them the diversity of my current gen' gaming collection they still don't appreciate the games they play? I know this is down to parents who aren't gamers, and want nothing to do with informing their kids about games, or even if they were like my neighbours parents who are just ignorant and buying him the manhunts and GTA's thinking its mindless fun. I genuinely hope if you’re a real gamer thinking these two kids are the biggest dumbasses you've heard of since the village idiot, if you get a child into gaming get them to appreciate the origins of that awesome game they love playing so much in the future is from. Because I know if I have children I couldn't call myself a Hardcore Gamer anymore if my own child didn't appreciate where not only their food comes from (and I don't mean Asda or Wal*Mart) or where games really began, Life itself would of been a failure.