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/)