Modern Gaming

I don't know if it's just me or if other people have noticed it as well, but gaming of all kinds has gone to shit. I remember when I was in my early to mid teens, I was gaming and, granted, I've never been the best, but I was decent. It's not like I'm playing less, hell, I play video games more now then I ever did, and yet it feels like everyone is a hundred times better then me. I remember play SSB growing up and having fun with it. Yeah there were a few people that learned some of the combos by heart, but no one was anywhere NEAR where people are nowadays.

Nowadays it feels like if you want to do anything except get metaphorically raped over and over again then you have to pour every waking moment that you aren't eating (and even that's optional) into that game. What ever happened to jumping online and having a quick match? What happened to playing a game just for fun?

That's something else that gets me. I know that it is fun to win a game, but since when was it the ONLY way to have fun? Since when did people's satisfaction with a game depend on someone else's dissatisfaction? Magic the Gathering for example. I'm more then aware that there have always been people that do nothing but go online, find the top tyr 1 deck, go out and buy the cards for it. Now, mind you, when I started, a Tyr 1 deck usually ran between $80-100. Now, if you want to do anything but loose, you need to spend at LEAST that (or trade for that value) and all you get is a tyr 2 or 3 deck that you sometimes win with. And Tyr 1? the only way you are going to own one of these decks is if you blow hundreds in either booster boxes, trading what you pull for what you need, or (more likely), you spend hundreds buying the exact cards you need for your deck. Either way, unless you have some kind of decent paying job, you can't afford to win most games.

I don't know, once again, I may be the only one out here who seems to have noticed this mass shift of people from casual gaming to hardcore, but it really makes me miss the old days when I could sit down, play mediocre, have a close game that I end up loosing, and walk away happy.