Vidiot Games

As a kid, I feel like I was better at video games than I am now. This is not something of great importance, probably, in the whole grand scheme of life, but I like to look at this and wonder how it illustrates changes in my personality over the last 30 years. When you go back and play old games, especially on the NES, you realize something: games were INSANELY difficult. Playing emulators as I got older made me reliant on using "save states," something that obviously didn't exist on original systems. So last night, I purchased the Megaman Legacy Collection on the Switch for 8 bucks, which is the first six games in the series. There's a feature on Switch where if you press the L turbo button (is that what it's called?) the game instantly starts rewinding. I suppose it's nice to be able to do this. But, you know what, we never had this feature back in the old days. If you fell off a cliff and died, there was no rewind. There were no save states. It's back to, depending on the game, maybe a spot just before where you died, or if you lost all your lives, you end up at the beginning of the level, or worse, you start the entire game over. So playing the original Megaman, I was struck with how much I suck at this kind of game. Not that I don't know how to move around and shoot and dodge enemy attacks. It's more than that. As kids, we possessed a sort of intense mental endurance that is absolutely lacking today. Or maybe other people have it still. I do not. This mental endurance I speak of, in my own terms, refers to the fact that when you die, you start over, and you repeat the stage over again, and then you die again, and then you start the stage over again, and you keep doing this over and over and over again until you get it right. I apparently don't have this anymore, because after dying 30 times, I went into "rewind" mode, where I essentially gave up on the old school tradition of just re-treading the same stage repeatedly, said to myself, "I'm not going through this garbage anymore," and then proceeded to rewind every single time I died. If I had chosen never to rewind, I would estimate that beating this game for me would take weeks. Do I have the mental endurance to stick with it for that long? A thousand times, no. So how did young Holden do it? I don't know. Was I more patient then? Everyone, especially my mom, made sure I was well aware, as a child, that I was the most impatient child that has ever existed. I rememeber, as a kid, throwing down the controller on several occasions. But I still stuck with these kinds of games as a kid and would eventually beat them. Maybe I was better, quicker, at recognizing enemy attack patterns, so the trial and error was considerably shorter.