Throughout the past few years, I’ve often lamented the unfortunate fact that I can’t play video games the way I used to. I don’t know if it’s just a fact of growing up, a loss of patience/wonderment, or the existence of the computer I’m currently typing on. I imagine that it’s a combination of the three. Well, regardless of the cause, the fact is, I am mostly unable to just sit down and enjoy video games like I used to, and it sucks. Very rarely, if I find a game to be absolutely phenomenal, I can sit down and bang through it, but that’s been happening with games that are linear as all hell and not particularly long experiences (999, Ghost Trick, and any Layton game immediately come to mind). It’s not a good feeling being incapable of enjoying the things that made my childhood as rad as it was. Or at least not being able to enjoy them nearly as much.

To completely contradict everything I’ve just said, I recently had two sessions of playing 4-5 hours of Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete on my PS1. This game is the bomb and is pretty captivating, but these factors haven’t really made a difference in my ability to play a game (I’ve tried to play Okami and MGS1 and have had no such luck, despite the fact that those games are in the upper echelon of video game quality). Probably helps that it’s my girlfriend’s favorite game, but still, I don’t believe that fully explains my willingness to sink ten hours into a JRPG over the course of two days. I don’t quite know what it was, but I know it made me feel like a kid again. It ruled. All I can say is that I hope this happens more often while I still have the time to play video games.

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