zombie84 said:

I think it's because in the 80s and 90s we were just better gamers. Repetition, memorization, pattern recognition and tons of practice on nothing but hard games, by todays standards. The mainstream explosion of gaming in the early 2000s has progressively dumbed down the standards of difficulty in games.

Exactly. Back in the N64/PSX days, I remember one of my friends watching his youngest brother playing some 64 plat-former game he played constantly and still sucked at. My friend sighed like a warbler and made a comment about how the poor kid is never going to be good at video games because he had just missed the 2D era and was stuck finding some silly 3D game we found ridiculously easy overly hard.

Didn't think much about it at the time, but he pretty much his the nail on the head. This was probably back in 1997 or 8.

I didn't realize it would make me suck at games too, though. Bought Mega Man 9 for the 360 a few years ago, have played it for hours, and have still never managed to beat a single boss. I was playing those games back when I was in first grade (I seem to recall a phase where I ran around the playground during recess with a blue sock on one arm making annoying pew pew sounds as I shot my friends), and was fairly decent at them.