can't understand what happened to my passion for gaming

[UALOneKPlus]

I used to love play video games - I'd spend days on games like Castle Wolfenstein, Super Mario Bros, Legend of Zelda, etc...

Nowadays I got an XBOX as a gift from a buddy, and have a good library of XBOX games, but I hardly want to spend any time on it.

The video games just don't feel as fun as they used to in the old Atari and Nintendo days, and I get tired of them really quick.

Even though I have broadband, I have zero desire to get XBOX live and play against ppl online.

I wonder if anyone else has felt this way. What would a psychologist make if tihs?

[BuddhaTB]

I think its just a phase in life when we get old. I'm 21 and sometimes I don't even feel like turning on my PS2 to play, even if I just got a new game in. Maybe we're just getting mature and don't need as many games in our lives anymore. I'll always enjoy video games, but I don't think I'll enjoy it as much as the good old days of Nintendo when we would play endlessly.

[MonteLDS]

i know what u are talking about. Somewhere around 16 I stop caring about being the best at games and my life has slowly gotten like one of a 50 year old... without the wife and kid and the many of nights of love making with my wife...

[Ian]

I think its the quality of the games. I have a very hard time getting into a game that crashes all the time and has no plot.

[MonteLDS]

I have a very hard time getting into a game that crashes all the time and has no plot.

[Turkeyscore.com]

have you tried a different style game? Maybe some kind of racing game would be good like rallisport challenge....or you could try a flight sim...you might be getting bored with shooters and rpgs.

[TheWizard]

Nostalgia is great. If you still have a NES or Atari, dust it off and play! If it doesn't work, well...umm, then you'll have to find another means of entertainment. It is possible to download old NES and Atari games on the PC. Since my Atari 2600 stopped working years ago, I downloaded some of the classic games like Pitfall. I still own the original cartridge, but if the game system doesn't work, neither will the cartridge. It's neat to play old games on the PC though.

[dodecahedron]

Nostalgia is great. If you still have a NES or Atari, dust it off and play! If it doesn't work, well...umm, then you'll have to find another means of entertainment. It is possible to download old NES and Atari games on the PC. Since my Atari 2600 stopped working years ago, I downloaded some of the classic games like Pitfall. I still own the original cartridge, but if the game system doesn't work, neither will the cartridge. It's neat to play old games on the PC though.

where do you download such games?
are there sites dedicated to old games like that?

[TheWizard]

Some sites are dedicated, but they also get shut down because the games can be illegal if you don't already own the cartridge. Search the web for NES/Atari/etc emulators and ROMs (the actual games). You could also browse other file transferring mediums such as IRC, FTP sites, P2P environments, etc. There are plenty of sites out there that can give you a basic history of emulators and ROMs, then, once you know the basics, try searching for the real stuff.

[BillyG]

Look for a emulator called MAME (Multi-Arcade-Machine-Engine). Its supposed to be able to run close to 2000+ arcade games now and the best emulator out there.

Do a search on Google.com for "Mame Roms" and hopefully you can find them. You can find Roms using Kazza Lite or WinMX too. Just be sure to scan those zip files with Norton or Macfee right after you download them.

If you want to stay legal Namco had a series for Playstation 1 called "Namco Arcade" that had pretty good replicas of the orignals. Activision reissued all thier 2600 games on one CD-R a couple of years ago too.

I think its amazing that the early arcade games like Galaga and Defender were only running on 1 mhz and slower processors.