In my day, our games actually had objectives, and these objectives were no picnic either. Have you ever dodged evil pogo sticks while jumpin' platforms and avoidin' living fireballs in Donkey Kong? How about runnin' through caves while being attacked by invisible enemies in The Adventure of Link? I didn't think so. Rotten little kids, with your fancy Max Payne and Metal of Honor. You wouldn't stand a chance in the original Mega Man. No bullet time or AI teammates are gonna help you while your ass freezes off against Ice Man. And get this: no unlimited lives either. You screw up one too many times and you're done. Next in line.
When was the last time you faced off against a deadly arcade cabinet? Not those fancy-shmancy games like Crazy Taxi that keep ahold of your ADD-plagued attention spans for five minutes while you waste away your two quarters' worth. I'm talking about the real classics... Centipede. Pac-Man. Space Invaders. And not those "improved" versions like Centipede 2000. They ain't classics, mind you! When you boot up your high-tech Dell computer and pop in Centipede 2000, no one's gonna crowd around you and cheer you on while you frantically jerk around the joystick and rack up the points. Ah, the good ol' days. Now, they don't make arcades like they used to. Come to think of it, they don't make arcades period. All the arcade machines are being squeezed into the corners of mediocre Pizza Parlors or being sold off to old-school gamers. Stupid kids... it's all your fault.
You dang kids these days think games are all about the graphics, don't ya? You wouldn't flock to Halo if it had the looks of the original Quake, would you? Blast it, in MY day, we didn't need no fancy 256-bit, DVD-playin', hard drive totin', online gamin' system to have fun. All the good games of my day had barely recognizable characters, and you had to refer to the manual or the design on the arcade cabinet to remind yourself what you were playin' again. Why, even the 16-bit games like A Link to the Past didn't have perfect graphics. Link's hair was pink! And yet the game is still being praised as one of the greatest Zelda games ever. In twenty years, let's see your perfect-graphics, no-plot, no-challenge, first-person-shooter hunk of garbage get that kind of praise.
I hope my wisdom has helped enlighten you on the glory of the old days. The old school gamin' era started everything you're playin' now. Respect your past, you little scamps!