In the first decade or so of my gaming life, I really was a 'the glass is half full' kind of guy. Everytime I got a new game, I would euphorically dub it 'the best game ever' after barely having made it past the title screen, a cIassification that usually lasted until the next video game was bought and inevitably received with a similar amount of worship. I don't know exactly why I did this, but it must have been a combination of infantile positivism and a reluctance to admit that I bought a subpar game; after all, I didn't have a lot of money to spend as a kid and acknowledging the crappiness of a game was equal to realising that I had just wasted a good three months of pocket money. Whatever the reason for this attitude, I sometimes miss the days in which I could attribute scores of 90% or higher to virtually every remotely playable game I owned. Especially since I made the switch back to PC gaming - after spending over a decade as a console peasant - I find it increasingly more difficult to enjoy games that don't meet my high expectations.

Due to what can be described as the 'Steam holiday sales fever', I now have a bigger gaming backlog than ever before. Unlike some people, I don't see this as a bad thing, as I theoretically always have something to play when I'm bored. In practice, however, a lot of my gaming sessions are preluded by me staring indecisively at my desktop or Steam library for roughly the same amount of time it took me to write this article. The worst part is that this ritual is not even caused by the games all being equally fantastic, but rather by so many titles just not living up to my standards, so that playing them feels like a chore - a tedious time wasting session that could easily be spent on more fruitful activities. When I compare this sentiment with my optimist attitude as a child, it is tempting to conclude that games simply have gotten worse. The truth, however, is in fact quite the opposite: some of the more recent games I've played are so good that it is hard to settle for anything less.

The most obvious example of me subconsciously raising the bar of my expectations can be found in the first person shooter genre. When I reviewed The Conduit a little over a year ago, the only current-gen system I owned was a Wii, and as a result I didn't have a lot of experience with modern first person shooters. I acknowledged the game's flaws, but at the same time I found it a very enjoyable title, and I even went as far as finishing it twice, which is a rather rare thing for me to do still. After I got my gaming PC a little while later, though, the first thing I did was to get virtually every borderline relevant FPS title of the past 7 or so years. Games such as STALKER, Crysis, Half-Life 2, BioShock, FEAR, ArmA II, Call of Duty 4 and Cryostasis were all purchased, finished and digested.

Crude as it may sound, I don't think I would have gone through the trouble of even finishing The Conduit once, had I gotten it during my PC gaming period. I know this because, apart from the FPS cIassics mentioned in the previous paragraph, I also got plenty of other, less relevant games in the genre, such as Aliens vs. Predator 2010, Doom 3, Section 8 and Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter. And even though these titles are all better shooters than The Conduit, I have not gotten around to beating any of these games yet, as even staring at my desktop strikes me as more appealing sometimes.

Each playing session involving any of these games is usually accompanied by a critical analysis of every shortcoming I expose, as well as rather unfair mental benchmarking tests involving superior games. While my body is trying to progress through the game, my mind is constantly generating negative remarks about what happens on the screen: "the guns in this game handle horribly in comparison to STALKER"; "the AI is horrible compared to FEAR's"; "wow, the level design is lackluster"; "the story can't compete with the plot of Cryostasis", et cetera. It seems as if I have developed a critical, somewhat cynical view on gaming that keeps victimising a steadily increasing number of titles.

While my newfound eye for detail certainly benefits my skills as a reviewer, I sometimes long back to the time when I could still enjoy every halfway decent game that ended up in my collection. In those days, I could be totally immersed by a game like Tonic Trouble, or look past the inherent flaws of Rare's collectathon platformers. Nowadays, even so-called AA games such as Doom 3 can at times bore me to death. This is particularly sad, seeing as games are still entertainment, and snobbish aesthetic ideals of what video games should strive for or embody essentially only mar the pleasure derived from them. Perhaps my coming of age and subsequent joining of the ranks of the PC master race have finally taken their toll.

Thank God there are more important things to worry about in life than video games. I just hope I don't become a cynical snob in real life, as well.