My dream is that one day a major videogame media outlet will approach me to begin writing a column called 'The Jaded Gamer' where I talk about how most modern games pretty much suck, wax geriatrics about how we used to play Mario 2 until our thumbs bled, and yes Timmy, there was a time when you could walk off of one side of the screen and appear on the other.

With all the sh*t-talking I do about Gamespot (despite them being so kind as to give me an outlet for my rants) I doubt they will be the first to approach, but I have my fingers crossed that someday some scout will dig up these blogs and connect my ID tag with my pen-name I write under for Japanzine, and offer me carte blanche to write my own column.

Until then, this will be my personal (and mostly private - although I have one guy tracking me now! Whoever you are, you get 4 gold stars! and a smiley face for every other poor soul you lead to the dark side) soapbox, despite Gamespot's continuous denials to put me on the real 'user soapbox'.

Probably because my username offends people (the same guys that run over hookers in GTAIV), and I don't have a profile picture (tried to upload one of Snake or something a long time ago but the file was too big and it wouldn't accept it. been too lazy ever since). But I like to think the content of my steadily-increasing-in-frequency rants are of much higher quality than the circuitous and mostly self-serving Freshman-philosophy-flunkie term paper material most of the guys that actually do make the soap box are putting out (with pretentious titles like 'Absolutism in Gaming...' and a real groaner from some time ago about how people who talk about Ayn Rand without reading The Fountainhead cover to cover are phonies).

I pull no punches: I write these stupid blogs because I do hope, eventually, someone or with luck even a handful of people will actually read them and find them interesting or at least agree with me, or at least hate me in an intelligent kind of way. I have little mercy for modern gaming and modern gamers, who are a different breed from the gamer friends I had years ago (whom I subsequently ditched- around the time Playstation 1 came out- for a more balanced social life and the ability to fly under the radar when it came to my then-#1 hobby).

Gaming is no longer my #1, or even my #2 hobby, and I have come to terms with the fact that I will probably not have enough money during the entire run of the current generation of systems to actually purchase one. I have made peace with the fact that for the next 4 to 6 years, in the few instances that I do have free time, I will be playing old school RPGs and re-treading Metal Gear Solid 3 and Resident Evil 4. In fact, this is the way I like it. I will stick myself in a kind of time capsule- a pocket of time in which gaming was good and honest and free from pretension and shields that refill after you duck behind some barrels for a few seconds. I will shamelessly download emulators for systems long, long dead and gone and play top-down shooters that remind me of my Nagoya days, killing a few 100-yens between dates and all-night parties with some truly interesting, worldly people, in smoke-filled arcades where men and girls both converged to watch the slightly aloof gaijin nearly beat Raiden 3.

I hope to emerge a better man. Someone that the masses of the newest game-hungry generation will point to and call a Guru of modern gaming - the man that went under into the abyss of 2D classics and those wonderful amalgams of 3D and pixel-sprites and refused to come out until the gaming world was a better place again.

In a way the decline of gaming has liberated me from a vice that robbed me of the life I should have had when I was a kid- baseball, soccer, snowball dances. Fishing with dad. I'm getting a late start, but I'm starting to practice the sports I never got a chance to get good at, fulfilling my dreams of seeing the world outside of 32-bit lenses, hooking up with girls and making good friends in every major continent.

But I go forth in the world guided by my old heroes, who like the comic book heroes of old had morals and personalities that you filled out with your own imagination and a tangeability that even the world itself seems to have lost. Mario, and Snake, the Belmont Clan, Pac-man, Liu Kang, and Cloud Strife and the gang all got my back.

The kids these days have no one to look up to but cold anti-heroes who stab hookers, faceless, gritty space marines, and graphically rendered hands that connect to no one in particular.

Yeah, it's a sad state of affairs.