One thing that comes to my mind is Guitar Hero 1 or 2. That game has a great range of skill requirements so players can start easy and go up as their skills grow, or they can stay at the level they find the most enjoyment playing. For me I started at Medium and mostly found that the only fun level to play at. Soon that feeling shifted to hard, and now, even though I can't finish some songs on Expert, its really the only level I can have fun playing.

I think the game can really help train and improve your reflexes. You'll find songs that are easy, moderate, and serious challenges even within a difficulty setting so there's always something to work on if you have a mind to actually improve your reflexes. I can't promise any personal skills transferring to other games, but I dont see how it can hurt.

I believe the game trains reflexes better than it forces the user to attempt to memorize anything. Your brain becomes comfortable with the speed at which the notes come at you. Your hands coordinate to strum and fret notes and though your fingers will become more comfortable with certain note combinations or movements, most people never really 'memorize' a song (like they might memorize the way a Mario level plays out) . Most everyone plays by sight and sound instead.

Edit: Well, all that, plus its loads of fun.

One thing that I wonder.

Why do you care how good you are? You say the bosses in metroid prime took 10 tries sometimes. The point is, you beat them. That's the way you get better, by dying over and over. Every time a new game system comes out, I have to learn new controls, I never played xbox until just a few months ago when I got my 360 and I still hate FPSes on it.

I've been gaming since I had an NEC 8080 computer (or with my atari 2600 can't remember which came first) and I still get slaughtered by people in online games, but I enjoy games for the fun of them. I don't care if I die over and over in a game (unless its just due to horrible controls, E.T. for example).

So, in my opinion feel free to die away, and come back stronger to finally beat that boss.

Being a gamer isn't about 'm@D Sk1llz' it's about finding games enjoyable and playing them.

I now welcome you to the brotherhood. The brotherhood of those that die a lot.

*shifty eyes*
I can't give you the secret handshake yet, but you can drink from the punch bowl, it's over there next to the dirty skimmers. . .
*points*

Getting horribly gibbed is it's own reward. Make a game of it! The one who dies the best gets all the clan-love anyways.

No, there's no hope for you.

We're all born with whatever talents we have, all fully developed, from birth. Who in their right mind would think that a human would get better at something if he kept practicing it? You must be crazy.

Please go away, crazy person.

I've been gaming since I touched Dig Dug on my grandfather's Atari 2600. Do you think I'm good at everything I touch? Hell no. I can barely keep my car on the dirt track in Dirt, and give me Forza 2 with tar roads it might as well become Destruction Derby.

Just find your niche genre that you "click" with. It was RPGs for me at a young age that I eventually grew out of just this year by branching out to the types of games I swore I would never buy. Maybe you are part of the rare breed that are wizards at the incredibly complex Guilty Gear games. Who knows?

The great thing about gaming is that it's fun to practice, and not a burden. Any reason to play more is good.

Go out there, grab a console for yourself, a game or two in a couple genres, and clean your Saturday schedule. Have fun.

We have an actual diagnosis for this condition here at GWJ now, since I started posting about a year or so ago. It's called:

"Being Rabbit"

Welcome to my world bro. I love games. I evangalize games. I write about games. I spend way too much money on games. And man, do I SUCK. Ask anyone here.

But at some point I just stopped caring. Sure, that means there are "hard" games I just give up on, but then again, rentals and gametap cure a world of pain. Just play the stuff thats still fun.

And, by the way, GH for the win. Until Rock Band.

Seconded. It's taken me years to realize that I'm just no good at most games that require fast reflexes, and allow myself to tone down the difficulty so that they're actually enjoyable rather than just exercises in frustration. There's a difference between having fun practicing through failure, and ending up in forehead-throbbing frustration because a boss specializing in cheap, instant kills has ganked you again, requiring yet another five-minute walk from the save point to try again.

The next time you're ready to throw the controller across the room, try toning down the difficulty (or just flat-out cheating) and see if you aren't having a much better time five minutes later.

I've been playing since the dawn of time -- I still remember that day when I went into a computer store excited about the idea of graphic games, and was told that computers aren't powerful enough for games to be graphical. It crushed me, as I figured that meant they never would be.

I've always tended to use walk-throughs and to let other people do the thinking for me. Recently I realized that one of the more positive benefits of games (especially the kind I like to play) is that they encourage thinking, learning, and improving mental accuity. Except for 20 years I've done everything I could to avoid that part of playing games.

So now I'm playing without walk-thrus, and am even just now trying to get back into non-MMOG multiplayer to see if I can get my brain clicking enough that I don't *always* lose.

I think part of this is preparation...for multiplayer games, playing skirmish against the AI to learn maps and concepts before going in to get crushed all the time. And actually bothering to learn all those nooks and crannies of the game that I never usually bothered with, as long as I could limp by in the single-player campaign.

It looks like I'm intent on spending a lot of time with games, so as long as I am, I figure I meant as well get some of the benefits...

Ye Gods, not the "play a real instrument LOL" argument. I've played the piano daily since I was six years old. I've been in rock bands, soul bands, funk bands, and jazz combos. I can play any lick you throw at me in any key, instantly.

...and I still love Guitar Hero almost as much as I love playing music in real life, although for very different reasons. People who roll their eyes at the idea of flailing around on a plastic guitar don't understand that the appeal of the game doesn't lie solely in pretending to play an instrument. The wonderful thing about the game is that it forces you to start listening to songs the way a musician would. When I hear guitar solos on the radio now, I start to break them down and analyze them, something I would previously only do to keyboard parts. I can't wait until Rock Band starts forcing me to really listen to the drums.

In conclusion, um, buy Guitar Hero. What was this thread about again?

Are you sure that your skills have plateaued already, if you didn't grow up with games? If you're genuinely terrible right now, my hunch is that will pass in time.

If you feel like you're no longer noticing improvement as you play, then I wouldn't hold out hope for future miracles. I'm inclined to believe that your gaming ability in any given genre is something that you can't really do a whole lot about without investing a ton of hours (once you hit that stable point). I have "coached" a number of friends who wanted to be better at Quake or Halo, and while I could teach them to run a map properly, learn 'em to reload at the right times, and generally improve their grasp of the cerebral aspects of the game, they just couldn't aim very well. Didn't matter that they were putting far more hours into practice than I was, they just weren't wired for it, deep in the lizard part of the brain. Their training made them noticeably better, but they'd still get housed by someone who hardly touched the game, but had the knack of FPS play. Same goes for teaching Starcraft to friends who could never handle selecting an individual templar to psi-storm just the right area in the heat of battle.

Having said that, who cares about being great? No matter how good or bad you are, you'll always find folks who are better, and others who are worse. If you enjoy playing games, why quit? And if you've only been playing on your own system for a year or two, I doubt that you've hit the skill plateau yet.

zyblorg, maybe you just weren't meant for twitch games. How about turn-based games? Consoles may not focus on them, but you can find quite a few on the PC. TBS games like Civilization, shooters like Jagged Alliance 2 and Silent Storm.

[Incoming Dumpster]

I like gamer tags like "your dear mother" and "an innocent child." That way when they kill me, they're told that they just headshot somethign kind and sympathetic. It's a meta-game strategy.

Games are supposed to be fun. So it really shouldn't matter how good you are, it shouldn't skew your enjoyment. The only thing that skews this is online play. And even then if you don't mind losing often you can still have fun. I frankly don't care that I never made it past "easy" on Guitar Hero. Easy was fun and medium wasn't. So I stayed on easy. Big deal.

"If you can't learn to do something well, learn to enjoy doing it poorly." - Demotivator Poster

Seriously, the best thing you can do is not care about being good. You're sure to be satisfied.

If you find that you can't change your attitude, then take baby steps. Oblivion might be the best game for that method and it's already in a genre you seem comfortable with. While some games allow you to select your difficulty at the beginning of a chapter or only at the beginning of the game, Oblivion has a difficulty slider that you can adjust every other second if you are so inclined.