I've recently discovered that I can't play JRPGs anymore, either. When I was much youger, I'd often load up The Bard's Tale on my Apple IIc and attempt to play it, but at that age I never had the patience to actually succeed at it. It seemed more like work to draw maps and manage my characters than anything else. Now that I'm older, nothing seems more exciting to me than a dungeon crawler. Oddly enough, dungeon crawlers such as Wizardry are now almost exclusively designed by Japanese developers, so in order to find RPGs I want to play I'm still looking through a catalog of Japanese games. I played through The Dark Spire on my DS a while ago and absolutely loved it, and I'm currently making my way through Etrian Odyssey II. The DS has been a great platform for me lately. I just read today that Etrian Odyssey III had been announced in Famitsu, and I'm already eagerly anticipating Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey. Because no one else seems to be developing and/or publishing first-person dungeon crawlers in America these days, I've become a huge fan of Atlus for their apparent devotion to the genre.

Also, Nethack has always been a good standby for when I can't find a decent RPG to play. Maybe it doesn't have any kind of story to speak of, but in terms of gameplay it has quite a bit of depth.

When it comes to platformers or action games, I don't think I've outgrown them. I think they've outgrown me. I love playing through Megaman 2, a game I can beat in an hour or so, but I hate all of the modern games with achievements, items you can overlook, secrets, and endings which are only viewable after completing every "optional" challenge included in the game. They aren't really optional challenges if you have this horrible feeling you haven't really beaten the game if you don't complete them. I usually try to complete the extra challenges on my first playthrough, get frustrated with them 2/3 of the way through, and give up in order to play a different game that doesn't ask so much of me. I shouldn't feel the need to access a walkthrough every time I play a game, ESPECIALLY a platformer or an action game. If I'm playing a game like that, it's specifically because I'm tired of all of the complicated things I have to deal with in real life, and I just want to do something simple like jump on monsters or shoot robots. I usually only have an hour or two to play games anymore, and I want a complete experience in those few hours I have. Movies only last two hours, and a lot of them are awesome and can be re-watched dozens of times. Why can't video games be the same way anymore? When I see a label that says "over 50 hours of gameplay!" on a game that isn't an RPG these days, usually that's a sign that I'm never going to have any fun playing it. They might as well put a label on the game that says "this game is horribly tedious!"