"You can't handle modern consoles, pops!"

eBay may primarily be about the buying and selling of second hand goods, but that doesn't mean the company is going to sit back and miss out on the retailing frenzy that is Christmas. With that in mind, the firm has published a commercial which focuses on how it can enliven the festive period of gamers, but in our eyes it's a chilling reminder that we're getting older with each passing year.

In the clip, a father attempts to bond with his son over the PlayStation 3, but there's a problem - dad is befuddled by "all those buttons" and is soundly beaten by his offspring. However, throughout the commercial dad gets his own back by inflicting "retro" games on his son - games with less buttons that his pickled and aging brain presumably finds easier to process. We assume his son's own brain - trained on modern titles with hyper-realistic visuals and intricate control schemes - cannot process the crude graphics properly.

The ad reaches its peak when the two sit down to rip open their Christmas presents - the son is bowled over by his shiny new PlayStation 4 console, while pops is taken back to his childhood by a surprisingly mint NES Action Set. He even blows on the cartridge, just like you're not supposed to! So while Junior enjoys 1080p 3D visuals which would probably burn an older person's eyes clean out of their head, his father has to make do with 25 colours on-screen at once. Any more than that and he might start dribbling, get a bit agitated and fall off the chair.

It's clear that someone at eBay has the hots for Nintendo though, despite the NES being relegated to the status of a dusty old person's console in that first commercial. See if you can spot the unboxing of a SNES Jnr and a bundle of carts in this second commercial: