I remember as a child, being bitterly disappointed with how bad Ferrari Formula 1 was on the Amiga, and I ended up blaming the slow speed on C. That colored my attitude toward the language for years, though once I started working, I ended up writing C++ mainly.
Nowadays, I've reverted to coding in C99, simply because I can easily find libraries for 'hard things' like generating jpeg files, and because cleanly written C performs like almost nothing else, and because console programs have a refreshing simplicity about them, especially if you put all the cool stuff in a library, then just hash up a text-based front-end.
There's a heck of a lot you can do in 1000 lines of C, and it's fun to write too, without the hassle and slow performance of an IDE like VS or XCode.