I suppose hardcore and casual, to me, has a different meaning from everyone else. Hardcore gamers are the ones who care about all games, who watch the industry and find games that they enjoy, rather than basing what is good and what is not solely on what kind of hardware is required to play it.

In any case, a lot of those people who think they’re “hardcore” and shout it out are some of the reasons why I tend to shun gaming communities nowadays (and am not as deeply into games anymore). Used to be, gamers stuck together. Now it’s Xbox vs. PS vs. Nintendo vs. PC. It’s damn annoying. I’d rather be known as a “casual” gamer.

I’ll tolerate casual games as long as they don’t take over the sophisticated games completely.

But it seems they have taken over the Wii. I feel like my Wii is a cute little toy of a system that holds a plethora of Mario Party-esque mini-games. The only titles I had any interest in really were Twilight Princess and SSBB. And being a Zelda fanboy, It feels as if Nintendo is slowly killing my soul. *heavy sigh*

I love the fact that gaming is becoming more mainstream, yet hate it. Mainstream means appealing to the wider audience, like Pop music does ; and everyone knows pop music is terrible. I just hope they dont forget about the original fanbase.

Obviously there is, and still should be, a market and fun, well-designed games for the hardcore set - I got my time, and the folks who have chosen to game exclusively as a hobby, or who simply have chosen careers or paths with more free time than mine - should get to have as much fun as I did planting a bomb on every single brick in every single frame of Hyrule. However, I can’t be too upset about the casual revolution, as without it, I’d have to give up the hobby entirely… and I’m not ready for that yet!

I do think there is something to be said of gamer age… What Nintendo has really tried to do from the outset is not just to appeal to those outside of the core market, but to get back old gamers who have gotten lost over the years. You know, those older guys who played the NES and the SNES. And I think this is what the Wii has largely done. The whole reason I bought a Wii in the first place was for the Virtual Console. Say what you want about Live, while the online features are cool in some cases… overall I just want to play the original version. And a lot of these remakes you see on various platforms (live included) are not the same at all and this is part of the charm of the VC (don’t get me started on how Square completely ruined Final Fantasy on the GBA by importing their crappy new systems into a great game). At any rate, the thing with trying to get the former gamers back is that a lot of the stuff that people liked back in the golden age of gaming is the simplicity of these games. There wasn’t really any complexity to Super Mario Bros, Donkey Kong, or anything like that (Zelda was complex by design, and you note that these days though the series has maintained much of the feel, it is considered a simple game by many lol). So these are the games that Nintendo decided to start to remake when they started making new games for both the DS and Wii. I can’t say they’ve made a mistake, business is booming. And people I know in real world are truly interested in a console for the first time since the SNES days.

And gotta say it… when wasn’t WoW catering to the casual gamer? LOL They’ve always been known as the casual gamer’s MMO ROFL I think Puzzle Pirates is more hardcore than WoW and that game is based on casual games.