Comment Re:Has anyone considered... (Score 1) 185
When I was in college, my girlfriend and I scoured every odd pawn shop in town for the odd overlooked Nintendo game and stayed up all night playing Gauntlet and Xenophobe. After college but before I had kids, I burned many an afternoon with my friends playing Quake, Goldeneye 64, Gran Turismo or some incarnation of Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat. Now that I have kids and my last-gen games are looking a bit dated (I have GameCube/PS2/Xbox), we got a Wii. I really enjoy Mario Galaxy, Twilight Princess, Tatsunoko Vs CAPCOM, RE4:Wii Edition, and No More Heroes.
What games can I log a lot of time on? Mario, Zelda, and maybe some Tatsunoko Vs CAPCOM. RE4 and NMH end up being a after-the-kids-have-gone-to-bed game, and guess what. By the time they're asleep, I've probably had enough for one day too. By your definition, my older son who will play LEGO Batman until the Wii overheats is more hardcore than I am. I play TvC with a Gamecube controller, he uses the simple controls. How can I be the less hardcore?
Meanwhile I am presented with lots of odd scenarios.
"You play fighting games and you didn't own a Saturn or a Dreamcast? You're not hardcore."
"Wow, there's lots of stuff out there for the Wii that isn't a sports game collection? Thanks for helping me pick something out. It's nice that a hardcore gamer would be willing to help out a noob like me."
"You don't own a PS3 or a 360? How can you even call yourself a gamer?"
"Seriously, you finished Devil May Cry and Ninja Gaiden? Those games are brutal. I can't even have any fun playing them."
It took me years to finish Devil May Cry (2 and 3 were much easier), and some crosstraining from Ninja Gaiden may have helped a little, but the best thing about the Devil May Cry games is that you can save at absolutely any time. So, if there's an incident involving bodily functions that I need to tend to, or someone wants their third hot dog, or I can't stand how much sand got tracked on to the living room rug, I can deal with it. I think I have gravitated towards fighting games because single playthroughs are not 6+ hours. The other thing I really like is a game like Pikmin where time is naturally divided into 15 minute segments. And another thing - as a parent, it's a lot more satisfying to play Wii Bowling or Tatsunoko vs CAPCOM with my son if we have time to do that than to play a more difficult game by myself. It's not that I've 'grown out' of gaming, but how it fits into the rest of my life has necessarily changed because the rest of my life has changed.