Interesting you should say that, cause I have also been playing games for roughly 30 years and I actually found a lot of what he said to be pretty valid and even spot in in many respects. Someone says "I wish we had more hard games like this" and I'm sitting here wanting to explode because I actually think a lot of games these days are harder than what we had growing up.

The way I see this is that a lot of early games were hard because of limited and/or plain bad programming/design. Games these days have no real excuse for being controller-smashing hard unless the player wants them to be. And that's just it: not everyone does. I grew up on games that would grind you into the dirt and then laugh at you - not unlike certain people on various message boards.. I wonder if there's a cause and effect there. Anyways, as I was saying... I'm getting on in my years and I certainly don't have the skills or even the reflexes of my younger self, but I still enjoy gaming and it's nice to know there ARE easier games in the genres I love.

However, my point about games these days being harder still isn't explained. Games are indeed a bit easier.. to get to the end of, but that's not the same as "completing" the game. You look at games like Mario Galaxy with it's purple coins or Cosmic Luigi races, or Megaman X8 with it's palace of spikes and a final boss with "an insta-kill you have but one shot of stopping which easily misses cause you never have to use it normally", or Sonic Adventure 2 and its "beat every level with the highest score possible for an A AND without dying/using checkpoints to get emblems" and suddenly those games aren't so easy anymore.

If I had to compare the games I've completed when I was younger to the games I've completed now, the difference is suddenly startling.

I'm sorry, this was a bit of a tirade and rather off topic. I just felt like I needed to get this off my chest after seeing that snide remark about a person's age simply cause they found a certain game difficulty. :/