I am not against the easy modes at all, specially for players new to video games or the genre. But I belive that if you play most of the games you ever played in easy mode you are a casual, and not part of the gamer demographic. It is like saying you like hot chili sauce a lot but you can't even take a mild Bufalo sauce. Or saying you are a fan of literature but you only read young adult franchises and rarely touch something that is not a best seller.

And just like that rumor I keep hearing about Cookie Monster going vegetarian...

I refuse to believe it.

Yeah, I am still in disbelief since the facebook page wher I heard it linked to a Destructoid source, but still, if it is true, I just cringe. I once made the mistake of playing Rockman Zero 4 in easy mode thinking it would be just a bit less challenging. I finished the game in less than 2 hours and felt frustrated over the lack of challenge, yes, I saw the whole story, but the lack of challenge was annoying, then I played it in normal mode and it was a totally different experience. To some games an easy mode is like watering down a good wine to make it cheaper.

If an entire generation of young people are incapable or unwilling to be challenged by things, there's only two reasons why...

Laziness or incompetence. I refuse to believe that a whole generation of human beings have grown too goddamn stupid to successfully complete something as simple as a video game. So it must be laziness, and that possibility may be even more frightening.

"Have children grown too lazy to even play video games?"
I just did journalism. There's your next Kotaku article headline.

...cookies are vegetarian.

Not if you put meat in them.

I am not sure it is children or youger generations which don't know the value of a good challenge to the point of prefering to tone it down, and there is a whole generation which in its vast majority has grown that stupid to the point that the man behind Idiocracy cringed at realizing it became all real. The generation of incompetence, entitlement, stupidity, and desire for immediate gratification among other defects. Millennials. Yes, the same idiots who now study in college might as well be the casuals who lack the skill to play a simple game.

By the gods, just when I though this thread could not possibly become any more pathetic :D You are actually going after casual gamers. You actually are insinuating people who are not good at video games shouldn't go to collage. This is a new low not just for this thread, but for this forum in general. It's like some terrible mutation of the "git gud" meme, blind, disfigured and with it's head permanently lodged up it's ass.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go give back my diploma. I'm not nearly godd enough at Mortal Kombat to ba a university graduate :D

I will assume you are in jest and not that you did not really get it. Otherwise it would mean that, as usual, my wording is not clear.

Casual Gamers come to GOG often? Are you one of them? Did you seriously read the most part of posts here? Maybe you should return your diploma because your bad reading comprehension, not for playing games badly. (Seriously someone ever talked about this in the whole thread? hahaha)

If Mortal Kombat is your best example for a "hardcore game" I assume you must be a time traveler from the 90s, that explains many things.

PD: I always sucked at Mortal Kombat.

Don't worry, we all have at least one weak genre. That is why some gamers specialize on one or two genres and rarely play out of that comfort zone.

Hence the popularity of mobile games and the rise of generation casual. Cause and effect. Rinse and repeat.

It is horrible. The "mobile" market is full of crap and cashgrabs, yet it is lauded by everyone and used as an excuse to list groups not interested in video game sas "gamers" just because some soccermom plays 30 minutes of Candy Crush while she picks her child from school and a hipster spends time on a lowly match three game with little to no strategy during his philosophy classes waiting for them to be over and rush to the gender studies seminar. and all of them spend dollars to skip a level or two or get a quick powerup which removes all challenge to an already simple game

Those are not gamers, a gamer invests hours to complete a challenge, a gamer needs a real motive other than skipping challenge to pay in a free game. A gamer seeks an experience, not just a mind numbing activity to do when there is time to kill. Even when we play a game in the casual genre we try to get the best of the game, we concentrate on evaluating the challenge level, we see that game as a true food critic sees Lays potato chips.

Casual gamers, specially hipster casuals who want to alter the industry, are to gamers what yelpers are to food critics. A bunch of guys with little to no experience who think they are hip and trendy, some of which are pretentious idiots who feel they are superior to the average uninformed dude just because they write on a blog.

Part of it is due to the switch that took place about 20 years ago. Once gaming became as big as it did, it stopped being the hobby of a few tech nerds and social retards and became a billion dollar, global social experiment. The casual/mobile gaming stuff is nothing more than catnip for barely conscious service drones masquerading as living beings.

Look at the change in developers. 20-25 years ago, video game developers were stoners who smoked weed, listened to Slayer and barely graduate (or sometimes never went) to college. The were social outcasts and rebels. Now they're buttoned down middle class hipsters with neatly trimmed beards and a total lack of imagination or ingenuity. That same pattern also plays out in music and movies. Anywhere anything creative is being made, it is suffering from being in the wake of talented people who invented entire industries and then moved on to other things.

Mobile gaming, online only casual, dub step, boy bands, endless movie remakes. They are all basically the same thing. Poor, cheaply made vending machine products meant to replace older, valuable products that have long since been sold off or are otherwise unavailable for mass consumption.

Indeed. Quite a godd analysis. But it would seem saying such things, daring to question the casual, has become sort of a taboo too since our rep goes down if we do. I say this writting a smug smile in the real world since I do not get angry when I get haters for expresing myself anymore, I enjoy that now.