What should be the definition of a (hard)core game

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Personally I don't buy the definition of Nitendo, I think a (hard)core game need a certain difficulty setup to be called as such, I mean by that, you can play the game on different difficulty settings to get the real essence of the game. That would make Mario kart hardcore and grand theft auto more casual, but that definition got a lot of flaws, because it doesn't support some genre such as rpg's and simulations games, that requires more patience then anything else. So what's your definition of (hard)core

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