In my "The Wii will never get the kind of third party support the PS2" had thread, I see people cutting it down the middle between "casual" and "hardcore" types of games, but even when I use those words, I don't think they are correct and it bothers me.
A game I would view as hardcore would be a shooter like Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved which if you were talking about classical music would be designated as "pure music" rather than the second type of music that is typical of Wagner's operas and more story driven musical pieces. There is no true story involved other than you're a spaceship or shape firing at other space ships or shapes and trying to get the highest score in order to move up the game's leaderboards which is the point of the game's existence to see who is the better player or best player in the world which is the same objective with eighties arcade games and pinball machines and that I think is the point of all real "hardcore" games.
However in a debate involving "hardcore" and "casual" when discussing the types of game differences between the HD and console games, I think most people are using the word "hardcore" to include many types of games that are quite different from Geo Wars. early arcade games, and pinball machines. I think people are meaning the types of games that have always predominated on SNES, PS1 and PS2 when they use the term "hardcore" and the goal of aa lot of those games isn't to become such a harcore player of the game that you have the highest score in the world at the game but to explore worlds and see how stories turn out in rpgs and action adventure or adventure games like Metal Gear, Fallout, Final Fantasy and even Gears or Halo also have story driven aspects. I know when I'm talking about the kind of games that I apply the word "harcore" to that I'm generally speaking more about these types of games than arcade and pinball type games.
As far as casual goes. I don't know if its the right label either. If people are playing Wii Sports in an attempt to be the very best in the world at it or Wii Fit to lose more weight and be in better shape than anyone else, then they can be hardcore players of these games that many are speaking about when using the term "casual". In fact in some respects these games can be closer in many respects to the pure gaming dimension that I applied to Geo Wars, arcade games, and pinball machines than the stroy driven games I mentioned in my last paragraph.
However, to truely follow a game like Metal Gear Solid's story for over 20 years and listened to every codec conversation in the series and memorized all the cinema scenes, or to know series like Zelda or Final Fantasy so well that you can comstruct complex timelines of all of those series events, or to have explored every possible nuance of huge worlds like those featured in Fallout 3 and Oblivion those can be hardcore undertakings.
I'm not sure that the terms "harcore" and "Casual" are proper words to discuss the differences between the Wii games and HD games that everyone uses to distinguish them .
