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Parokki on 15 November 2007
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Kasz216 said:
Parokki said:
Casual to me means a game is less about skill (ie. you don't have to learn how to play it) and accomplishment (ie. rarely a campaign that you beat), and more about being easy to access, fun in small amounts, and so forth. I guess anyone could pick this game up and know what to do (aim for the head!), but calling it casual feels very wrong to me.

If that's the case... I think they stopped making non-casual games around the SNES/PS1.


I feel the same way sometimes. It's hard to take people who only play FPS games with 5 second attention spans and call themselves "hardcore gamers" seriously when I've just played heavy strategy games (Hearts of Iron, Master of Orion 3 etc), text-based adventure games and Roguelikes.

I suppose the main difference is that "hardcore" games are designed to appeal to the existing gaming audience, and "casual" games are designed to attract people who've never played games before. I suppose this would mean that in the N64/PS1 era it was Nintendo who had "hardcore" games, the kind of games that were the standard back then, while Sony made a new breed of "casual" games that appealed to the regular Joe, and most importantly managed to make a sizable portion of the population think games were "cool" all of a sudden. 

From what I've heard, Atari fans thought the NES was a piece of crap as well when it came out, but we all know how that ended. 

There are probably better (and less loaded) terms for this than hardcore and casual, but I'm not a native speaker of English per se, and therefore get to cop out of this by saying they're the best I can think of. =P