FPS Games are for casual gamers!!!

[BrainBoxLtd]

I'm personally sick of this crap with branding games "Hardcore" or "Casual". If there's anything thing to learn from all this leaderboard jazz from this generation, it’s that pretty much every game has “hardcore” players. There’s people who play Wii Sports until the game simply won’t increase their score any higher and there’s people who just buy Halo to jump around circles and chuck grenades at one another online.

You can argue which games are catered more to a “casual” crowd and which are aimed at the “core” crowd, but just like how different movies can mean different things to different people, how people play a game also varies person to person. Regardless of how something was made to be played, it might be played in a different way than the developers intended, just as someone might interrupt a film differently than it creators.

You can casually play something like World of Warcraft and just eff around with you friends online, or you can be a “hardcore” WoW player who power grinds a dozen characters and are constantly in and out of raids to finish a loot set for each of them. Or (more likely) something somewhere in between.

Even games that don’t encourage replays or have different modes or track scores usually have their own hardcore nuts taping speed runs. Portal’s freeware predecessor, Narbacular Drop, is incredibly short and straight forward, and yet you have people doing speed runs for no reason other than the Challenge. I played THPS3 hours and hours after finishing every goal just to keep making my own killer replays.

Maybe part of the problem is there’s still no set definition of “hardcore” games or gamer and this is just me pushing my take on it. Generally I feel the term “hardcore” as lost any meaning when used in context with gamers or games now since it’s been so horribly thrown around by so many people in so many fashions, but if prodded I’m inclined to suggest games are as “core” as you want them to be.

I’m a stubborn completionist lunatic with way too much free time, and my sister is a happy social person living a normal life. Yet she kicks my ass at Guitar Hero. Why? Because I just play it every now and then, when I’m in the mood. She plays it all the time on and offline, constantly beating songs on expert mode. I play Guitar Hero “casually” and she can be rather “hardcore” about it. Most games can be a fun time waster or a insane challenge. It usually depends on how you approach them.