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Icyedge said:
The Ghost of RubangB said:

Hardcore games are games that came out before 1995, except for bullet hell games, indie games, and Bejeweled 2.

Where are you taking your definition from?

It was right about 1995 when every game genre got super-easier for a couple reasons.

3-D replacing 2-D: 3-D games are always easier than 2-D games.  You can move in 360 directions instead of 4.  To make up for this, they take out the precision of crazy jumps.  There are jumps in Super Mario Bros. 1 that are harder than any 3-D game's jumps.  Same goes for shooters.  Games like Halo replaced games like Contra and Metal Slug (although the first Doom and Quake games were hard as hell).

Cutscenes changing the focus to story: now games have stories with endings.  So they want you to finish the whole game and get to the end, so you can see the cliffhanger ending, so you want to buy the sequel to finish the story.  Now it's in their best interest to make the game easy enough to beat.  Back in the day games wouldn't even have endings.  Sometimes they'd just say "CONGRATULATIONS" or "THANKS FOR PLAYING!" or "A WINNER IS YOU!"

There was also an increase in save points, and people have stopped using lives and continues.  Back in the day, if you couldn't beat a game in one sitting, you couldn't beat a game.

 

I threw in bullet hell games because they're all impossible, indie games because they can do whatever they want and make some crazy hardcore stuff without giant publishers breathing down their necks to throw in aliens, nazis, save points, naked chicks, and cliffhanger endings, and Bejeweled 2 because of that guy who played it for 3 years straight and broke the scoreboard.