Well...younger games play the same format FPS over with a different skin over...and over and over again,,,
So..yeah I would say the older players and platform players are still a little hardcore. How many kids nowadays actually complete skyrim in it entirety...how many could play ff7 or ff8...in their entirety...these games required work and tedious hours...that was the challenge.. Playing call of duty is fun ...but it doesnt take much endurance or concentration to play for 8 hours straight...because well...its easy to play with for 8 hours straight...

How many times has someone here played a FPS and been like...Whoa..where did the time go??

Well, nothing to argue there Also, more game-changing mechanics were introduced in the newer games - skill trees, level scaling, crafting...

To go back to your original post, it's interesting that you switched to PC because the games allowed saving any time instead of just set save points. My thoughts  are completely opposite, I'd like the save points to return. When I can quicksave the game every two seconds, there's almost no challenge on any difficulty...

First, I have to lay out the disclaimer that I am from the older generation of gamers; technically the original generation of consumer gamers pre-dating the Atari 2600. 

I'm not sure why the whole notion that by merit of doing something first, that automatically makes one feel superior to those who follow later chronologically, but it's pretty common for any pasttime/hobby or "thing" as in "That's my thing, it's how I define myself, and therefore it's important to me to establish that I've been doing it before others and that automatically increases my own self worth."

So yeah; that's pretty much why. And yes; it's a bit ridiculous. 

At best, it means one should have a broader range of experience simply due to the amount of time and presumably the number of titles one has played. 

Truth is, even if one didn't live through the corresponding years for earlier titles, there's that whole thing called the study of history, where people learn about things from before their time and are able to put those things within the context of the current time, whether that's listening to old music, watching old films or playing old games. 

So yeah, it partly saddens me but typically just amuses me when someone has a predictable reaction to something that predates their age as though the present is the only thing that matters.

As far as the whole ignorance thing goes, it's not like most of those old games aren't still available thanks to DD on modern consoles, so there's not really any excuse to bag on sprite based graphics, whether 16 or 8 bit, regardless of how crude they look (pre-NES were little more than boxes in most cases). So one can only assume the reaction from the younger generation of current gamers simply stems from not being around long enough to start exploring backwards to see where all this started.

Some of the final comments kind of summed that up when he talked about the kitch and retro factor of the NES and how a kid who had one of those would likely be the coolest kid on his block. 

That's part of what lies at the crux of the superior attitude of which you speak. It was more of a fringe form of entertainment, mostly for kids.

You have to figure any old curmudgeon who's still playing games with a vengeance after 2-3 decades has a different sense of what's entertaining seeing as how the majority of adults are entertained by other things past a certain age, or at maybe their taste in games will have been reduced to quick games on their smartphone or tablet or web browser games because they simply don't have hours per week to spend on the typical retail adventure/campaign/grindfest/time killer. 

So said curmudgeon who is still fully into the hobby is often the type to wax poetic about "the good old days" and how much better everything was back then. 

I'm guessing the people who have been gaming for decades and still play yet don't have this attitude are typically the ones who are probably playing games with their kids now. 

Well, maybe they can do what I do? Enjoying the games from their childhood, but at least admitting that other people liking or disliking those games (and/or being good at them) says axactly nothing about them... except their age? Not whether they are "real" gamers, not how "hardcore" they are or how skilled they are?

Maybe I expect a little to much from other people

So we're just ignoring the plethora of plataformers during the 8/16-bit era? Especially those starring antropomorphic characters?

And how many kids in the history of ever would have the patience to beat a 60+ hour game? Only kids that are "gamers" really. Let's not forget that back then, 8 hours was a pretty long game.

Assuming they have the maturity to match their age, frankly, it really shouldn't even matter. 

Unless someone has a chip on their shoulder because all they did was play video games when they were a kid and caught flak for that, I don't see why it should even be an issue. 

I can sort of understand if someone stopped playing new games past a certain age/year and declared they had no interest in anything past XXXX year, but come on; it's pretty unrealistic to think that the industry and the products it produces don't continue to advance and evolve.

A lot of 8 bit games could be speed ran through in 20 minutes or less although the level of skill required to do that meant the player spent a lot of hours practicing and memorizing the game. 

Usually the only games that took 60+ hours were RPGs that relied upon stat building and grinding as a primary mechanic to prolong the overall experience. 

I find it funny how many people complain about a retail game being "too short" when it clocks in under 8 hours seeing as how the alternative is to stretch a game out (as was done in the past) with lots of deaths and repetition of the same level/section over and over until the player essentially memorized the segment and was trained to negotiate through it. 

That's kind of how Mirror's Edge was and even as someone who grew up with that style of game design, I found it maddening. 

I don't want autosave for that reason because it either makes things too easy or it risks messing things if the game offers many possibilities and some are triggered in a way that's not immediately evident. Anyhow, in most games, either saving is possible only during quiet moments, so you can't divide a big battle in many easy chunks, or if it's left possible it isn't a wise choice anyway, because you could reload in a situation in which you haven't enough time to react. BTW this is a flaw in some games with worlds divided in small parts united by load points, like Thief III mission levels and central hub, or like when going from outdoors to indoors and vice versa in Morrowind, where the part you leave remains frozen at the moment you left it, so if you were escaping, chased by enemies, you could be trapped and being immediately hit by them as soon as you reenter that world section without time to react, dodge or parry their blows, unless there are other load points to reenter it.
In Gothic 1 and 2 you can lure away from large groups a few enemies that don't gang together like others, or that belong to smaller groups inside larger ones, to make the fight a little easier, but it's not always possible, and unless it's a very small group, it's a tactic that must be combined with others to succeed. And saving during melee battle with many enemies is suicide, the strongest ones can kill even medium-high level players with very few hits, particularly skeletons, that have crappy armour level and rusty weapons, but more than make up for that being very skilled and fast with swords, reloading in the middle of a battle would automatically concede them the first hit.
In free or almost free-roaming games, and even more in sandbox games, free saving, possibly with the aforementioned limitation, is the only way possible, save points need at least some order to make players arrive to them in a consistent way, without missing them completely or without unwillingly skipping a previous part they'd have liked to play because some shortcut made them arrive to the save point earlier than they wanted. About this, the only thing I didn't like in the first Tomb Raider was that many levels had points of no return, once gone past them it wasn't possible to complete the exploration of the previous part of the level if it hadn't already been completed, the only way was to play the whole level again from the start.

Yes, people like to brag about how older games are "hard", only it's really just the (thankfully outdated) arcade design - cheap deaths, pattern memorization and etc.

And I felt the same about Mirror's Edge. I really like the concept of the game, but the amount trial-and-error there was kinda maddening. I'm looking forward to the sequel though, hopefully this will be improved