Let me rephrase that for you... Zelda WAS hardcore... Up until The Windwaker, that is. Twilight princess wasn't a challenge! AT ALL!!!... It was good yeah!... REALLY GOOD! But not good in the way i like Zelda's... Challenging games with nice puzzles... In that way... It kinda sucked! period.

Were you able to solve the "jumping guardians of the master sword" puzzle? I don't think that was easy at all, I spent two hours trying until I felt defeated and went to the Internet for some help...

What about the puzzle with the bricks over the ice? Was that easy?

Was it easy to find all heart containers???

Did you find easy to find ALL Poe souls?????

Maybe I've got a different concept of what is and isn't easy, or maybe I just hadn't played a Zelda game since ALttP, but Zelda TP wasn't especially easy in my opinion. 

robjoh, you should re-read what you quoted, and GF should read it too. He said "nice puzzles", not hard puzzles. Whether he meant it or not is beyond my ability to say, but I know I want better (not harder) puzzles in the 3D Zeldas than they have had in the last couple of entries.  Puzzels shouldn't be hard, they should be clever.  Puzzels shouldn't be something you solve through brute force (aka repeatedly trying until something works) but by thinking about it and finding the trick to it.

A challenging game is one that's difficult to beat. And frankly, they have been progressively been getting easier since OoT. You don't need to find all of the heart containers because you'd have to make some horrible mistakes to ever need that many hearts.  Really, you could easily beat it without a single hidden heart container if you've been doing the Zelda things for a while (and it's been almost 10 years since OoT now...), and skilled players can easily go through it without picking up extra hearts at all, really.

And hunting a bunch of poes is not everyone's idea of fun. It's just an artificial way of making the game longer for people who are anal about doing every stupid little thing. Really, they exist only so that Nintendo could flaunt the length of the game (which is frankly too much with too little content).  I don't want to play filler, I want to play a game.  You can have your poes, but keep them the hell away from me.

Wait so if I am getting this right you aren't happy that the puzzles have been getting easier...but you don't want them to get harder..you want them to be better? Well in what way do you want them to be better without getting harder? I think more thoughtful puzzles will be innately harder and I am fine with both aspects of that proposition.

You want hard puzzles? Play Picross DS. Oh wait.. That's a casual game....

Honestly, all this talk of the games getting easier, I never thought a game like Link To the Past was all that hard to begin with. Ever thought that just maybe.... you're getting smarter with age? I know it's an amazing unheard of concept, but education can do wonders for the mind if you apply yourself.

yeah, unless your talking about the NES zelda, theyve all been about the same difficulty puzzle wise and battle wise for me.

i actually thought windwaker had some of the most difficult area to find using the leaf. you needed the wind *just right* and then if you were good, you could reach em :)

unlike crappy linear shooters which are the hardcore games your probably on about

Giggity Giggitty, Nintendo is once again where they should be, now they need about 3 million more to be number one in America and the other regions where ps3 and xbox are ruling like in australia

Well, a little more than 3 million. The 360 isn't just going to stop selling in America and wait for the Wii to catch up.

And while the 360-Australia thing holds true, PS3 is kinda getting spanked down under.

Lol some would say it's a bit arrogant, but they deserve a pat on the back, because they have truely been driving this industry with the Wii and DS, but also Sony deserves props because the PS2 was a strong driver at Xmas(and still is) as was the GBA( a strong driver at Xmas)