Yes they did. Atari gamers hated the NES at the time. It was aimed at kids and it had a crappy controller (even though the NES controller ended up being the industry standard). For the last couple of generations PC gamers have been complaining about the casualization of PC games to make them console friendly (with prime examples being Oblivion and UT3).

Arcades were disrupted by the home console. Home consoles weren't called casual, because they were no more user friendly (arcade games lived or died on user friendliness), but a similar venom was directed towards home consoles by the people who loved the arcades.

There are no hardcore sistems, there are hardcore games and hardcore players. Sure a FPS is played better in a PC with the keyboard and the mouse, but a sports game and most action / adventure games work better in a home console.  90% of all games exists both in PC and consoles, and i´ve paled hundreds in both...i´m a pc and a console fanboy and i can´t say pc is hardcore and consoles are casual ( actually wii is some kind, but that´s another story). I like playing half-life 2, crisis, far cry 2 in pc but prefer tomb raider underworld. pes 2009, nba and nhl games in a home console. By the way, pc game pads are awful, not even close to Sony´s dualshock, which is by far the best controller ever made.

100% agree.

Not a single mention of birdmen.

Of course. It's the games and how they are played that are "hardcore"

But the term "hardcore" is too widely used. I would never call a game like Gears of war hardcore, it just isn't.

hardcore is a term that soon enough, if it hasnt allready will lose its meaning similar to the words noob and epic.

i for one agree with this article. i dont see why you want to play FPS with a controller when M&K is so much more accurate also i find RTS games to be better on PC aswell because of precision and hot keys. but i dont care much for RTS. (except for dota, if that can be called a RTS)
Games i like for console though are stuff like he mentioned racing games (i like them better with wheel but who here even owns a wheel anymore) and most third perspective games, specifically Zelda, kameo plaformers like mario jak & daxter, ratchet & clank , banjo etc. and third person shooters that use a autolockon option. most if not all 2d games are better played with a dpad then with wasd or the arrow keys
Beat em ups like ninja gainden and god of war are also games that are better suited for the console and its controller.
Also i would love to be able to play a MMORPG like World of Warcraft from my sofa or bed with a controller but with all the mods and macros and hot keys i dont see how it can work

but that's just my opinion

Indeed.

It's really annoying how overused and twisted it has become.

Being mainstream doesn't make the game casual. I'd agree to an extent on Crash, but not on FF7.

That's actually an interesting way of putting it haha. I've always heard the term of console gaming being a poor man's PC gaming but it's put in a way that it feeds off that.

Of course it's all perspective but I don't agree in fighting back that way. Sure we know the supposed "hardcore" gamers on PS3 and 360 are wrong for trying to put themselves above Wii gamers but it doesn't make it right to prove a point by doing the same with PC gamers to console gamers. Two wrongs unfortunately don't make a right.

There should be a category between casual and hardcore like middlecore, halfcore or normalcore .