Please Dumb Down My Video Games for Me, Thanks

Raging on the internet about how gardenscapes hack are being “dumbed” down and simplified is all the… erm.. rage these days.

Hordes of “hardcore” gamers flock to gaming forums and mourn the death of games that don’t hold the players hand and cannot be completed in 7-10 hours of playing.

They say that the “console kids” of today, with their aversion for anything challenging has ruined game design and turned most modern games into;
“click this button to win. No, not that button, over here. Look, this button he… Never mind, I’ll do it for you *click*”.

I am going to confess something to you. I *like* that games have become more casual friendly and that they do a better job of introducing the player to game mechanics and how everything works in the game.

I am almost 30 years old and have been playing games since I was 5 (that was on a C64, talk about a non-user friendly machine).

I have a full time job and a girl friend and I have lots of real life obligations that means I cannot spend anywhere close to the amount of time playing video games that I could (and did) when I was a kid or teenager.

Conversely, I have a lot more money to spend than I did as a kid, so buying/renting new games is much less of an issue for me, than it was 15-20 years ago.

If I am lucky I will have maybe an hour or two in the evening on weekdays and maybe two or three hours in the weekend that I can use for playing games.

That gives me somewhere around maybe 10-12 hours of gaming a week on average.

Having been a video game aficionado since before I could read, I really love video games and I generally want to try out many different games, even if they are not exactly in my normal wheelhouse genre.

During a week I can easily play at least 3-4 different games, especially during a “high” season of releases like Q4 that we have just entered now.

Back in the early 90’s your game would be considered short if it could be completed in less than maybe 20-25 hours.

I remember the outcry from the gaming community when “Max Payne” launched as one of the first “Triple A” games with a sub 10 hour long campaign.
Gamers simply did not feel that they were getting enough bang for their buck.

I also remember playing X-Com: UFO defense (Which *is* a great game, no argument) and spending at least 10-15 hours messing around before I got enough of a grasp of the game mechanics to not get my butt kicked immediately by the first alien invaders that dropped by.