Agreed 101%,
I vividly remember a sleep-over at my cousin’s house, when we practically didn’t sleep. My brother, my cousin and I alternated fights until we (it was me, but let’em think they helped) finally beat Mike Tyson. He could beat you in less than a minute and getting to him even with the password to start in the final circuit meant at least half an hour of fights with the lower characters which weren’t cakewalks themselves.
Hell, now that I am in memory lane I remember when I first played with an NES, I was amazed by the ability to Pause a game. Up to that point you were at risk of losing your shot a high score in any Atari Game (the high score, by the way, lasted only until you turned the Atari off). If mom called you, your best hope was to have enough lives to last through the interruption.
I’ll admit to being very soft-core in my current gaming. I suck at FPS and RTS, The last games I actually finished were Profesor Layton on the DS and Portal on the PC. Hell I haven’t even been able to finish Contra DS on the easy level
But I still agree that most of the 1337 64m3r5 should finish their games in “1988” mode before they can call themselves hard-core
