I don't think he's being hyperbolic at all, Jim was specifically aiming at the obnoxious gamers that attack others for preferring to play on an easier difficulty, not everyone who likes a challenge. So no you are wrong there, he was not very specifically targeting you at all.
It's fine that you don't think that, but I think that, and it's fine for us to have different perceptions of his discussion. I'm not any more wrong than the person who perceives an insult as such when it's not intended to be an insult. As many on the forum say, the audience has a right to feel however they do about a piece of media. But I digress that is pointless to this discussion, again.
I think one issue here is that people who love hard games get overly defensive and assume that every person making fun of elitist assholes is making fun of them, rest assured Jim isn't mocking you, that's just his style of humor. I've fallen into that trap too of getting overly defensive in the past and I know it's a hard one to break so I can sympathize.
I'm glad that you sympathize. I'm not sure with what as I've stated time again that I can understand why people not myself like hard difficulties, and have reiterated I take no offense to either this video or your communication. I was merely putting out a critique in regards to the consistent rhetoric on the subject.
The past of least resistance might offer less for you, but not for everybody, I use cheats on games sometimes and I never regretted it.
Neat. I do too. I'm more of a story guy. I still don't dictate other gamer's experiences by my own. I will go out of my way to hack games and use cheats on PC because I don't have time for it. I'm not going to get mad if a game provides no avenue to do so or if I buy something on console. Different strokes for different folks aside, I'm not playing devil's advocate, I merely understand why a perspective of difficulty is enjoyed, something you seem to keep circling back to personal experience that is irrelevant to the discussion.
For example when I finished Marc Ecko's Getting Up a few weeks ago, the last couple of levels were giving me some trouble and by that point my hands were getting sore from fighting enemies that took ages to go down, so I just said "fuck it" and put in the invincibility cheat for the last few levels, did that lessen my enjoyment of the game? Hell no, in fact there were some previous levels where I wished I had entered the cheat earlier instead of banging my head against a brick well(the one level with infinitely spawning CCK guards is one I really should've cheated to get past, as I got no satisfaction from beating it without cheats whatsoever).
Again. Anecdote. Irrelevant to the audience who thrive and relish in difficult combat/engagements/gameplay. I'm glad those options exist for you. I also would not be mad if they didn't.
Same with the GTA games before IV, I tried my best but there always came a brick wall in the form of a particularly annoying mission that was hard for all the wrong reasons and I had no choice but to use cheats if I wanted to actually finish the damn games, and even with cheats some missions were still hard as hell, so in that case I felt like I was just leveling the playing field to actually stand a fighting chance.
Anecdote. "had no choice" is interesting because there's normally difficulty changes and stuff in games, something you yourself referenced previously, but again the argument of using cheats and/or hacks is not anything I'm arguing against. You like to cheat, as do I when I just want a good story, and that's fine. It's also fine if I have to watch a youtube video of a game to experience that same story because I don't own it or can't find a copy. There are always solutions to these problems. Whether or not they're solutions you enjoy is on you as a person.
Personally I never got into JRPGs as I agreed with Yahtzee's criticism of them where they had a tendency to separate gameplay and story with an iron fence, plus they require a HUGE time investment which is frankly really intimidating to me, western RPGs like Fallout are long enough for my liking, hearing that stuff like the Xenoblade series is even more insanely long and drawn out is frankly more of a turn-off then a selling point to me. Number-crunching is not something I play video games to do as I suck at math in real life, so the last thing I want to when playing video games is feel like i'm doing homework(that's one reason why I don't touch grand strategy games like the Civilization series).
Irrelevant to the discussion. Citation of Youtubers as well has no bearing on the conversation. Again, another example of coming at this conversation from only your perspective while ignoring why people might have issue with it. You don't like JRPGs, I do. I could make a whole thesis about how people who don't like JRPGs have made JRPGs try to chase other audiences like FFXV with its terrible combat, but that's a tangential argument that isn't worth getting into. I'm glad you know your likes and dislikes. Other people love that stuff.
I think it's inaccurate to say that "most games" are easy, just because most games are easy for you personally does not mean that's the case for everybody. I don't know if there has been that big of a drop in difficulty, plus as others like Yahtzee have pointed out, that whole mentality for "old school" Nintendo hard difficulty originated with arcade games and the designers had an incentive to make those games as hard as possible to get as many people pumping quarters into them as humanely possible and that attitude carried over to console games as well and eventually after a few generations developers realized how outdated that mentality was thankfully. But there it was balanced out by the existence of things like Game Genie where people could make the games easier for themselves, since we don't have cheat codes anymore and you can't shortcut your way through console games anymore I feel like it's pretty balanced out.
More citation of Youtubers and an argument/observation that revolves around nothing but your own experience and/or background information. It's great that you understand why games were nickel takers back in the day but people like that difficulty, regardless of the reasoning. Again, a point that has zero relevance to the audience who enjoy From games and others for difficulty and challenge.
There are actually a lot less shorter games now and more live-service games as Jim pointed out because publishers don't want to make games people can beat in a weekend after renting it, they want to make games that encourage you to log in every day. That's why i'm excited for Jedi Fallen Order, because linear single-player games have become so rare these days that's a breath of fresh air whenever one gets announced. I'm still expecting a catch cause EA, but i'll still play it.
Moviebob also did a much shorter video about this and he's even older then Jim and he did in fact grow up during the NES era, so you might want to listen to what he has to say:
https://www.escapistmagazine.com/v2/2019/04/04/git-over-yurself/
It's great to cite a bunch of wikis and background information on "this is why games were designed that way" but it pretty blatantly ignores my discussion of "Here's why gamers like hard difficulty" and instead goes with the same attempt of responding with anecdotes and your own personal views on the subject.
I cheat and use level skips all the time. I'm here for the story, as previously discussed. I also can understand (like most would expect) why people who enjoy difficulty and don't like the way difficulty has been "nerfed" for gaming in recent years feel the way they do. It doesn't matter "Why" it just matters that people can faceroll through games and when they go for a challenge those "difficulty modes" are typically poorly designed, thus them defending the good examples like From and Cuphead and the like.
Good discussion, but with the over citation of youtubers, some of which I blatantly disagree with like Moviebob, I'm going to agree to disagree and bow out on that one. We seem to be speaking past each other and I don't think we'll come to an agreement. Honestly we all have better things to do than go back and forth on a topic about things we're not going to change our mind on. Cheers.
