I'm not saying they have "entitlement issues"; I'm certainly not unsympathetic to them.

This sort of thing always reminds me of the Neil Gaiman post on entitlement from a few years back:

I'd try it.

It's kind of a big jump from "it seems to me that many people would be satisfied with this..." to "LET'S ALL JUST MASS SUICIDE WHILE WE'RE AT IT."

You're right, you don't know.

That's, like, the goddamn American dream right there.

And I would PLAY that game!

The understated excitement of Mr. Totilo reminds me of this classic piece.

I kind of like "stripping it bear," here. :D

To be fair, any game made now is going to be HUGELY more complex than River City Ransom. I am 100% certain that Skyrim had a much larger QA staff and budget than RCR.

I'm surprised by this. I thought that the gameplay in 2 was even better than the gameplay in 1. The greater focus on tactics, environmental awareness...

There's an episode of Extra Credits that mentions this problem:

My sense was you have to spend some sort of resource to use the vita chamber (or whatever) - otherwise it's disabled, and you have to use an actual save that makes you lose some progress. I think. Maybe. Or maybe that's just what I'd like to see...

I've always felt that it's not really my duty to be friend to the company, and to defend it from people, for whatever reason. EA/Bioware doesn't need me to give them the benefit of the doubt, or be positive about their good try. They're a corporation putting out a commercial product, not a friend showing me his latest…

I agree with this totally, and especially appreciate that context for STALKER. I would have a lot of trouble understanding STALKER as "old school" in almost any way.

"Tougher, not longer." I can get behind that!

Absolutely. I know it doesn't really get to the heart of the problem, but there are always mods that show really effective ways to increase the difficulty without bulletsponging.

That was my sense of it. There's some sort of resource that you can expend to get the vita chamber rez. Otherwise, you have to use a traditional save, which puts you back a ways.

I do think the nature of "difficulty" has changed, a lot. A game like Dark Souls doesn't seem old-school to me; its design dogma is totally different from old games. It has difficulty in its structure and balance, not because it's twitchy or has a weird control scheme. It's true that it's not easy, as old games often…

I was worried about that, too! Unless it's in the context of a roguelike or some such (where it's explicitly designed around repeat play,) I don't really want to repeat huge sections because I'm having an off play day.