Yeah, even when I was a kid, with a GBC and a PS1 early on and later emulators (mostly the GBA, that and the PS1 were the systems I was most obsessed with until adulthood), I remember other kids that I knew having no patience for anything with difficulty, though there were still difficult games at the time, and games in general were still challenging to a degree.

Meanwhile I was really into the Rockman games, and those get pretty brutal. My first one was X6, which is infamous for not being designed very well and not being very fair, because it was rushed to release. I beat that an absurd number of times. Hell, I beat all of my favorite games way too many times, because they never got old, and there were so many different things to do, and beating something doesn't mean that you have mastered it. But of course, they got really easy, so that's where ROM hacks came in, for a boost in difficulty.

While all of that happened, gaming moved in the direction of everything being made for babies, and I wasn't even that aware of it because the games that I was playing were not the norm anymore. Really, it doesn't affect me directly, only through it affecting other people. There are newer games I want to play, but I have to be convinced to play them, because older games set my standards higher. And I'm not a consoomer, so a game being newer is not a benefit, it has to convince me that it's worth playing and that it deserves my time, that could be used for an older game instead.

That got me into playing really difficult games, and also beating a lot of older games in general, as an adult. Then I ended up getting into arcade games, because I saw really good players play them and it was very impressive. Those tend to be brutal, and are also not very long because they are very dense. There is no padding, because the game wants to kill you and steal your money, but it also have to be fun enough that you keep playing. They have to be all substance.

I actually became pretty impatient with a lot of easier games. Like, a lot of RPGs are too slow and bland for me, so they can be a bit hard to play these days, particularly if the systems aren't very interesting and there's nothing cool to do other than basically getting bigger numbers and hitting attack over and over again. https://social.076.moe/url/137730