[quote name='Wolfpup']I disagree with that, because lots of people just occasionally play something (or play solitare-esque games on PC). Which is really different from those of us that are up until 1 am because we can't bring ourselves to quit until we hit the next save point, etc.
My worry with Wii too is that the hardware won't support certain types of games I love. BioShock and Oblivion and Mass Effect are all a type of open ended RPG that I adore. I think technically Wii could do a lot of that gameplay with worse graphics (I'd think something like Morrowind could probably run on Wii...right?) but it seems like publishers would be more likely to put those games on the other two systems.[/QUOTE]
Again, I aint goin' after ya with malice or aggression here, but a lot of your points are really subject to opinion.
Some people who are casual gamers might consider someone who can play Solitaire nontsop hardcore.
Someone who levels up all their characters in a game like Disgaea so that they can kill the uber badass bosses might be hardcore. (I have a friend who does this shit, and that motherf*cker is goddamn insane. He'll sit there and level up people for literally HOURS. He did this same shit in games like Secret of Mana, where you could have all 3 characters master every weapon to a level of 9, and then do the same for their magic. Insane, I tell you! Insane!)
Someone who can do the hardest songs in DDR at the arcade, and work in shit like flips and other acrobatics can be hardcore.
It's really a dated term. Back when gaming was reserved to a smaller subset of humanity, hardcore-ness could be better applied, simply because there were less avenues to achieve that. Could you sit down at beat Punch-Out without continues? Never die in Contra? Beat Metroid in less than an hour? Congrats, you're hardcore.
Nowadays we have too many pathways to accomplish this, that applying "hardcore" as a blanket term diminishes its effectiveness. Kinda like in The Incredibles - "When everyone is special, no one is."
There are people who still play Counter Strike religiously for multiple hours a day. Are they not hardcore for playing a 7-8 year old game STILL, and not giving a shit about graphics?
What about the people who still haul around the original Gameboy version of Tetris, denying the newer, flashier versions?
What about people like me who have some 12 systems all set up and ready to go, so that if I want to play some NES Ice Hockey, I damn well can?
That's really all I'm getting at. The term needs to be put to rest. Some journalist somewhere was ranting about in a few months ago in an attempt to slam Nintendo, and he threw out the term. A lot of people called him out on it, and all he could say was "hardcore gamers play exceedingly hard games and excel at them." Well the only game these days that fits that category are bullet hell shoot-em-ups, and let's face it - if I went up to a Halo gamer and asked him for a round of Ikaruga, he wouldn't know what the f*ck I was talking about. (Note: You can replace Halo with any assortment of the bigger franchises and probably get similar results. I can't imagine someone who is only into GTA knowing what Ikaruga is.)
But Ikaruga is a hard f*cking game, and I'd wager you'd have to be hardcore to attempt to play it and not want to tear your eyes out.
But it's a genre that is basically dead and doesn't contain the flash of huge 3D epic games.
I think I've kinda gone overboard in my point here.
As for the Wii hardware holding out, I think it can do so, but that is predicated on a bunch of things. A good game engine will be scalable and be able to be ported, so you could argue that. But Epic came out and said not only could GoW not be run on the PS3, but that the engine couldn't be on the Wii period. Which is fine - that certainly hurts my argument here, but it doesn't change the fact that you could get similar results by cranking the graphics down a little with a scalable engine. Will it be the same game? Hard to say.
As far as publishers are concerned, they just want money. If the Wii sells 10 million systems in 6 months, publishers will follow. And they will find a way to cash in on that userbase. That's really as simple as the equation needs to be - have cash, will travel. This is one of those things that can be argued either way - do you say the Wii is underpowered and won't get cross-platform titles, or do you say it is unique enough that it gets exclusives? You can really argue that either way competently.
Anyway, I think I've said enough for the times-a-bein, so I'll stop for now.
ing stand because everything out of their mouth is some kind of bullshit that relates to whatever they're "Hardcore" about. It's like those "hardcore" anime people, like you can't have a 
