When I was a kid I had to make the most of the few games I had. I would make up my own personal challenges for myself in games. But now I'm an adult. There are literally dozens and dozens of games that I still wish to play through both new and old. I have stacks of games on my shelf and in my Steam list purchased and needed to be experienced. On top of that I have a huge wish list of older games I still need to buy and new games coming up that I want to buy.

I'm never hurting for lack of money to acquire these games, but I am lacking for time in which to play them all. There are too many games out there that need playing for me to make up ridiculously difficult challenges for the games I'm playing or even for me to play them on the hardest difficulty.

That's not to say I don't understand why people like a challenge. I don't want every game I play to be on piss-easy mode. I don't want to be able to one-shot everything I'm up against all of the time. But, I have no need to get masochistic. I really wonder about the mentality of those who feel that you're not really playing the game unless you have it set to the absolutely most ridiculous difficulty to the point that it's controller-breakingly difficult.

I play games for fun. Moderate challenge fits in my definition of fun. When I play older games on emulators I cheat the hell out of them. I want to see what the game was about and I can appreciate the difficulty, but constant repetition and memorization with bad respawn points or limited continues are pointless.

I played the first 5 Mega Man games as a kid. I could probably play through Mega Man 3 with no energy tanks. I played the crap out of that game. Probably could've done the same on Mega Man 2. No chance with Mega Man 1 or 4 though. The rest of the original series I've played on emulators and I didn't feel bad for a second about savestating to right before each fight when I lost.