As long as I see Metroid and Smash bros. I'm good...and maybe Starfox...AND SOME NEW D@MN IP's!!!!!

Awesome first post, welcome!

Lol thanks man, I've been a member for awhile, but I kinda forgot about it and just remembered today. :-)  

I think it would be better suited to label this topic as: "What defines hardcore?"  While I completely agree with everything you said aside from a few flaws in your statement, I think by naming the topic what you did  kinda blurs your point a little bit.  My thoughts on this topic are ppl nowadays tend throw the words "hardcore" and "mature" around using their own warped definition without really understanding what the words themselves actually mean or what type of gamer they pertain to, as well as only using them when they want to troll .  For instance some ppl only use the words "hardcore" when it comes to graphical capability and how much blood is in the particular franchise they're partial to.  I've also seen mature used the same way,yet we all know what it means when that rating is on a game, so I'm not really going to get in to that.  Ppl don't really seem to understand that graphical finesse and extreme violence aren't what make a game "hardcore", nor does that categorize them as a "hardcore gamer" for only playing those particular games.  This has been a small problem for a while, but as games have become more mainstream this problem has turned into a full blown epidemic poisoning the gaming community as a whole and slowly but surely steering it towards disaster.  The reason things are gong the way they are going right now with devs just rehashing the same thing over and over with prettier graphics is because most of them are too afraid to take chances and make more imaginative innovative games the way they did back before horsepower and graphical finesse were such a BIG deal like they are today.  And like you said while the blood and violence elicits an M rating the over all feel of the game does seem to target the more immature minds out there.  I could go on, but this getting a bit long lol sorry guys, hopefully I at least got some of my point across.