When I heard that the upcoming installment of Alone in the Dark would allow players to skip hard parts of the game, it made me wonder: have developers gone soft on us? Do gamers have it too easy these days? Looking back over a lifetime of gaming, I have to admit that there's been a fundamental shift in game design.

Consider how easy it is to save your progress in a game these days. Back in the early nineties, the best you could hope for was that the game would give you a password so you could start at the beginning of the latest level you've played. Nowadays, most games will allow you to save whenever you want, and will also auto-save at key points in case you forgot to. Or you can quick-save with the press of a hot-key to spare yourself the torture of hitting pause and then scrolling through an options menu to save. Convenient? Absolutely, but it's considerably less difficult to beat, say, a first-person shooter if you're able to save before every single fight. If some headcrab gets the jump on you in Half-Life 2 and knocks off half your health before you can crowbar it to oblivion, you can just reload the game to right before the fight and retry the encounter. Really sucks out the risk element of a game, not to mention the suspense.

Another reason developers can't really throw any curve balls at you anymore is the abundance of strategy guides. Back in the days of NES, I had to write letters to Nintendo Power to get help with games. Now there's GameFAQS and a slew of other hint websites to give you every little piece of information you'll need to beat a game from start to finish. MMORPG's, perhaps the most time-consuming games to "beat," have their time commitment balanced by the fact that they have perfect information for the game. New raid encounters go up on test servers before being released to the public and scoped out by the top guilds, who then pass strategies down to everyone else. Players can also download add-ons to keep track of every detail of every battle, such as how many seconds there are until a boss casts a certain spell. In other words, players have perfect information at their fingertips.

It goes on like this throughout all genres. Auto-aim lets you merely point in the same cardinal direction as an enemy and pull the trigger to take them down. Then there's the more recent phenomena of rechargeable shields in games like Halo and Mass Effect - I mean, c'mon, weren't first aid kits and magical turkey legs enough? Of course, most shortcuts are optional but the result of features like this is that anyone can conceivably beat any game.

That bugs the elitist in me who likes to think playing games takes skill. If anyone can beat a game, doesn't it turn that game into a movie with buttons? Sort of, yeah. There's obviously some money behind that decision. The budget for video games has steadily grown over the past two decades and is now comparable in cost to a movie. The average Playstation 3 game, for instance, costs about $15 million to produce according to the BBC. Halo 3 for Xbox 360 cost twice that amount (for some perspective, Pac-Man only cost $100,000 back in 1982).

A video game company won't recoup an investment like that without appealing to a wide audience. While us self-styled "hardcore" gamers would love to go back to the days when some games were damn near impossible (R-type, anyone?) and beating them made you part of a small, exclusive club, it just doesn't make sense for the industry. A game that everyone can beat has a wider appeal than a game that whips most players’ asses. It's easier to market a movie than a Rubik's Cube.

This is the sort of thing that leads hardcore gamers to bitch endlessly on discussion boards. Developers have far from forgotten about their most devoted fans, however. There's just been a change in how a game tests its players now. It's not about "can you beat the game?" so much as "how well can you beat the game?" Did you beat it on Hard difficulty? Try it on Insane difficulty now. Then there's all the special goals laid out for Xbox 360 gamers with Achievements. The 360 even gives you a running "Gamerscore" so you can know mathematically how much more “leet” you are. What more can you ask for?

If all else fails, hardcore gamers, just tap into your inner elitism. There's plenty of creative ways to earn bragging rights - beating Half-Life in forty-five minutes, for example. And mercilessly crap on the noob who took forty-six minutes.