I think a lot of the "Old games used to be hardcore!" stuff comes from the difficulties with playing them. Games have been constantly evolving, and the 90s had a lot of games that did things similar to what modern games do, but much less streamlined.
In a way, that's kind of a good point.
In a hilarious bit of hypocrisy, I notice that a lot of the whining about Skyrim's new Legendary difficulty mode is that it's "artificial difficulty." (Psst. It's noti.)
People are saying Skyrim's overall not as hard as Morrowind. Guess what made Morrowind hard? LEGITIMATE artificial difficulty.
Same for Arena and Daggerfall. Same for most of the NES games. Artificial difficulty.
Agame with artificial difficulty is Boarderlands multiplayer (the enemies just take more hits to kill nothing more )
I don't really consider that artificial difficulty necessarily. More like "Make it so that multiplayer doesn't make the game easier than piss." Diablo II, a game that's lumped in with Morrowind for having a lot of nostalgic fanboys, had that same effect, and no one ever complained about it having artificial difficulty (at least not without being laughed off of every message board they were on)
In Skyrim, raising the difficulty decreases the damage you do and increases the damage you take. And while that
can be artificial difficulty at times, Legendary is a large enough leap that it actually forces you to play more carefully. We're talking about a high level character with defense capped getting two-shotted by bandits.
