Mid-Core?

Well, if labels are your thing there appears to be a new one out there: Mid-core gamers. Apparently fed up with the thirteen year old wankers playing Halo 3 et. all a group of people, lead by Jeff Fulton over at 8BitRocket.com. they decided that the labels of casual gamer and hardcore gamer didn't apply to them and that they were somewhat in the middle. While I found his blog post insightful and certainly very interesting, I'm not sure that it really applies to me either.

The video game world, much like any other hobby has its stereotypes. They have the "hardcore" gamer who owns an XBox 360 or PS3. He buys titles on release day and spends untold amounts of time trying to get to perfection in Halo or some other such FPS or they level up in Warcraft or some other MMORPG working their magic.

Casual gamers, on the other hand are viewed as people who buy games for the novelty of it and are more apt to play games such as Boogie or Wii Sports. The hardcore gamers seem to show disgust at them and their choice in games.

So where do I fit in? Well, I really have no idea. I know a lot of my friends tell me I lean towards the hardcore side yet the label just doesn't fit for me. First, while I loved Starcraft in high school I never put the hours into honing my skills like some of my classmates did and thus I usually lost unless I was on their team. World of Warcraft and Halo are both a collosal waste of time in my view and I am looking forward to trying out Professor Layton and the Curious Village once I get a DS.

Yet I'm no casual either. While Wii Play is fun for parties and when some friends are over, I hardly ever play it. If I want pick up and play I fire up Kid Icarus or Super Mario Brothers 2 (the Japanese version.) While Wii sports is fantastic and I love boxing I could never see myself just owning games like that on my Wii.

So what do I like? Well on the casual side I did actually enjoy Furu Furu Park as a fun timewaster for $20. This week I picked up P.N.03 and Mega Man Network Transmission for a fiver each. I have plenty of puzzle games with Dr. Mario and Puyo Puyo being my absolute favorites. On the hardcore side of things my current favorite Wii game is Metroid Prime 3 and I'm currently working on playing through Wind Waker once again.

So I suppose to many I probably lean towards the casual side of things. If that's the way they want to label me, fine. Just don't expect me to buy those worthless Nerf attachments for Wii Sports. No, I'll be having fun with my Zelda games and biding my time until I get my mitts on Smash Bros Brawl, Baroque, Tales of Symphonia 2 etc.

Either way, labels suck.