The Carrot says a lot of what I was going to say, but I feel I should put some of my own cents into this before reading the rest of the articles in this one.
Having played games since the Commodore 64 days, and having gamed on almost every system (regardless of whether I owned it, rented it, played it at a friend's house), I have to say that I do _not_ thrive on excessive difficulty. If I see a GAME OVER screen and I can't figure out what the hell happened or if I want to snap my controller in half (which wasn't uncommen in the PSX and PS2 era) then the game is invariably doing something wrong in my mind and it does not endear me to it, nor makes me want to keep playing if it happens repeatedly in a short time span. If I get do get a GAME OVER screen, it should be because I screwed up somewhere and I should be well aware of that. Missing a jump in a Mario game on the SNES because I jumped too soon/late is one thing. Missing a jump because the camera angle is wrong, I can't seem to get mario to go in a straight line, and he refused to jump off that wall and landed in a pit of deadly ice water has nothing to do with my own skills at the game (whatever they may be).
I am sick of games that promote "competition" because I do not enjoy playing against other people. I don't mind playing WITH other people, but not against them. The in-game AI can be cruel enough in their taunting at times, laughing at you or throwing some random insult or the GAME OVER being replaced to YOU LOSE! with an 'amusing' context or font, but real flesh and blood gamers are beyond that. They call you names, they rub it in your face, and if you're genuinely new to the game and are still learning, they have the audacity to tell you that you flat-out suck and shouldn't be playing. Go to GameFAQs for a perfect example of what is wrong with many gamers these days. And speaking of that crowd, I'd love to point out their love of T&A, but that's not part of this article.
No, for me, the harder a game is, the less likely I am to want to finish it. Of course that's gonna leave me depressed, but who cares about the gamer's needs/concerns right? So long as we dish out our hard-earned money to the big corporations that want to own our souls, it's all good, right? Not for me, and that's why I've been buying less and less games every year. Many are either ridiculously hard or unfair or cheap, such as Trauma Center (which I could never beat without cheating and even THEN it almost gave me carpel tunnel). Keep in mind that it wasn't exclusive to games today, as anyone who played the X-men game on the Sega Genesis can probably attest to.
Does that mean I want games piss easy? No, of course not, but moderation and clear definition of difficulty needs to be addressed. When I play Easy mode, I expect it to be Easy, and for the most part that's certainly the case. However, when Normal and Hard are barely discernable as different, the line has been blurred and I can't help thinking that the designers missed the point of difficulty in the first place.
Megaman 9 is a good example of a game that doesn't know what difficulty settings are. We have a piss-poor game with bad level design (although it looks and sounds great, to be true), but we've got pits and spikes everywhere with respawning enemies and doesn't even FEEL like an older Megaman game. You know what it reminded me of? Megaman X8 and Sigma Palace. So I check out Downloadable content to see if they had an "easy mode" and what do I see? Hard Mode and Cry-Some-More Mode. Oh, you want those neat sliding and charging abilities? Here, have Protoman. Cool, Proto! Oh wait, he gets hit further and takes twice as much damage. Fuck that. I thought Protoman was supposed to be good.
Go pick up a copy of ET for the Atari or Ghosts and Goblins for the NES. If you finish either of those, be sure to record it and send the evidence to TwinGalaxies and collect your world record. 
