I am not a hard-core gamer. I'm not even a medium-core gamer. My core, gaming-wise, could best be described as "nougaty." Oh, I play a lot of games, across all sorts of genres, but it's always on standard difficulty. The only game I've gotten 100 percent completion on is the odd Sudoku.

I had kind of a heavy World of Warcraft thing going on for a while, but claiming to be a hard-core gamer because you play a lot of Warcraft is like claiming to be a criminal mastermind because you can't stop shoplifting nicotine patches.

Even though I've somehow managed to come to terms with the fact that I don't care about videogames more than every other thing in the entire universe, sometimes a game rubs it in my face. Most recently it was Super Mario Bros 2, a game released in 1988 for the Nintendo Entertainment System. I downloaded it on the Wii — supposedly not a hard-core system — and realized that I am nothing.

I may not have mastered games like Halo 2, but at least I finished them. This is because they have this obscure little feature called "save games." You might not have heard of it — it's kind of obscure — but here's how it works.

Say you spend four hours fighting a boss where you have to perfectly time your attacks while dodging flame and giant rock fists. First off, saving your game lets you go straight to the boss instead of having to mow through mooks every time you lose a fight. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, saving your game makes it so that you never have to look at that monster ever again. It's like a bad date; once you get through it, it's over. You can seek counseling and move on.

In the years since save games were invented, I've come to think of it as an essential and important part of the game experience. Playing Super Mario Bros 2 — which I somehow managed to miss back in 1988 — reminded me that saves are the tool of the weak and feeble, and that true hard-core gamers all but died out with the Thompson Twins.

The Wii has a save feature that lets you stop playing and pick the game up later — essentially an extended pause button — and the game has a limited number of continues, but if you use up your lives and continues, it's back to World 1-1 for you. I haven't even gotten to World 3-1 yet, and already I hate World 1-1 with an aching, gnawing passion. It's not that World 1-1 is tough, it's just that I have to look at it over and over. And Super Mario Bros. 2 is actually a fairly forgiving game for the time.

There is, notoriously, no accepted definition for "hard-core gamer." Is the classification based on which games you play, how you play them or which platform you prefer? Checking out gaming message boards, apparently the term is usually used to mean "someone who likes the same games I do." It sounds like we could use a standard definition.

So here's my proposal. Every game, in addition to the standard easy, medium and expert modes, must have a "1988 mode." In 1988 mode, you don't get to save the game, ever. If you lose, you start over from the beginning of the game. Every hit from an enemy reduces your hit points by 25 percent, minimum. Extra lives and hit points are tough to come by, not handed out like Mardi Gras beads to bosomy exhibitionists.

This applies to all games, not just shooters and platformers and the like. Lose against the big boss in an RPG? Hey, guess what, you're Level 1 again and townsfolk are going to remind you to press X to pick things up. Flub "Painkiller" in Rock Band 2? Time to start over with "Eye of the Tiger."

Only those who complete a game in 1988 mode get to call themselves "hard-core." Everyone else, from tourney winners to Minesweeper addicts, is a "casual gamer." Gotta draw the line somewhere.

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Born helpless, nude and unable to provide for himself, Lore Sjoberg eventually overcame these handicaps to become a plumber, a plunderer and a plummeter.

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