Just to clear up a possible (and frequent) misunderstanding, it's not an either/or thing - look at the Microsoft Flight Simulator series for the best example. Hardcore can crank the realism up to 100%, where anyone who has never flown a real life helicopter would find it impossible to hover the Bell 206 even if he tried thousands of times. The casual player wants to hover that Bell 206, he just turns the realism sliders down all the way and he can do it easily. Make any simulator as realistic as possible, the interface and physics can easily be "dumbed down" for the casual player, everyone gets what they want, everybody wins nobody loses. You have to START with realistic though, you can always dumb that down but it's impossible to "smarten it up" if you start with simple. A simulator can easily be turned into an arcade game, an arcade game cannot be turned into a simulator.
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