What triggered this post was recently playing a old football game with the kids, Nintendo World Cup , not a single one of the 5 kids (5, 13,13,15 and 18) manage to do the special "trick" shot nor did they want to try a second match: "game is dificult and unfun". Every one of the kids play FIFA games quite ok, even the 5 year old.
They are ok with having to press 5 or 6 buttons on the gamepad for FIFA (except the directional movement) but a game with only 2 buttons is that hard to play?

Of course, FIFA have that weird game code that benefits the weaker player and punishes the best player, like many other popular games. Mario Kart 64 punishes the 1st position to the point of the best way to win it is being 2nd or 3rd the whole race and keep a powerfull power-up to fire on the last lap.
While this "feature" is awsome to "equalize" skill levels with casual players, it does usually punish better players with artificial ways. This got me thinking that it must be really hard to make such a game fun for every one, be it a casual or the most seasoned, competitive player.
That thinking got a little extended to other areas of life, say (here it comes...), making a very fast track car but perfectly acceptable as a modern road car must be a engineering and design nightmare.

I'm a big fan of "easy to play, hard to master" but on some games this concept is way, way to strong.
This topic has been discussed previously, like rubber banding on race games (wich I hate with a passion) but my question is, wich games do actually implement such a feature in a good and fun to everyone way?

From the little I've played Super Smash Bros, it is actually a good exemple of such a feature.

Hard to say, you must look to a younger self i guess before you became this lauded and experienced game pro who would have difficulty to recognize .. such a thing
Games that i enjoyed while younger that seemed to be from the easy learned hard to master thing are games such as , Summer Games or Winter Games, Duckhunt ....... Maybe Command and Conquer which i did managed to finish, Red Alert ( command and conquer )

Screamer 2 ... Settlers 2

Rail shooters have been a good bridge game from my generation to my kids and grandkids. Games like House of the Dead (1+2), Terminator and many others are FUN no matter who you are playing with but you can master them to get the zen mode thing going but it does not stop anyone from enjoying themselves.

“Game is difficult and unfun” translates to “it’s not shiny and modern”. Very few kids want to play something their dad played, or listened to, or watched, or was.
Also, in terms of difficulty, there is not a constant to go for, some people are better at certain things than others. There is a bit of dumbing down going on, like the follow the arrow type thing, but games are also getting more complicated, so I suppose it balances out. Until you get to dark souls type games…

haha noobs
the new kids are so weak
ignore what they want you are the adult show them the who has the power

SC2. Macro adjustments with difficulty level and micro adjustments with game speed. Mixture of all difficulty variables: faster game speeds, smarter AI, more starting units at outposts and expansions, and faster upgrades. With the exception of WOL, you can revisit missions for achievements after finishing the campaign with the most optimized upgrades to make it easier. Campaign research upgrades can be chosen to fit your playstyle. Also room for community-developed challenges too. like getting all achievements on brutal, beat with only one unit type, beat with only default starting units, don't lose a single unit, etc.

Anyone can jump into the game and beat the game regardless of skill level. If you're still really struggling, it still has cheat codes while disabling achievements. It'll always be a solid game I know I can come back to at any point in my life and still replay aided by difficulty options.

MK8 and L4D[2] also have great DDA mechanics. Unlike Mario Kart 64 and the chaotic MK Wii, MK8 places more emphasis on skill level in single player / coop modes. You can still get the most overpowered items at lower placements, but if you manage to stay ahead of the curve through skill or abusing shortcuts, you're still more likely to win due to smaller chances of blue shells spawning.

L4D[2] also have their own difficulty options, but the fun factor is the AI; it'll spawn more hordes and special infected if you're playing extremely well. And spawn more health packs and ammo with less hordes if you're playing pretty poorly. Even though there's only like 12 campaign maps, but still continues to be played today.

Hard to play? Hmmm depends on the point of view. For say soccer you'd have pass (to teammate) and trying to go for the goal. Depending on the direction of the D-pad it would try to choose the closest approximate AI teammate to pass to. So all in all it's easier.

As for more options other than passing/kicking for the goal? well holding the button longer and then letting go could do something, and then direction combinations could do something, but for say the NES that may be too complicated... Not that it didn't stop them from doing MK for the gameboy...

As a programmer, i can take a lot of more complex pieces to make my code work, even from an opcode/instruction level. But make the pieces too simple where i have to build more complicated things to do the more complicated things, you get lost in the details and it becomes too tedius. Makes me think THIS may be one of those cases.

I used to play a lot of Grand Turismo with a friend on my PlayStation. We would drink and drive and smoke for hours. Great fun. I was always the better driver (my PS, more practice), but I won roughly half the time.

The GT 'catchup' system (rubber-banding?) was a pain. It would cut in at surprise moments, altering the handling of the car and if you're pushing on the ragged edge, it would often result in a visit to the wall. It also ruined the unique handling characteristics of that car.

We agreed early on that we would keep the catchup system switched off and balance the game in other ways. Loser chooses the cars, tyres, track for the next race, or staggered starts, for example. We would often end up negotiating trade-offs (EG: You can have that car, if I can have those tyres. More fun). Since we both enjoyed close racing, it would rarely be a heavily biased choice*, but usually just biased enough to keep it interesting.

After a while we discovered a decent balance was for us to both use the same cars, but he gets better tyres.

*We had Porsche911 v 2CV once. He wasn't very good at dealing with the 'back end on ice' of the Porsche, and my 2CV did better than you would expect ^_^)

Generally, I like adaptive difficulty when done right. So the difficulty of the next section is influenced by your performance in the previous section. I also much prefer a set of difficulty options rather than a simple Easy/Medium/Hard. See attached for example of a good set of difficulty options (il-2 sturmovik 1946).