Your Initial Difficulty Choice?

[Kriven]

I generally only play Hard if there's some kind of reward for doing so that isn't just bragging rights. A lot of the time I'll go Easy in fighting games or RPGs simply because I want to see the story, and fighting game AI is pretty often just ridiculously cheap. Those kind of competitive party games, if I want to challenge myself, I play with other people. For other games (platformers and the like) I haven't really come across a skill level type of thing... I tend to play on whatever the default settings are.