Preferred difficulty for non-strategy games

[Mouzafphaerre]

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When a game forces me to hurry and be faster, that's stressful and the fun ends for me

Well said mein Herr. That's why I left the entertaining Bow Street Runner incomplete. Pure quick-click nonsense at the end.
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[woad&fangs]

I usually play the first time through on either hard or medium depending on what I have heard about the difficulty of the game. The second play through is almost always done on very hard settings. Subsequent play throughs are usually done at hard but occasionally at very hard level.

So a little bit of everything.

[Kekvit Irae]

I enjoy games that have no real way of changing difficulty, but rather adapts to your play style. Starting slow and easy to help you adapt to controls and playing, then gets increasingly difficult. Very much how the Half-Life series is.

[Ramses II CP]

I default to very hard, but if I discover that a particular game's AI cheats on VH then I may reconsider... so it's really game dependant.

[LittleGrizzly]

I usually go for the most difficult setting (avoiding things like new york minute in max payne 2) as im usually worried about a game being too easy and over too quickly, i mostly end up regretting this half way into the game when i realise i have to start again or battle my way through this army of pissed of machine gunners with 1 hp left.....

[Quirinus]

But god, did that send us crazy or what. I hate the Library, with a passion.

Ugh, yes. That was my least favourite level too, I wanted to shoot that bloody annoying robot thingy out of the sky.

But whoa, Legendary was hard. I remember getting screwed up two shots from the Covenant Elite's plasma rifle in the very first level, and then giving up for a lower difficulty setting.

[pdoan8]

Always Normal (sometimes it is the easiest setting) or whatever the default is. Then I adjust it from there.

[CrossLOPER]

Where's the "Murderous" option? THIS QUESTION DEMANDS AN ANSWER!!!

Depends how I feel. If I think I know the format, then either Very Hard or Hard. If there is an "Impossible" option, like in F.E.A.R., I'll take it out of curiosity. Of course, this usually means that there are random enemies with power armor around every corner that force you to empty every gun you have in your arsenal and scramble to collect any weapon that happens to be lying around and eventually simply deciding that the only course of action left is to perform a time-lapsed flying sidekick to the hull of the giant robot-thing that has twenty rocket launchers.