06-05-2011, 12:25 AM
(This post was last modified: 06-05-2011, 12:38 AM by DavidCaruso.)
Super Guide is an optional feature, but the main problem is that in the future, as the practice becomes more accepted and other companies start incorporating Super Guide-like features in their games for the sake of "accessibility" (and you know they will -- they get more money that way), people gradually forget that these things are supposed to be a last resort and lose all sense of self-restraint. You'll have kids who look at a puzzle for 5 whole minutes before giving up, then call up the Super Guide which solves it for them. The main difference between this and gameFAQs is that the developers don't directly condone looking at gameFAQs, so the kids won't even feel they're robbing themselves of something (which I think most of us did as kids at least to some extent, if we cheated with a Gameshark to skip a level or looked up the solution to a puzzle instead of solving it ourselves). So they'll become used to the handholding, and then those kids grow up and become the new core market for videogames. In the worst case, it might even create an environment where the Super Guide is an expected feature and games without it aren't viable commercially.
Before you say I'm overreacting, this kind of thing isn't a new trend either. The same thing happened with credit feeding in arcade games (another optional feature), for example, and has led to mainstream review sites and gaming forums alike calling new shmups short and/or easy for years because they didn't realize that in arcade games you aren't supposed to continue every single time you die until you reach the end screen. Likewise any new console game that is significantly difficult and has not been backed by a significant amount of money/ad revenue from the publishers is lambasted (ex. God Hand, new Ninja Gaiden, Hard Corps: Uprising) while easier (and less fulfilling) games like Portal are placed on a pedestal and called perfect because of their "accessibility." It seems to me to be just another step in the dumbing-down process.
As for NSMBWii, I felt that the level design was kind of bland and uninspired as a whole, especially when compared to SMW and SMB3. But to be fair, I only got to World 5 or so before stopping, and hadn't encountered any significant difficulty to that point in single-player mode, which makes me wonder why they even included the Super Guide. Maybe the endgame is better, though.
Before you say I'm overreacting, this kind of thing isn't a new trend either. The same thing happened with credit feeding in arcade games (another optional feature), for example, and has led to mainstream review sites and gaming forums alike calling new shmups short and/or easy for years because they didn't realize that in arcade games you aren't supposed to continue every single time you die until you reach the end screen. Likewise any new console game that is significantly difficult and has not been backed by a significant amount of money/ad revenue from the publishers is lambasted (ex. God Hand, new Ninja Gaiden, Hard Corps: Uprising) while easier (and less fulfilling) games like Portal are placed on a pedestal and called perfect because of their "accessibility." It seems to me to be just another step in the dumbing-down process.
As for NSMBWii, I felt that the level design was kind of bland and uninspired as a whole, especially when compared to SMW and SMB3. But to be fair, I only got to World 5 or so before stopping, and hadn't encountered any significant difficulty to that point in single-player mode, which makes me wonder why they even included the Super Guide. Maybe the endgame is better, though.