So around the time of New Super Mario Bros. Wii, Nintendo came up with this awesome new idea to help younger players (or people who just happen to suck) get their ass past the first Goomba. This wonderful little gameplay device was known as "the Super Guide" and was a way for Nintendo to go back to the old ways of challenging level design while still being accessible by people who don't have acute control over their thumbs.
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| You are weak! Let Super Kong handle this! |
Now, some people seem to believe that the Super Guide is a horrible concept atrocious in design, use, and existence. For what actual reason nobody really knows. Most of the people keep saying the same thing over and over about the current generation being too lazy to figure out the game for themselves and being unable to handle challenges, or something stupid like that, because they know they actually have no reason to hate a Super Guide other than it's a part of the game the completionist fags (which I am, lol) won't need to use.
Their one real argument, that whole laziness thing I mentioned, doesn't even stack up. It doesn't stack up from an entertainment point of view, and it doesn't stack up from a business point of view. If I were the company, I'd want as many people as possible to enjoy my product the whole way through. Even if that means they just watch Mario and Luigi bounce around from Koopa shell to Koopa shell. Making a game where the average (read: majority) consumer can't get past the first level is a very bad way to sell your product.
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| This game. This fucking game. |
From an entertainment point of view... let's face it, yeah, this generation is full of lazy bums (that's why none of these have shown up in the article yet), but when a lazy bum puts their money (or their grandma's money, or their mom's money, or daddy's money) into a game they expect to have a stress-free hour of fairly mindless fun. And if that means the game's difficulty isn't causing them as much stress as the break-up they just suffered through, then so be it. Games are games, and they should be fun.
This is all a good thing for the more involved gamer. A lot of you just don't know it yet. This will give developers the opportunity to create sadistically difficult stages like they used to do without completely alienating the all-important and unjustly criticized casual players who just want to chill out with Donkey Kong and don't treat completing the game like an Olympic sport.
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| And they never should be. |
There are a few whiner babies out there who seem to think that because the Super Guide can directly tell people how to pass a challenge, solve a puzzle, and win the game that the developers will start pushing out largely junk games with stages that are either poorly crafted or hardly crafted at all. At first consideration, this is a legitimate fear. At second consideration you realize that it's total bullcrap, because the developing companies that will thrive through the "Age of the Super Guide" will be those who develop fun gaming experiences, and the Super Guide can only work to serve that purpose.
Plus you don't have to use it.
So what's everybody's opinion on implementing the Super Guide into modern games?
