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Have you guys heard about this? I must have missed it until it became big news today, but apparently the single-player version has a ghost mode that you can trigger on levels that you're having issues getting through:

http://kotaku.com/5374432/kind-code-demo-s...s-on-auto+pilot

I'd suggest reading the actual article before running off your mouth, but here are the critical points:

• You can only activate this after failing a level eight times.
• You can only start the guided mode at the beginning of a level.
• You can pick up control of the ghost Luigi any time after he starts.
• It's meant as a learning tool, not a way to speedrun levels.
• It's meant to allow the designers to have more control over level design, by allowing players a last-resort "out" which would in theory allow the levels to be harder.

So, what do you guys think about this new innovation, if you want to call it that? Is it something that you could appreciate? Something that makes you grit your teeth, because it makes games too easy? There's been a LOT of yelling about this over at Kotaku - I'm kind of wondering if people who aren't as nutso about games would feel the same.

For my part, I quite like the idea. It's not easy to unlock, and people who really think they're simply too good to take the "easy way out," there's no reason you have to. Is there any reason to not appreciate what Nintendo's trying to do here?


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"To create something great, you need the means to make a lot of really bad crap." - Kevin Kelly

Why aren't you shopping AmaCoN?

This is the key for me:

Quote

Nintendo's intent is to offer Super Guide as a helper for its less skilled customers and to allow its designers to make some of the game's levels devilishly difficult.

Those elitists who don't think the feature should be there should simply not use it. After all, as the article says, this will allow the developers to make the levels more difficult; thus, making said people feel more elite, while those of us stunted with horrific hand-eye coordination bask in the solace of an out (beyond bowing to our more gifted friends/siblings in an effort to get them to do it for us).

The bottom line for me is that it takes nothing away and adds something extra (which isn't automatically unlocked). That sounds good to me.

This may be a bit harsh but it sounds like an excuse for lazy level design to me. A way to strike out that hard tempered medium between making a challenging level layout that's not intuitively impossible to figure out. Points like that are usually the funnest parts of a game for the bulk of the time you're playing it, so I cannot see this being highly beneficial to the industry in the long run.

Also, the only motivation to really get past those devilishly difficult parts, is to get past it and continue on with the game. If the portion is made optional, the drive to even try it for yourself is greatly diminished, especially if you're in the majority of players who usually do not care for 100% completion. Since Super Luigi counts as a level clear, I can see this as being very damaging to developing a natural learning curve. Many players will probably just give up on the harder parts and not seek to improve their actual playing skills, while supposedly still "beating" the game. This will keep the executing and puzzle solving abilities of such players consistently lower, further softening future games because there will be fewer people who have taken the effort to step up their skills.

I'm not saying this isn't without its benefits, as repeated failure of a game portion can be annoying, often times lead a person into shelving it for good. Video games are gradually declining in difficulty anyway in order to prevent this. I personally feel this solution can only patch the problem temporarily, before rapidly worsening it one way or another. (Maybe people won't want to even try 8 times if a level portion's too difficult?)

This post has been edited by Tonepoet on 10th November 2009 21:09

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Role reversal at its finest.