Print

Author Topic: New Mario titles unveiled at E3  (Read 56117 times)

Kimimaru

  • Max Stats
« Reply #60 on: June 05, 2009, 11:21:50 AM »
Things are looking great! I just hope that Yoshi doesn't play a huge role in Super Mario Galaxy 2, and I hope that Nintendo changes New Super Mario Bros. Wii's name.

By the way, I found no problem with how Yoshi was ridden in Super Mario Sunshine. I didn't really care that he couldn't swim, since you only really needed to get across the water with him for one Shine Sprite that I can just glitch to easily. I think that using him to gain infinite vertical and horizontal distance with precise timing is much more useful than being able to swim (not that I dislike swimming). Plus, how could you not like that ridiculously long tongue?

« Last Edit: June 05, 2009, 11:23:27 AM by Kimimaru »
The Mario series is the best! It has every genre in video games but RTS'! It also has a plumber who does different roles, a princess, and a lot of odd creatures who don't seem to poop!

« Reply #61 on: June 05, 2009, 01:37:40 PM »
I'm pretty sure someone here said that the star cursor has disappeared and has been replaced by a red dot in SMG 2. This is not true. At a certain point in the trailer for the game (the Chain Chomp covered planet), the star cursor made a circular motion for a few seconds on the right of the screen.

CrossEyed7

  • i can make this whatever i want; you're not my dad
« Reply #62 on: June 05, 2009, 02:41:53 PM »
This says that NSMBW will be the first game to use that self-playing patent. I think it's probably a great idea, mostly agreeing with this guy (language), but it's bound to be controversial, at least at first.
"Oh man, I wish being a part of a Mario fan community was the most embarrassing thing about my life." - Super-Jesse

Kimimaru

  • Max Stats
« Reply #63 on: June 05, 2009, 03:00:29 PM »
WHAT? Reading that just made me think that Nintendo is going way too far in appealing to casuals. Everything was perfectly fine until now. What's the point of making difficult levels if a player can just let a computer get through them? Games don't necessarily have to be challenging, but if a game is challenging, let the player go through the challenge. After all, life would be boring without any challenges at all. I say Nintendo should cancel that idea and let their gamers play their games. This is the only time I have said this in my life: Bad move, Nintendo. Games were never meant to beat themselves.
« Last Edit: June 05, 2009, 03:37:33 PM by Kimimaru »
The Mario series is the best! It has every genre in video games but RTS'! It also has a plumber who does different roles, a princess, and a lot of odd creatures who don't seem to poop!

Turtlekid1

  • Tortuga
« Reply #64 on: June 05, 2009, 03:26:25 PM »
Wait, what?  What's this about games beating themselves?  Seriously, I agree with Kimimaru; not cool.
"It'll say life is sacred and so is death
but death is life and so we move on"

CrossEyed7

  • i can make this whatever i want; you're not my dad
« Reply #65 on: June 05, 2009, 04:05:53 PM »
I think it'll let them make harder games. For a game to be profitable and for the medium of video games as a whole to remain sustainable, it has to appeal to a wide audience, and right now that means you need to make it easy enough that it won't frustrate everyone. With this system, they can make games that are hard enough to satisfy hardcore gamers but can still have a big enough audience to be worth making. The same way that an advanced reader can spend time finding all the nuances of the Communist satire in Animal Farm and a simpler one can laugh at the funny talking animals, a casual Bible reader can just bookmark the Proverbs they like while an avid apologist will spend hours cross-checking footnotes to put together a detailed systematic theology, or a chef can use pepperoni in an intricate gourmet pasta dish while a hungry college student just eats it straight out of the bag, it will allow different people to interact with games on as deep or as shallow a level as they choose, given their interest level and free time.

The challenges are still there and just as hard -- once everyone can beat them, there's no excuse any longer for making them overly easy -- there's just an entirely optional way to skip them if lack of time, skill, patience, or desire call for it. I shouldn't have to watch those Senate scenes at the beginning of Attack of the Clones every time I want to see Padme's midriff; that's why they invented DVD chapters. Of course we ought to play the game the way it's meant to be played, just as we ought to watch movies from beginning to end, but we shouldn't have to do it strictly that way every time (it's not just for the casuals -- once I've read Harry Potter eight times, in addition to reading it straight through again, I can skip ahead to the parts I like, past the less interesting parts that I've practically memorized by now anyway). Don't forget that a lot of the fun of most games comes with playing with them in ways the developer hadn't ever really intended. It's a lot of fun and very fulfilling to spend hours putting together the perfect park in Roller Coaster Tycoon, but sometimes it's just as fun, if not more so, to get as many peeps as you can onto a single square of path over water and then delete it and drown them all at once. It's also fun sometimes to just switch on god mode -- an experience that is no less destructive of the spirit of gaming than Miyamoto's "demo mode."

And in an odd way, it brings gaming back to its roots. Growing up on the NES and SNES, most of us had a sibling or friend or even a parent who was significantly better at the game than we were. Today those mentor figures are more often than not absent for new learning gamers (which, never forget, we once were), but the act of a young, still-learning gamer passing the controller to their gaming superior sitting next to them and watching them blaze through the world -- not so that we could skip the level, but so that we could learn how to do it ourselves the next time around and ultimately become more skilled and self-reliant -- can make a comeback.

Will people overuse and abuse it? Of course. The same kind of lame people will also write "word" 50,000 times in a .txt file so they can "win" NaNoWriMo and get a little icon that says WINNER on it, but are they going to have the same kind of personal satisfaction as someone who actually wrote a novel without cheating? Moreover, do you really lose anything because they did that? It's not like we get paid to get to the end of games; all games are ultimately Bragging Rights Rewards, far more about the journey than the destination, and if you just put the game on autopilot, there's nothing to brag about. But in a world where games are harder and most people do put them on autopilot, actually beating it on your own (and I'm sure games will feature ways to prove that you did it on your own, a bit like the Golden Wheel; I think it's even mentioned in the patent) will become even more of a status symbol -- and one that many more people will be able to acknowledge and appreciate because they've all played the game too and know for themselves how hard it is. Will we be tempted to use it? I know I will, but once again, that only makes it even more of an accomplishment to actually do it legitimately. It's not Nintendo's fault if I can't discipline myself to play through the whole game, it's my own problem.

And putting aside the achievement aspect for a bit of humility, I readily admit that I've played many, many games where as much as I enjoyed the game, I got stuck in one spot and ended up putting it down and never going back to it (or if I did go back to it, it'd been so long since I played that I realized I'd completely forgotten what happened up until then and had to start over). From where I'm sitting now I can see at least ten games on my shelves that I wish I could finish but probably never will. I could go to GameFAQs, find a solution (not a whole 200-page walkthrough, mind you, just the one missing piece to get past this one spot that's eluded me for months or even years), print it out, and bring it with me when I play them next time (probably running into more than a few big spoilers for the games while I'm online, especially considering how old they are by now), but this system would let me do effectively the same thing right there in the game, get past that one spot with a precision-strike deus ex machina, and then get right back on the horse for the rest of the game. No game is perfect, and there will always be at least one spot in the game that turns out to be a lot harder to do or to figure out than the developers thought it would be. I shouldn't abandon a game just because of one flaw that's ultimately insignificant in the grand scheme of the game, but if it bottlenecks me and I'm forced to figure it out on my own, I'll probably just end up leaving.



That was a lot longer than I expected it to be. Sorry if it sounds kind of pompous and overly loquacious at times, I tend to sound like that.
« Last Edit: June 05, 2009, 07:08:41 PM by CrossEyed7 »
"Oh man, I wish being a part of a Mario fan community was the most embarrassing thing about my life." - Super-Jesse

« Reply #66 on: June 05, 2009, 04:35:30 PM »
Well, I was a bit too slow on my reply, but I agree with CrossEyed7.

Maybe we're looking at this the wrong way. It is a option isn't it? So why should we worry about it? We can play the game normally right?

This could be a good thing for all those kids out there playing Mario. I remember when I was about 4-5 there were some levels that no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't beat them and had to have my dad beat them. (I can beat them now of course!) This is simply a way to do the same thing, just without bothering your parents. (It used to get me in trouble all the time.)


ShadowBrain

  • Ridiculously relevant
« Reply #67 on: June 05, 2009, 05:37:00 PM »
This says that NSMBW will be the first game to use that self-playing patent. I think it's probably a great idea, mostly agreeing with this guy (language), but it's bound to be controversial, at least at first.
Well, that's saved me the time of posting that link, but I'll still say this: I hated Wii Sports and its ilk, but I've come to accept they are important for how they've gotten new people interested in games. This, however, seems to be the first real genuine blow to the whole point of videogames.

In other words: Ah, [dukar].
"Mario is your oyster." ~The Chef

Kimimaru

  • Max Stats
« Reply #68 on: June 05, 2009, 06:08:45 PM »
Good point, CrossEyed. I never thought about it that way. That being said, I'm curious to see exactly how this system works. It seems like Nintendo will have to program a certain path for the computer to take, most preferably the simplest one.
The Mario series is the best! It has every genre in video games but RTS'! It also has a plumber who does different roles, a princess, and a lot of odd creatures who don't seem to poop!

« Reply #69 on: June 05, 2009, 06:17:05 PM »
My concern is that some will lack the judgement to use the feature sensibly -- They'll let the game practically beat itself, and then return it because a completed game apparently isn't worth having around. Well, their loss.

Hopefully Nintendo will have the decency to at least require the player to collect Star Coins and whatnot manually...
YYur  waYur n beYur you Yur plusYur instYur an Yur Yur whaYur

« Reply #70 on: June 06, 2009, 12:51:18 PM »
I don't know why people are surprised by this feature. Games that play themselves have been around for years..

The Smash Bros series, Mario Parties 1-3 (I think 4 did away with all computers playing..) and the Soul Caliber series (I have only played one, SC2, and there was a mode specifically for watching the CPU fight eachother..)
Kinopio is the ultimate video game character! Who else can drive a kart, host parties, play tennis, give good advice and items, and is almost always happy??

BP

  • Beside Pacific
« Reply #71 on: June 06, 2009, 01:51:26 PM »
That's not the same. NSMBW will have a story and an ending an a goal you must accomplish.
All your dreeeeeeams begiiin to shatterrrrrr~
It's YOUR problem!

ShadowBrain

  • Ridiculously relevant
« Reply #72 on: June 06, 2009, 08:11:26 PM »
Yeah, that's what I was thinking (however minimal they may be).

And Toad, those examples are different and you know it.
"Mario is your oyster." ~The Chef

« Reply #73 on: June 07, 2009, 09:20:48 AM »
Does anybody know when Bowser's Inside Story comes out in North America?
Victory... is my destiny!

Deezer

  • Invincible
« Reply #74 on: June 07, 2009, 03:06:27 PM »
At the press conference they said this Fall.

Print