#super guide

If it’s optional, it’s fine.

But it’s not a trend I like. This is speaking as somebody who, back in the 16-bit era, defaulted every game he could to easy mode. I played games like Chrono Trigger and Earthbound with Game Genie firmly attached, so I could instantly level up to 99 on the first battle.

At some point I realized that was kind of lame and made an effort to bump up the difficulty in games. I think the first game I cleared on “Normal” difficulty was Halo 1. I beat Bayonetta on normal difficulty. Earlier this year I beat Doom 1 on “Hurt Me Plenty” difficulty, which I think is the next step up from whatever classifies as “medium” in Doom.

I learned something important: games are more fun this way.

Like, Doom on “Hurt Me Plenty” is a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT experience. Practically a different game, and a much better one, at that. I’ve heard it’s the same if you bump it up to the hardest regular difficulty setting, “Ultraviolence”.

Last year or the year before, I also played through the original Half-Life on normal difficulty, after years of sticking to Easy. Again, same deal: completely different experience. Not just from a “more enemies, less health" stand point, but from a "everything’s smarter, so you have to be smarter" stand point.

Yes, you die a lot, but that’s an important part of playing a game. That’s how you learn. There’s a part in the Street Fighter V trailer that, while cheesily sentimental, seems relatable to this scenario:

You go again. You fail faster. You fail BETTER. You get stronger, you get smarter. And then one day, it finally happens. Something breaks. You push past what you thought your limits were. That ceiling above you? It isn’t real. It never was.

So to have Superguide come in there and say, “Aw, you poor baby! You died five whole times! Do you just want to skip this level?” feels to me like it is creating a larger problem than it is solving.

You should always play the games in the way developers intended you to. Sure, easy mode prevents you from getting frustrated, but you’re also probably watering down the experience.

Adversity doesn’t feel good when it’s happening, but it makes victory all the more rewarding. You NEED adversity in games. It’s that yin and yang; in order to feel happiness, you must also feel anger and sadness so you have something to contrast with. Otherwise you just become numb to everything.

Sure, this is all optional, but I’m coming at it from the perspective of somebody who relied on Easy Mode as a crutch and knows there’s a better way. I know how easy it is to rationalize the decision to say, “Easy mode is good enough.”

But it’s not. And giving more people more options to skip or neuter “frustrating” parts of games is a little silly.

A lot of old-school gamers enjoy difficult games. These people like challenges that push them to really fight to see the game's ending, because that's what they grew up on during the 8-bit and 16-bit ears.

However, the games of today cost many millions of dollars. The huge expense of making today's video games means that it's not all that smart to block some of the content behind difficult hurdles.

Most games opt to resolve this by offering multiple difficulty levels. However, that's not always enough to get real newbies through the toughest spots. That's why some games are giving players the opportunity to just skip past the action.

Many gamers see such "helping hands" as slaps in the face.

The modern reboot of Alone in the Dark was one of the first to let players skip ahead to later parts of the game in whatever manner they saw fit. However, it was Nintendo who took it to a new extreme with the "Super Guide." In New Super Mario Bros. Wii, Super Mario Galaxy 2 and Donkey Kong Country Returns, players who died a set number of times would unlock the ability to let the game play itself. You can watch the game play through the stage that's been killing you for as long as you like, or even until the level is finished. Even the final boss of these games can be beaten in this way; just die enough times during the battle, and the game will deliver the ending to you on a silver platter.

L.A. Noire was such an expensive game that it allows players to skip right past any action sequence after dying only five times. Screw up an interrogation? The game continues regardless; you just might get a little chewed out by your boss. L.A. Noire was more concerned with storytelling than anything else, so I suppose this isn't all that weird. They wanted players of all skill levels to be able to see the adventure through to the end.

The white-furred "Super Kong" lets you skip on ahead.

I know this is heresy to some people who think that endings should be earned. Nintendo's games don't even have the "Everyone should see the story!" excuse to fall back on, because those games barely have any story to speak of. Yet I think it's understandable anyway because of how annoying it is to hung up onone small partof a game, then get past it and discover that it never gets that tough again. Sometimes, games are just unbalanced. Why not provide a get-out-of-unbalance-free card to everybody who wants it?