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New Super Mario Bros. Wii Attempts To Bridge Casual/Hardcore Divide
When Nintendo returns to its roots next month by releasing a new, 2-D, side-scrolling Super Mario Bros. game for the Wii, it's trying to do more than simply hop on the retro bandwagon many publishers have ridden in recent months. Speaking at a roundtable discussion in New York this week, Nintendo game designer Shigeru Miyamoto talked about how they're trying to satisfy fans of the series who want challenging gameplay in addition to attracting new or casual players just looking for an entertaining platformer. Quoting:
"... you can play the story mode single-player all the way through from beginning to end, and at any point along the way, you can add players from the world map and have up to four players cooperate to complete the levels. And beyond that, there are two dedicated multiplayer modes, one of which is free-for-all, which lets you select the stages from story mode ... so you can easily find the stage you like. And then there’s also a coin battle mode which is a competitive multiplayer mode, in which you’re actually competing for points and you’re getting ranked based on how many points you’ve collected. The free-for-all mode has kind of a similar feel to something like Mario Kart where you just happen to have four people over and you want to sit down and play a quick match in your favorite level."
I'll hold off my judgment until I try it, but so far such attempts to "bridge the gap" have all failed. Although most of those attempts start with the hardcore side and water it down (Empire Earth 3 anyone?). IMO, it seems best just to let hardcore gamers have their hardcore games, and casual gamers have their casual games, and those who want a mix, can get some of each. But I hope they pleasantly surprise me.
DISCLAIMER: I am very rarely serious. If the above comment seems asinine makes no sense, it is most likely a bad joke.
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I remember once leaving my NES on for a week straight trying to get to the end of the original super mario bros when I was a kid without using any warps, good times.
I'm glad however that the wii one is getting a multiplayer, and I look forward to the level designs, I may actually have to buy a wii now instead of just fixing them for friends!
Being semi-"hardcore" all my gaming career never actually gave too much thought about casual gamers point of view. Wonder where people draw that line.
The free-for-all mode has kind of a similar feel to something like Mario Kart where you just happen to have four people over and you want to sit down and play a quick match in your favorite level.
Honest question: how often does this happen for other people that you have three other people over and you say "Hey, let's play mario kart" and they say "sure?" One of the 3 people for me is invariably my wife who has made it clear she doesn't enjoy playing videogames even "casual" games in a group. (Before anyone starts suggesting "a game she's sure to like," realize I've probably made attempts to get her interested in games already). Even when she's not, I don't see that happening, most people who I have over don't come over to play videogames. Same with my friends who have wiis, when I'm at their house with other people, I don't find myself playing mario kart or smash bros or guitar hero.
Who are these groups of people that nintendo is still making games for? And next console generation, can we establish before hand which consoles are going to have libraries that are mostly group games and which consoles have more games that you can play online or by yourself? I got a wii early. I think Muramasa, demon blade is the only game I've played on it this year.
If you've ever seen a so-called "casual" gamer get into a game you'll notice they really devote a LOT of attention to it and tend to deal even with the harshest challenges. What you need to make one of them play your game isn't low difficulty, it's a beginning that convinces them the game is worth their time and many "hardcore" games botch that badly with overly long intro cinematics followed by boring as hell tutorials which are necessitated by overly complex game design. Complex here doesn't mean deep, many games that use the whole controller are just "shoot anything that moves", it's that they have a crapload of minor functions thrown in there that you'll rarely need but still have to memorize and camera views geared for "immersion" rather than understanding WTF is going on.
You could probably implement a modern FPS with Contra's gameplay without really sacrificing the fun. Contra was something recently made gamers enjoyed on the NES. It didn't waste your time, it was about action and offered the joy of playing cooperatively. And if it's too hard, up up down down left right left right B A.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
please go back to playing animal crossing, i don't like to be flamed by 12yo girls.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
As all attempts to make a game suitable for all types of gamers have failed, this is generally a bad idea. For instance, in the competitive gameplay, the one where you attain ranks, this may provoke people that play casually to start playing hardcore, or turn casual players away from the gametype all together, since they will never attain as high of a rank as a person who spends all night on the game. While this is a novel concept, it's generally doomed to fail as it has the potential to either pull many people into the hardcore style, or push a lot of them away.
"Chance favors only the prepared mind." -Archimedes
I'm not sure what casual means. I think the different types of player are:
- Social, the ones who come not for the game per se, but for the community and companionship
- Recreational, the ones who come for a quick, easy, romp in fantasy-land
- Hard-core, the ones who want to beat the game or their fellow players, and who will invest time in understanding and mastering its mechanics.
I think the problem with casual, is that it tries to cover social and recreational, and ends up meaning... idiot... which alienates the hard-cores.
WoW is kinda covering all bases, with guilds, lots of solo and easy ("normal") content, and heroic raids + pvp rankings for the hardcores. I think their issue at the moment is that
- lowering the "maintenance" effort (grinding, farming) for the players to make the game more accessible to casuals is making the game boring for hard cores: there is not much to do outside of raiding, and raids are very easy and short these days. Achievements farming only does so much, especially since not much skill is required, just time.
- having hard-core content that is not very different from the casual one (you're no longer killing a very exclusive boss, only the same as everyone, but in hard mode) is kinda a let-down
On the other hand, I've tried EVE, and found the game not very accessible (I had trouble understanding how to complete a few very early quest), and quite overwhelming for the new player.
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Some people seem to have lost their sense of reality!
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> Who are these groups of people that Nintendo is still making games for?
The Chinese and Japanese are two obvious groups, at the very least.
I recently spent three months traveling through East Asia, mostly in China (Beijing & southwards) and Japan (Tokyo & southwards). There is a huge amount of casual gaming compared to Europe and the US. People commute a lot using advanced public transit (even Beijing's subway looks like Sci-fi compared to NYC MTA, and of course Japan is a different planet altogether). So, all these people not busy steering (and gearing, if in Europe), have PSPs at hand for zoning out to and fro work. And it's not just young boys; also thirty-something women frequently whip out gaming gear rather than makeup kits.
Of course it's not only a subway phenomenon. In Japan for instance, apart from all the gaming at home, there are also at least three distinct types of public game venues:
1 - Tekken-style penny arcades, similar to those in the West, mostly crowded by young men.
2 - Incredibly packed places with Vegas-style machines, but with small silver balls that rush though mazes. These places are unbelievably noisy from all the balls, sounds like a small airport. People of all sorts hang out here, from young men in fancy suits to middle-aged women who apparently just drop in when shopping.
3 - Cafe-style manga libraries where there are also booths for reading, gaming and surfing - or just sleeping. The Japanese seem to be sleeping everywhere, even in the lobbies in the hotels where they stay for the night. I really don't know why they prefer the lobby to their own room..?
I certainly applaud the effort to reconcile hardcore and casual gaming, but Super Mario Brothers Wii will not accomplish that because of one glaring problem: it is on the Wii. The Wii is not a hardcore gaming platform. It is the platform you use when you want to give your casual gaming friend a snowball's chance against you in a game that relies more the Wii interpreting in a fortuitous way your frustrated spastic Wiimote flailing than it does skill. Speaking for myself, I prefer an input system that is a bit more precise and accurate than the Wii, which is wont to take my motions more as suggestions than actual controls.
considering that most of the NYC MTA are just trolley cars running on lightly-roofed-over roadways, pretty much anything from the 1980's forward will seem like scifi by comparison.
Ironically even Animal Crossing felt like a shitty gamecube port.
To me, City Folk felt like a DS port because they didn't add anything to Wild World other than a strip mall. If it were a GameCube port, then I'd be able to keep my town on an SD card or USB stick and have more than one of them going on one console like I did on Population Growing. But by far the biggest disappointment of City Folk was the lack of a split-screen 2-player mode.
Maybe if they waited until they got the controls right (even the motion plus is lacking) and put at least an xbox-level graphics chip in it.
If the GameCube's Flipper GPU wasn't on par with that of the original Xbox's GeForce 3 GPU, the Wii's Hollywood GPU sure is.
"The free-for-all mode has kind of a similar feel to something like Mario Kart where you just happen to have four people over and you want to sit down and play a quick match in your favorite level"
Four people over plus I also want to play...that means five controllers, right? Thought Nintendo only supported four...
Perhaps they meant "have three people over".
I think I found video of the coin battle mode
http://www.hulu.com/watch/57938/saturday-night-live-wii-guys
I'm a kind of cross Dedicated + Casual gamer in that i'm happy to play a longish game through but might spend years doing so. currently about 3 years into Tomb Raider II and Suikoden on the PS1, for example and only just recently acquired a Dreamcast. On the other hand i recently played HL2 almost straight through in one sitting - which for me means taking less than 3 months to do it
I have a full time job and a family and do not have more than a handful of hours a week to spend in front of the goggle box so whilst i do not want to play a game that requires oodles of time and or skill i do want to be able to progress without feeling like i'm restricted because i'm not hardcore enough. Some examples i can think of are golf - where i have to be super hole in one on some challenges to unlock certain courses, or skateboarding/snowboarding where i'm stuck with 3/4 out of a dozen areas to play on because i cant remember the correct multifinger button combos to pull off the raddest moves to get a high enough score to unlock them.
At the same time though, whilst wii bowling or mario kart is fun and something even the wife is up for it's only good for a bit of mucking about while drinking beer, not really rewarding or immersive enough.
basically i want games to cater to the hardcore gamer but please let the casual gamer get to those unlocked levels without dumbing down the mechanics to get me there. I was able to ENJOY half life 2 (and halo 1 and 2) because i was able to play - and feel suitably challenged - on Normal skill, but i had the choice to play Hard skill, other game genres might do well to adapt to that, find other things and rewards to unlock to give the hardcore gamers something to earn (like gold plated shit, i dunno) without withholding 80% of the actual game THAT I PAID FOR from me.
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.