I know this is a sarcastic troll post but some QoL improvements can actually help old bad games. Like Save States.
And yes, Super Mario Bros was always bad. I never understood how it got so popular, even when I was a kid in the early 90's.
this post was submitted on 22 Jan 2025
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It's okay not to like Super Mario. You don't need to try and "fix" it.
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Noita has a resurrection mod for this.
That would certainly give me a sense of pride and accomplishment.
dark souls would still benefit from difficulty settings
The difficulty settings are your stats. Literally.
Depending on your build and your personal skill level the game becomes easy or hard. The souls games are notoriously difficult because people don't have the attention span to learn boss patterns and want to kill every other enemy they see. The game punishes arrogance and forces you to figure out the mechanics yourself.
Once you get a hang of it the games become really easy. Not even joking. I have a harder time playing Space Marine 2 than I do Dark Souls.
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I tried to pay DS1 about 6 times now, hated it every single time. Played ER, fucking loved it. DS1 is just horrible game design.
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Aye. Unpopular but...that's a reason I haven't touched any of those yet. Fucking respawn. Stop wasting my time. We had that enough back in the days when there only was 1 game a month (if at all). But they must exclude us with not having a difficulty setting. Cheating also doesn't help in this case.
Thanks I hate it
Recently I re-played Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3 on an emulator and did not feel ashamed by making save points everywhere to avoid re-playing the levels, I had time for that as a kid.
I get the urge, but I wouldn't reccomend doing that on any of the later Wario Land games. They're puzzle platformers, so (especially in 2 and 3) the punishment for messing up is the short window of time it takes to get back to the start of the puzzle.
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I use save function though but differently instead of saving everytime I breath I just save once at start of Level then everytime even if I take a single hit or Fall somewhere. I load my last start save no matter progress. That's why it take me around 1 week just beat one game.
Is this for real or am I too tired to understand the point of the text?
I'm genuinely not sure wether or not the first text is sarcastic, but I'm certain the reply is.
streamlining
you mean instead of playing the game, i could pay you to not play the game i'm playing instead?
sign me up
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Nintendo is way ahead of these guys. The last few mario games let you pick a character that can't be hurt or killed. And if that's too hard for you, they'll even show you exactly how to play the level.
Mario Wonder both had a “baby mode” mechanic and yet also had some genuinely interesting and challenging levels.
Celeste is extremely difficult yet also has a baby mode feature.
Many games have a “tell me a story” difficulty level which is more or less the same idea.
Games having an easy difficulty without detracting from the game’s main challenge and balance is not a problem IMO.
The real problem with the "improved" SMB from the post is not that it has ways of making the game easier, it's that the "fixes" amount to a microtransaction hellhole, complete with intrusive prompts.
I'm all for games with configurable difficulty. Nobody thinks less of Doom for having difficulty settings. But everybody does think less of games that pair frustrating mechanics (like difficulty spikes or countdown timers) with bypass MTX.
To use the default controversial genre, I think that a soulslike with difficulty settings would work just fine. But a soulslike where your healing flask only restores one charge every ten minutes unless you buy more charges from the store (but store-bought ones can exceed the normal maximum) or where game-breakingly OP equipment is available as MTX would not go over well.
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I can at least support baby mode for, like, extremely small kids and maybe co-op with that one person who's never touched a video game in their life but wants to play along with the other three. You know, the kids are over at grandpa's, and he wants to feel like he's playing and having fun with them instead of just setting and forgetting them on the magic dopamine box, but he's no good at it, so he takes the invincible character. I think that's reasonable, inclusive game design.
What I take issue with is when baby mode drags down the difficulty of the rest of the game modes. For example, you as a game designer benchmark "normal mode" against "being literally invulnerable", and so you now have to play hard mode to even vaguely feel any sort of tension.
I agree completely. Idk why they do it. They got filthy rich off kids 5-10 playing the shit out of NES games.
The way it works is this: The people catch hold of something, and make magic. It makes a ton of money, because people can recognize magic. Then other people with investment money get involved. Gradually, the magic oriented people are outnumbered, the fun of their average working day declines, and they leave or simply get shouldered into some niche somewhere by the unimaginable torrent of motivated people who have something else on their mind.
No one involved in Mario, Zelda, Metroid, or Contra has been anywhere near the design team at Nintendo for decades. These guys own the rights to call it "Mario," but if they weren't making games where you can turn Mario into an elephant, they could be just as happy making sweat pants with writing on the ass. And the magic is off somewhere else, doing its thing.
These guys own the rights to call it “Mario,” but if they weren’t making games where you can turn Mario into an elephant, they could be just as [miserable] making sweat pants with writing on the ass.
FTFY. But also nice one, I loled. And you're absolutely spot on with what you're saying too.
I'm not sure if I'm missing sarcasm here, but Super Mario Bros. Wonder is freaking amazing. There's so much creativity packed into that game, that almost every level they introduce a new mechanic that could easily be it's whole entire game.
Oh, I dunno about any of the newer Mario games, I was just taking people's word for it.
I was agreeing with the way that successful brands/IP tend to get milked to death by business types long after the creative types have moved on. But tbf I think Nintendo is one of the few corporations where they have been able to maintain the creative vitality of their franchises for 30+ years, they may be an exception to that rule. Especially with Mario and Zelda, they continued to make great games long after the original creative teams were gone.
But still, all it takes is a few dumbass MBAs to ruin great things by driving away the people who make the magic happen.
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For the love of God Gen Z is gonna kill us with sighs