Why Super Mario Bros. 3 was the last great Mario game.

[JUG]

The Ghost of RubangB said:
As a Nintendo fan, I can say that.... Malstrom is right. Kinda. It's not just Nintendo. All games have been dumbed down in the last 20 years to expand the audience. Some games are just movies you click through now. In the 80's we didn't even have save points, let alone unlimited lives or continues or tutorials or anything. Imagine a 3-D Battletoads game today, with save points, save files, item collecting, tutorials, and puzzles. Kids today couldn't lay a finger on Battletoads. The game would bite their fingers off.

This less intimidating design isn't a bad thing, and I don't think it entails that games have to be too easy anyway; most modern games just give people more options. In Mario Galaxy I could go up to a toad knowing that he'd give me a hint on how to figure out the puzzle I was on, or I could carry on and try to do it by myself. Surely that's a happy medium for all players? I think it's going much too far to call it 'dumbing down'. It's not as though games aren't made with high difficulty settings and challenging unlockables any more. I think the kind of gamers who feel nostalgic about the old approach only miss the feeling of superiority - they want to feel that they are one of a select few.

Does anyone really miss games where the basic gameplay mode was as hard as Battletoads? Would anyone rather spend six months trying to beat Shadow of the Beast 2 than play through Mario Galaxy, widely acknowledged as one of the best games this generation? "Dumbing down" this is not.