Almost every Sega Genesis game made had massive cheat codes that would allow you to topple any game in the first day you bought it. I never felt like they were devalued, and I doubt many others did either. (When we used them.)

And as for devalued, there is nothing more devaluing from a game, than running into a roadblock that you cannot get past, and stops you from being able to keep playing the game. Nothing feels worse than having a game in your collection that is just sitting there on the shelf, not being played, because there is some part that pisses you off to the point you can no longer enjoy the game.

This fixes that.

Games these days are all getting way too easy and with wii's huge amount of casual gamers they have to make the games simple and easier, if you had played during NES/SNES/SEGA -era you would understand what hard really means in gaming (no saves, very limited lives, in most of games you died instantly when you took damage). RPG's are not hard, they just require grinding and time and all will be easy.

Also trophies in games have been made so that they require lot of commitment to get, so of course they're hard to get when you have to kill 100 enemies in 10 second, kill 100000 enemies total, etc but do you really play a game for the trophies or for fun?

I heavily doubt TP is hard, propably annoying at times but nothing an average gamer couldn't handle.

Quite true, which is why I included my totally awesome Cooking For Fun analogy a ways back. If you don't start to learn and utilize the basic skills of the early game, you'll almost always find that the ratio of fun-stuff to not-fun-stuff tends to shrink as the game goes on, since it ramps up the difficulty as it gets closer to the end. This is only natural: few activities remain fun if you keep doing them over and over, so developers introduce new elements, ramp up the difficulty of old ones, or both. But if you're having difficulty with the easy stuff, there's no way you're going to be able to do the hard stuff. So what developers need to do is make it so that the not-fun-stuff is taught sufficiently and organically enough that when you get to those parts, it becomes fun-stuff.

Consider Mario 3. It's possible, by using flutes, to skip to the end of the game in under ten minutes. But if you do this on your first time through, you're likely to get slaughtered by Bowser's military, as the platforming and enemy evasion skills World 8 requires are pretty stiff. But if you've been playing through the level-by-level, you're almost certain to be good enough to tackle World 8, since the game does a fantastic job of letting you improve over time, without really noticing that you're getting better.

But this new features is like using flutes to get to World 8, then having infinite P-Wings when you get there. No, it's more like watching the YouTube video of someone using flutes to bet to World 8, and then beating the game himself (awesome video by the by, but only the first time).

I agree that something needs to be done to entice the mothers of this world into picking up Mario, don't get me wrong. I just don't see how having the game play for you is going to be the thing that does that.

:O If I buy a game, I can watch a computer play it so I can save half the time! Genius

*shrug* There have always been ways you can make a game more or less challenging. If you really wanted Twilight Princess to be hard, you could have ignored the Heart Piece after every boss. Or, you could have had found a guide on GameFAQs and walked you through the game. Each person will only work so hard for a game. The person who enjoys working through frustrating parts will still work through them, and the person who'd give up, or go to a guide, or use cheats, will still do something to get past the difficult parts. Nintendo is just making it easier for people who don't want to deal with hard parts to do that. In doing that, it allows them to make more challenging parts for people who want more of that.

Basically, this is just Chrizum's post fleshed out a bit for noname to understand.

Edit: I remember a challenge in OoT where you only have three hearts and you use some broken knife and no shield for the whole game.  It just serves to reinforce my point.

Thanks!

I agree completely with your categorization for who this is good and bad for: basically it's great for people who're committed enough to learn what to do next, but potentially bad for people who are on the fence about gaming.

I'm glad you brought up the teleportation feature, as I'd forgotten about it. I think that type of thing is great: the "weaker" player still has to try his or her best, but in certain situations the stronger player can "save" them. It's kind of like the Save feature in Rock Band, or what Khuutra wrote about when he said he tried to shoulder as much of the boss fights as he can; the more experienced player can do a lot to help the new person stay in the game, but all the players still have to pull their own weight to a degree, even if that just boils down to "stay alive long enough to be saved!" As someone who's been on the helped-out end of that in several games (FPS and SHMUPS, mostly) I can tell you that it's not only still fun (as you're staying engaged), but it also helps hone your own skills over time.

It's YouTube Gameplay vids for the lazy gamer. I see no problem with it.

I highly doubt Nintendo will punish people for using this feature, that would be counter-productive to what they are trying to accomplish (enticing new players to play the game, punishment will not do that) - they will however reward those who don't use it.

Look at it this way: Nintendo is trying to make their games fun, if it's fun for you to play the game on your own with now hints or strategy guides that's fine and you should feel that sense of accomplsihment when you can beat a game on your own, but for some people being stuck on a hard part of a game is frustrating and not fun at all and the sense of accomplishment when (or if) they get past that hard part isn't enough to justify the frustration so they use strategy guides or simply quit playing the game. Nintendo is simply trying to make it fun for everyone, if you don't like it then don't use it.

I personally will probably try it out once to see how it works then never utilize it again, but I hope others do - if that makes the game more fun, by removing frustrating parts, for them.

Your (and Chizrum's) point is well-taken, but that's not the angle I'm coming from. I do believe that this can be a handy feature for people who're already committed to gaming: you can learn how to do something that's tricking you, and if you're just really not in the mood you can skip to the good parts. My fear is the effect this will have on newcomers; they're not already as devoted to gaming, and with this feature around I believe they're likely to spend increasing amounts of time watching rather than playing, because they never improved enough to play the game for themselves. Since watching a computer play isn't particularly fun, I think that will tend to discourage newcomers from staying in our hobby.

By contrast, if games' difficulty came at a more organic pace, one which allowed players a chance to learn new skills and then refine them at a steady rate, I think more newcomers would get drawn in. To further your own analogy, a newcomer who never bothered to become good enough to tackle the first dungeon is probably not going to enjoy most of the mid-to-late game, and he or she is certainly never going to become devoted enough to even consider trying the 3-Heart Challenge. Why would he? Watching the game play itself wasn't particularly fun.

I'm not concerned. Those who feel like quitting will hit the /autopilot button without being bothered to go to gamefaqs or youtube, those who still feel up to the challenge will just take another swing at it.

I know some gamers have a hard time understanding it, but some people, even people who consider themselves to be gamers, aren't looking to be challenged. Now they can enjoy challenging games to completion instead of just giving up at the first sign of resistance.