Well I just beat Super Mario Galaxy not too long ago and I must say, it was a really good game. However, I have loved the Mario games based off of three things: they are fun, creative and challenging. Although I feel that Mario Galaxy excelled at those first two parts, I personally think that it has undermined the third. Ever since I started the game I have been wondering when the difficulty was going to pick up. I have now beat the game and I am about 70 stars in to it; however, I still find that the difficulty is roughly the same as it was when I had only a handful of stars.
I found that the majority of the time that the game was relatively easy; however, during the times that there was a difficulty in the game it was curbed with coins, 1-up mushrooms, a bunch of star bits or a combination of the aforementioned items. There were times when I would collect the star bits, the 1-up mushroom, die, come back at a point very close to where I died pick up the mushroom again then the star bits and get another 1-up for collecting 50 star bits. In short, that means that for every two attempts at an area I would gain three lives. The game made it so that you could easily gain lives at a faster pace then you could lose them.
The challenge comets were not all that difficult either. For example, one time you have to race a shadow version of yourself, it's a water race and you go much faster while you are in the water then you do when you are on dry land, but during the middle of the race your shadow opponent decides that he is just going to leave the water and run on dry land, which gives you a big advantage and inevitably gives you the win and the star. There were also time trials, which would have you re-do a galaxy that you have already completed, but you must do it in a limited amount of time. That sounds challenging, but the problem is that they give you too much time, I would usually complete them I my first time with about a minute or so to spare.
Maybe I was wrong though, the last real Mario game that I had played was Mario 64 and that was years ago. I thought that maybe I have gotten better at video games over time and that the reason they were so challenging was only I was a little kid without gaming skills. Well after downloading Mario 3 off the VC and getting to world 6, I have easily confirmed this to not be the case. So why has Mario gotten so easy? I blame Nintendo's new target crowd, the casuals. I consider myself a normal, core-gamer. I don't consider myself hardcore or anything, but I do enjoy a good challenge; however, I don't think casuals might feel the same way. So here is my conspiracy-ish theory.
My idea of a casual gamer is either a non-gamer who wants to try videogames out or someone who does not play videogames all that much, but still purchases a few every now and then. Now during the short while someone like a casual plays a videogame they want to have a fun time where they will be entertained. Now, to add real challenge to a game makes it more difficult, normal gamers would easily rise to the challenge, but a casual might get frustrated and quit, thus giving them a negative view toward video gaming and discouraging them from purchasing any more games or getting them to advertise by word of mouth. I think that Nintendo kept this in mind when creating a game with their mascot character and thus purposefully made the game easier than normal.
Well that's what I think so far. I could be wrong and the game does get more difficult the closer you get to 120 stars, but until then I'll just have to play it and see if it does. Also, I know that this is blog material, but I am posting it here because I want to see how other people feel about this.
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