Super Guide: It killed your family and kicked your dog

The Super Guide is your enemy, it has killed, imprisoned and raped your countrymen and will be the cause of the end of civilisation the world over… or at least that’s the kind of melodramatic nonsense some would like you to believe about Nintendo’s newest experimental feature that has made its debut on New Super Mario Bros. Wii.

So what exactly IS the Super Guide and why should you care or not care? In short, the Super Guide is a feature that when activated will play the game for you… and this kind of description is what has put a lot of people up in arms and have condemned the feature outright without them even looking into what it really is.

Put your rage and your conclusions aside and let’s continue on and see what this is really all about…

The Super Guide really isn’t just some magic button that let’s the game play itself. What it is is a tool to allow a game to be accessible to those who may not be the best at video games and may not be self proclaimed pro-gamers that we all seem to believe we are. New Super Mario Bros. Wii is not an easy game and although it’s not anywhere near the hardest game either, the idea of adding the Super Guide is to try to level the playing field so that people who aren’t experienced gamers won’t give up in frustration in later levels.

Let’s go through the features of the Super Guide:

The Super Guide is not accessible right away during the game. The green Super Guide block only appears in a level if you have died 8 times in a row during the level and will disappear once you have completed that particular level.

The feature only works in single player mode, the Super Guide block will not appear if you’re playing with two or more players.

If you do choose to hit the green Super Guide block, you are told what the feature is about and are given an option to activate it or decline. Once activated, Luigi will take control of the game in place of Mario. With Luigi in control, at any time through the level, you can deactivate the feature and take back control of the game to finish the level yourself.

Using the Super Guide feature will not automatically score you all of the Star Coins, it will not help you find all of the secrets or have you performing super cool moves or have Luigi run all the way to the finish. It’s a very slow, safe and boring pace and not something you’ll want to sit through time and time again.

The game will record the fact that you’ve used the feature and will show people that fact on your save file. (Oh, the shame of it all!)

This feature is completely optional and to add to that, you may NEVER even see that green Super Guide block appear at all. To have it appear you must first truly SUCK at the game and be desperate enough to use it.

I personally haven’t seen the feature at all through my play through of New Super Mario Bros. Wii. At the moment this entry is being written I’m currently up to 8-1 which is almost at the end of the game. The difficulty level may not be up there with Ninja Gaiden, but New Super Mario Bros. Wii does get challenging enough during certain levels that will frustrate some and ultimately have them put down the controller and move onto something that isn’t.

I almost feel as if Nintendo purposefully made the game harder because the Super Guide feature was added on. If that really is the case, then hell yes, I want this feature in more games because even though I’ll never use it and will never see the option appear to use it in the first place, it will give Nintendo an excuse to make the overall game more challenging.

…isn’t that what we all really want?