Last week while shopping for Brain Age, I pre-purchased The New Super Mario Bros. for my Gameboy DS. At the checkout counter was the official guide for the game. I flipped through a few pages. Indeed, it does ruin the game.
In college, the thing I did fourth-most (in the list right after “ping pong”) when I wasn’t going to class was playing video games. We kept a fair number of consoles around our room. I don’t remember whose the NES was, but we played hours and hours of Tetris and Super Mario.
One of the best parts of playing Super Mario was finding all of the hidden stuff. There are places in the game where you can leap out of the visible play area and run on top of the blocks that border the game board. There are places with invisible blocks that you can hit and cause really weird things to happen in the game. There are these warp whistle/flute things - objects you can pick up in the game only after finding the most hidden of secret treasures.
There was no guide for us for this game. Or maybe if there was, we didn’t have it. We played the game and happened upon these easter eggs. And then we looked for more, trying all sorts of weird things to see if the developers had hidden anything else in the game’s dark corners. 80% of the fun of the game was knowing how to employ these secrets and discovering new ones. It’s a thrill you can’t get from games today.
Today, I can buy the New Super Mario Bros. hint book and have every secret laid out before me. The places you need to jump to find the secrets, the hidden blocks you need to break to gain entry to secret areas, and the giant coins that are tucked away for only the most meticulous gamer to find - they’re all available to anyone who forks out $15.
Mind you, some games require hint books. There is no way I would have enjoyed playing Oblivion as much as I have without the hint book. I could have played the game without the hints, but it turns out that there are so many things you can do with that game, you might never find 90% of it without the hint book. Still, the book could have been a little less walkthrough and a little more hint-oriented.
Harking back once more to the golden age of interactive fiction, I remember playing Infocom games like Planetfall and Wishbringer. Infocom produced hint books for these games in their line of Invisiclues books. Invisiclues were very special hint books that came with a special marker. In the book, you would see questions with no answers.
For example, you might read, “How do I avoid the Grue?” Underneath each question was a set of boxes. You would color in the box with your special marker, and that would reveal text inside the box. The multiple boxes were designed to give you only enough information to point you in the correct direction. Each box would be progressively more revelatory until the last box, which would tell you outright what you needed to know. You controlled the level of hinting, which is a very powerful thing.
Invisiclues were crafty because they would have a few questions that had nothing to do with the game, and then the answers would berate you for simply going through the book and highlighting everything. Even the clue books were an adventure!
I suppose that there is a place for the type of walkthrough hint books they sell with games now. Of course, that place is for making money. You figure, why let all of the fan web sites cash in on their walkthroughs of your games when you can offer a color-illustrated, full-detail outline of everything about a game with a decent profit margin? Just like anything else, it comes down to the money. What a shame.
I think from now on, I’ll jus buy the game and skip the hint book, not that this was something I did often. If I want to see what I missed after playing the game through on my own, then maybe I’ll check out the hint book.
Of the games I mentioned here, I am enjoying the New Super Mario Bros. very much. I think it’s a nearly perfect rendering of Mario for the DS. I only wished that there were better save spots - it’s frequent that I’ll need playing to stop between levels, and having to replay everything since the last save is a bummer.
Brain Age is great. I look forward to this “game” every day. $20 for pocket-portable brain training? You can’t beat that. When Nintendo makes a similar “Learn Japanese” cart for the DS (or any similar training type of game), I’m so there. There are only two downsides I see to Brain Age. First, that talking head can get a bit chatty between games. I would rather not ever hear him tell me, “I have a tip for making the most of Brain Age.” It records the location on the calendar that I apply my stamp, but it can’t skip the tips I’ve already heard? Please. Also, the game works much better when more than one person plays it. I can’t get Berta (who enjoys it, too) to do it often enough to make those features show up all the time.
Oblivion. Yes, there are a few flaws, but I really love this game. I’ve been told that the power structure is skewed heavily against magic users, but I have not experienced this to the level that I was warned against. I mean, I’m using magic, I’m getting advanced at it, and it seems to work fine to me. This seems like another issue of pro gamers plying their innate knowledge of game mechanics to diminish the actual fun you can have with the game. So what if the mechanics are a bit broken? It’s still lots fun. Oblivion rates very highly for me.
I never did finish Planetfall. Whether I got stuck without a hint or I moved on to something else, I can’t recall. Wishbringer is on my top ten list of all-time best video games ever. You should play Wishbringer.
