Nintendo calls Super Mario 3D Land an "entry point" for consumers

[wraggster]

Director Koichi Hayashida has said that he wanted to make this entry easier than past titles
Super Mario 3D Land director Koichi Hayashida intended for the title to be an "entry point" into the series for consumers. The game includes a very easy first half before ramping up the difficulty greatly in the second half.
"We thought of setting the difficulty level about as low as we could go realistically for this game because we saw this as an entry point to the Mario games for a lot of people," director Koichi Hayashida told Joystiq. "So the way we see it is someone would pick up Super Mario 3D Land and play that, and then maybe they would move onto Super Mario Galaxy or Super Mario Sunshine or Super Mario 64 after that."
Hayashida admitted that even he had trouble with previous Mario games.
"Speaking as a Mario game fan personally, I should admit that I had trouble trying to clear the first two Super Mario Bros. games," Hayashida said. "So for me, I wanted to create a game that I could at the very least clear. Even if it meant using Assist Blocks, I was able to clear this one, of course."
The game has been a big success on Nintendo, having sold 5 million units by the end of January 2012. Super Mario 3D Land was still number 8 on the Media Create sales chart for Japan last week.

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/article...-for-consumers

[johnsonjenny25]

Battlefield 3, the first-person shooter game actually speaks of adventure. This video game is a complete thrill package which brings the true experience of battle ground. A direct sequel to 2005’s Battlefield 2, Battlefield 3 grabs much attention.

[LDAsh]

The trick is to make games "comprehendible" to newbies without making it tediously uneventful for actual gamers, and I think the best way to do this is by making them separate modes.

I always think of Goldeneye64, anyone could play on Agent with auto-aim enabled and enjoy playing it, enjoy some achievements, at the same time as not interfering with 00 Agent difficulty. It was also a good way of separating the mice from the men and encouraging Agent-players to become better at the game, aspiring to be a 00 Agent. I think it could have been even better if the 00 Agent difficulty gave some extra rewards as well as extra challenges, such as extended cutscenes or something like that (I wouldn't need to be much at all), with Agent players only seeing a few short seconds, where as 00 Agents would be treated to something extra. Perfect Dark pushed things in that way a tiny bit, with certain Perfect Agent missions becoming almost completely different to the easier modes, but it could have done more to give Perfect Agents something special that Agents can't experience.

That's a much better game design than saying "the first-half is ridiculously easy, the second-half is ridiculously hard", because then you're stuck with one half not residing comfortably with the other.