First, there was LittleBigPlanet. When it came out, angels wept and all on the Earth cried out in joy. There was nothing better than LittleBigPlanet. Nothing!
Miyamoto and the rest of the guys at Nintendo went into a huge panic over LittleBigPlanet. Why, what to do? What to do? Therefore, they all got together and made New Super Mario Brothers Wii.
That’s right. LittleBigPlanet defined the 2d platformer. New Super Mario Brothers Wii is nothing more than a follower of the definitive 2d platformer: LittleBigPlanet!
The reader might be thinking about now, “Good God, has Malstrom lost his mind? How is it possible for NSMB Wii to be a response to LittleBigPlanet?”
Gentlemen (and ladies too, I cannot forget about ya’ll!), I did, indeed, lose my mind in the above text. For a brief moment, the Spirit of Sony had descended into my body and encouraged me to write those strange sentences. Indeed, as I read what I wrote, I, too, am puzzled at why The Spirit of Sony chose me to write such a thing. If you gobble up any anxious parcels of news on the NSMB Wii game, I am sure you have run across some mysterious commentator who indirectly claims that LittleBigPlanet is the definitive 2d platformer and NSMB Wii is attempting to imitate it.
There are two possibilities to explain this. Either some people are so stupid (or young, same difference) that they have no idea of the Mario Madness that erupted on the NES and carried on into the 16-Bit Era, or these people were *ahem* paid to say such things. Granted, both possibilities will have ‘useful idiots’ that follow no matter what is said.
Everyone in this industry knows about the Mario Madness. Everyone knows how Super Mario Brothers rocketed the NES to the stratosphere. Everyone knows about the massive debut Super Mario Brothers 3 had (and seek to emulate it). Everyone knows about the 16-Bit Console War with Sonic and Mario being rivalries. Everyone knows that Super Mario Brothers popularized and defined the 2d platformer. This is fact.
Usually when a game has tons of hype, it attracts detractors. When something is obviously hyped, it is natural for people to want to express anti-hype. However, NSMB Wii is not lighting the Internet with wild hype (because it is not one of those type of games). Yet, strange people, filled with The Spirit of Sony, come and begin praising LittleBigPlanet and how NSMB Wii is horrible, evil, and just plain bad (as if they have played it already!).
What is going on here? I have an idea…
When the E3 2009 parties are over, the executives of all the companies fly back. They discuss their competitors. Since Nintendo is the market leader, its press conference is examined carefully to see which way the market leader is going. If Nintendo saw the wind shift before, it could do so again.
And what did they see when looking at Nintendo’s announcements? They saw sequels. Another Metroid, Galaxy 2, Wii Sports 2, and Wii Fit 2. But there was one major game that was not a sequel: New Super Mario Brothers Wii*. In fact, it was the highlight on the showfloor and at the conference.
I would imagine the competitors scratched their heads. “Why on Earth is Nintendo going backwards? The Wii was backwards enough, but now Nintendo is re-entering the 16-bit Generation!!!” Smarter heads soon prevail as they say, “Let us examine this 2d Mario and see its impact in the past as well as that new 2d Mario on the DS.” So off to the history books the executives went. When they closed the history books and current sales charts, their faces might as well be white with fear.
The only game that can compare to Wii Sports in terms of spearheading a game console and growing the game industry would be Super Mario Brothers. The impact of that game cannot be overstated. Aside from its insane sales and driving the NES adoption rate, the game is probably the most influential among game makers. id attempted jump start their company with a port of Super Mario Brothers 3 to the PC (of course, Nintendo said no). A young Cliff Blezinski would get his high score of Super Mario Brothers published in the first edition of Nintendo Power magazine. Super Mario World was enough to launch the Super Nintendo. The ‘battle’ between Mario and Sonic is already legend.
But it gets worse for the shaking executives. They did try to console themselves by saying, “Hey, that was twenty years ago. Today, no one likes those stupid 2d games.” The sales of New Super Mario Brothers DS have surpassed 18 million, more than Super Mario Brothers 3, which shows that the game is selling beyond the core Nintendo fan and nostalgia tools. When they looked up the top selling games on the Virtual Console and Gameboy Advance, alas!, alas!, the top games are the 2d Mario games from the NES and SNES eras. People today were still playing 2d Mario games!!
I genuinely think the decision makers at Sony are scared of NSMB Wii. Have you noticed that this will be the first time that a PlayStation console will be going against a 2d Mario game? N64 and Gamecube did not have 2d Marios (which is a main reason why they didn’t perform so well). The DS did have a new 2d Mario. While it, alone, is not responsible for the DS behemoth, it did bring in many gamers who bought a DS just to have it (like myself).
Sony has much invested in LittleBigPlanet. I hear that new PS3s are even going to be bundled with LittleBigPlanet as an attempt to sell the system as a family machine (as opposed to bundling it with super violent KillZone 2 for example). A console 2d Mario would be making LittleBigPlanet turn green, as things turn green when placed next to a superior specimen. It is not unlike the reaction of some American women when you show off a Russian date. The class and charm cannot be equaled. Anything can be considered good when compared to vacuum. But a console 2d Mario will reveal just what a mediocre platformer is the ‘floaty’ LittleBigPlanet. Sony, who did everything it could to not have 2d games on its previous systems, cannot be happy at all about NSMB Wii.
For those sad gamers who were born only after the 80s and know nothing of those earlier generations, pretend Nintendo showed off Halo 3 and Sony was stuck with Commander Keen. OK, perhaps that is not a good example. Just think if Nintendo showed off the flagship game for a genre while Sony was stuck with a fourth rate game. The fourth rate game is awesome when there is nothing to compare it to. With LittleBigPlanet’s massive hype fizzled like a balloon let go, of the gas coming out of the ‘user generated content’ bandwagon, people could still say, “At least it is a 2d platformer! There aren’t any of those!” Now, there is going to be another.
”There you go again, Malstrom,” says a malcontent reader from the back row. “All you are doing is kicking a downed horse. Show some class and do not be the fanboy.”
Well, then, you uppity reader in the backrow! I will tell you why I am saying this: I despise mediocrity in all its forms. I am sick and tired of game companies unwilling to compete with the past. Current competition and disinterest are not the only competitors for game companies. The past is the biggest competitor of them all. If given a choice between a new game or a far better game of that genre made in the past, I’ll choose to buy no game and replay the game of the past. This is why I am such a fan of the Virtual Console. I want current game companies to compete against the classics. If you cannot compete against games of twenty years ago with all their graphical and production flaws, you don’t deserve to be in this business. Apparently, game makers are absolute wimps today as they whined and whined about competing against decades old games that many were taken off Xbox Live Arcade and the DSi, intentionally, doesn’t have a Virtual Console.
NSMB Wii isn’t going to be a front loaded game. I don’t expect it to sell like the DS version since individuals in the same household bought a copy for their own DS. Unlike the DS version, NSMB Wii will be one per household. But it *will* sell. People will see it by the checkout stand and say, “Hey! A new 2d Mario!” and will automatically pick it up with no debate about it in their head.
For decades (yes, decades), I would be playing a game like Super Mario Brothers on a handheld or on a plugged in NES and a hardcore walks near and says, “Why don’t you play real games like (as example) Grand Theft Auto?” I predict the hardcore’s reaction to NSMB Wii, when it comes out and people are talking about it, will be summed up thusly: “This is not a real game.” They’ll support this statement by saying NSMB Wii is a 2d game or that there are similarities between the DS version or, of course, say that LittleBigPlanet defined the 2d platformer and NSMB Wii is copying it. If 2d Mario wasn’t a ‘real game’, then why did the hardcore, along with the press, go gaga over LittleBigPlanet? I can understand why people at Sony would not like the game, but why wouldn’t the hardcore?
One of the wonders of this generation is that when Nintendo does something on the DS, it is “OK” or it is ignored. But when Nintendo does the exact same thing on the Wii, it is “The End of Gaming!” Touch screen was generally ignored by the hardcore on the DS but the motion controls on the Wii are ‘waggle’ and ‘ending gaming’. Touch Generation games were just called ‘non-games’ by the hardcore and then forgotten. On the Wii, Touch Generation games became ‘pure evil’ such as Wii Sports, Wii Play, and Wii Fit. The Hardcore would make sense if they were, at least, consistent in their behavior with handhelds and consoles.
*The rule is that a series that has not had a sequel in twenty years is considered a brand new franchise. Don’t believe me? Ask a publisher.
It is unfair to compare LittleBigPlanet, or any game for that matter, to 2d Mario. But just a viewing of the videos should illustrate just how LittleBigPlanet was so far off from the basic essentials that a 2d platformer needs. The floatiness and strange levels really hurt it. And don’t get me started on that User Generated Content…
Malstrom's Articles News 