(Note: Yes, the title really did say ‘This is hate mail’.)
man i really can’t hold it up anymore… i have to say this,i can’t stand reading some stuff in your blog anymore and i have to say it or i will go crazy!
1) i can’t stand reading you calling the game “super mario bros 5″,it’s really just a silly way to give more importance to the game in the same way i heard people calling the last shin megami tensei game (strange journey) “shin megami tensei 4″
this said i don’t want to say the game doesn’t hold is importance,but there is a reason this is called new super mario bros wii,it uses new super mario bros music,it uses new super mario bros themes (desert land,ice land) heck i can’t help but think that if new super mario bros powerups didn’t suck so much they wouldn’t have bothered making new one and this feels really cheap,if anything i can’t help wonder why is nobody taking offense in this,super mario bros 3 did not take it’s music and themes from super mario land 2!
heck in one of your post you asked “can you make a new mario kart stage out of new super mario bros?” i’d be surprised to see it happen
New Super Mario Brothers Wii is clearly identified, and advertised, as the successor to Mario 3 and Super Mario World. NSMB DS never was. This is why I call it Mario 5.
I find it funny how some people take offense to me calling it Mario 5 (people appear to be offended by everything these days). I guess some people are missing the major shift Nintendo has gone to by separating the 3d games from the series line and making them their own series. Mario 64 was not the successor to Super Mario World. Neither was Mario Galaxy. Super Mario Brothers 5 is the true successor.
New Super Mario Brothers Wii is a dumb name. In fact, it is a marketing disaster. It is the name, itself, which is causing so much confusion among customers in thinking the game is a DS port but with multiplayer. Imagine if there was a game that was “Super Mario Land SNES”. They should rename the game to Super Mario Brothers 5.
How can you say that Super Mario Brothers 3 took the themes and ideas from Super Mario Land 2? Super Mario Land 2 was released years after Mario 3 was.
2) why we are praising new super mario bros for the lack of online and hitting on actionvision for screwing it up? having no online sounds worse than me than having online that isn’t perfect,there is really no reasons for the game to not feature online other than “nintendo didn’t want to bother”,mario kart wii has it,same for brawl,what makes new super mario bros different? they even made a peripherical to facilitate the communication in online games and now they are ignoring it when given the chance… what the heck was the point then?
Local multiplayer > Internet Multiplayer
3) mario is a brand! oooohhh man do i feel better,it’s true… games don’t always get treated like games (http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2009/11/11/) but you can’t still deny this,there is a reason why we have reached mario party 8,there is a reason why we have a mario basketball instead of a basketball game and a mario tennis game instead of a tennis game and there is a reason why people aren’t surprised new super mario bros wii has happened,it feels insulting to hear this game is a risk (as in being branded as an idiot the same instant i say there is no risk involved)
pikmin which was a new IP was a risk
the first animal crossing was a risk
giving a mario spinoff starring luigi to an horde of people wanting mario was a risk
making a game with the blueprint of a million seller was not
if they really believed in old school gaming and wanted to take a risk they would have made an old school game without relying on the mario crutch (or at least they would have bothered making new music and making different lands) and without trying to push my nostalgia button with ads “REMEMBER? IT WAS SO AWESOME! MAYBE IT’S STILL THAT AWESOME” bah what idiocracy!
A 2d game as the major tent pole on a home console’s Christmas season in 2009? With no ‘Technocrati’ feature like User Generated Content or other gimmick? And that isn’t a risk?
When NSMB DS came out, the idea of a home console version was laughed at by people. They said, “2d games are for handhelds. 3d games are for home consoles.” That was the conventional wisdom.
Now Mario 5 is overturning that conventional wisdom. Old school is back!
4) which brings me to point 4,i don’t believe old school game are the recipe to success,why has gradius v failed? why did r-type final fail? why did retrogame challenge a game where the entire point was to celebrate old school games failed so hard that the publisher refuse to bring the sequel? what about all those psp game like hammerin harry? megaman power up? prinny can i be the hero? why nobody cared when zelda 4 swords got released? it was 2D! it had no narrative! it had multiplayer! it should have been a success according to your recipe… one could say the fault was of the gamecube but then i can’t help wonder why isn’t nintendo doing a 4 swords for wii? might that be because there is no million seller on the ds slapped behind it?
It is because the games you listed were not ‘old school’. Gradius V? R-Type Final? They might be shmups, but they were sweethearts of the hardcore. Naturally, no one buys the sweetheart games of the hardcore. Zelda Four Swords was more of a party game that used Gameboy Advance connectivity in order to do any multiplayer. LOL at Megaman Powered Up.
If you notice the trend, games I like are games that the ‘cult’ of game journalists and teh “Game Industry” do not like.
Core gaming is going down, baby!
5) wait… are we bashing ign in a post and praising famitsu in another? how does that work? do i have to make a list of every journalism site that said new super mario bros wii is better than galaxy and hold them as paragon of justice? what happens when famitsu gives a 40 to a game like bayonetta? does that mean bayonetta is as awesome as new super mario bros wii? is new super mario bros wii as unawesome as bayonetta? sorry for saying this but it’s easy for people to speak to you as a nintendo fanboy when you do stuff like this…
and on another note why we are speaking about ign? they screw up so much i don’t even know where to begin! ask anybody on the web what’s the worst review they ever read and most people will point you to the god hand ign review or will chuckle at the GTA4 “oscar worthy story”
heck we have reached the point where we are complaining about WI-KI-PE-DIA description! really that’s just so stupid it blows my mind,we are reaching the other side of the idiocy of hardcore gaming
You are so stupid you don’t realize that the post that had the Famitsu scan was not about Famitsu’s score. It was about Mario 5 receiving a better score in Famitsu than Super Mario Galaxy. And this, alone, resulted in hardcore going bonkers. The post was about how, for over a decade, the classic Mario games I have liked were being treated like ‘second class games’ including by 3d Mario fans. The classic Mario games WERE real games and were very high quality too. They were never ‘obsolete’.
Having Mario 5 at a higher score than Galaxy is not about the review or Famitsu, it is about classic Mario being treated as a ‘real game’ again.
6) narrative is a part of a video game,many games made their success on narrative,final fantasy had it’s success because of that,metal gear had it’s success for that,you don’t even have to look at the psx era (since most people that talk about dialogue as some sort of horned devil usualy mentions metal gear and final fantasy) zork was made before the famicom even existed,snatcher was done on the MSX! nintendo dabbled in games that were only narrative!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famicom_Tantei_Club
heck japanese visual novel are games which works only on their narrative and some of them gets turned into anime… phoenix wright a game which would be NOTHING without it’s narrative was turned into a MUSICAL
I don’t think you know what narrative is.
this is the reason this comment not only pisses me off but gives me this sensation that you are just trying to bring more modern games down so that the classics can be considered higher and more noble
“Would these same developers be hired by the movie industry to make movies? No. They’d be laughed at. Would these same developers be hired by publishers to write their ‘amazing stories’ into books? No. They’d be left in the slushpile.”
That quote is a homerun! I really hit it out of the ballpark with that one. Game companies do not tolerate unprofessional work except in matters of story and dialogue. The reason why has to be that they think *they*, themselves, are little geniuses and can do a good story and good dialogue. They, of course, fail. As any craft, it demands work and practice. Years of it.
Recently, I’ve been playing Dragon Quest IV for the DS. The dialogue is horribly written as the dialogue writer tried to put accents and ‘old English’ in it. While a person might have been hired to write and translate, this type of writing would be thrown out by a book publisher immediately.
7) heck this is a sentiment that goes trough the entire site,most people will say that you are a nintendo fanboy but for me it’s hard to picture you in any other light than a grizzled retrogamer,what i don’t get is why so aggresive toward modern games? is it so hard to think someone might have enjoyed mario galaxy because of it’s variety and contest? when they put me on that ball,i didn’t grumble because the game changed on the contrary i loved it because it was a surprise change,have you ever played lazy jones? it’s a game that really has no focus gameplay,you enter rooms and each rooms has different gameplay and that’s what makes it good
you ask why they are making a sequel to galaxy? why not? the developer said they had new idea for it and i believe it! let me flip the table,why they should make “super mario bros 6″?
2d Mario sells hardware.
3d Mario does not.
8) “When people complain about the ‘formula’, they do not complain about the dungeons and overworld. They are complaining about the “Amazing Story!” and “OMG Plot Twists” that are polluting Zelda.”
ah! nobody cares about the story and the plot twist,this is what people think about narrative in zelda
http://i36.tinypic.com/2u3wn0j.jpg
everybody still love OoT,the game still sold 7 million (i believe that’s even more than the original? i’m not sure)
you want to know the problem?
the formula is as old as gaming itself that’s the problem! there are 8 dungeons,each contains a treasure,one of them is a boomerang,one of them is a bow,one of them is a bag of bombs,one of them is a hookshot,you almost always get a magic wand of sort,a pair of boots that let you dash across the field and another item that give you the ability to swim (or swim better) of all the dungeons at least one has to be in a forest related zone,one in a fire related zone and another one in a water related zone
and that’s it,that’s the real problem with zelda,that is why they try desperately to hide this problem with gimmicks on each zelda,they made mask in majora,they got the toon look and the sailing gimmick for wind waker,they invented the “minish” gimmick for minish cap,they invented the season/time gimmick for the oracles game,they invented the wolf gimmick for twilight princess,they made the hourglass gimmick for the ds one and they are making the train gimmick for the next zelda
but really all they should do is throwing away all the gimmicks and just create new zones and new items,one of the dungeons of twilight princess is this ice palace inhabited by this giant snowman and the treasure? IT’S AN IRON CHAINBALL and it’s awesome to use! that’s what we need,we need more of this,we need more idea…
you also said “zelda formula worked in 1988 why it shouldn’t work in 2011?” and again i ask “ocarina formula worked in 1998 why it shouldn’t work in 2011?”
Ocarina of Time did not create convert non-gamers. Legend of Zelda did.
Ocarina of Time also was the first 3d game in the series (which, for some reason, always gets a sales bump) as well as having no competition. Legend of Zelda actually had some serious competition.
why you grumble when a modern zelda wastes your time with a bug hunt but have nothing to say when an older zelda has you racking rupees or burning random tree?
It is because the former is a sidequest, the latter is integral to the game.
A game is good not based on how much is added. A game is good only when nothing can be taken away without crashing the game experience.
and there you have it,i really can’t think of anything else i would want to say,do what you want with this,reply at it,post on your site,laugh at it
Thanks for the email!
