Would a 2D Mario that was more like Super Mario Bros. 2 be worth a shot, do you think, or should Nintendo try something else entirely? Because I think we’ve seen enough of the SMB3/SMW elements by now.  

Strange, I don’t think the SMB3/SMW elements have yet to be understood by Nintendo.

Nintendo doesn’t understand Mario. (I know that is an odd thing for people to hear because everyone assumes Nintendo understands Mario and knows how to make Mario sell games. Go with me on this for a moment.) Nintendo assumed people bought Mario games because of Mario as opposed to, say, the Mushroom Kingdom. Mario 64 was a spectacular failure. Miyamoto even publicly admitted the tomagotchi phenomenon was more successful than Mario 64. Then came Mario Sunshine which had much Mario but no Mushroom Kingdom. That game was a total bust. And the Mario Galaxies had a scrambled Mushroom Kingdom.

At the beginning of the Seventh Generation, Nintendo did not differentiate between 2d Mario or 3d Mario. It was just Mario. Reggie Fils-Aime asked game developers how they would market the successor to Super Mario World (Reggie was referring to Super Mario Galaxy). It was the insane success of NSMB DS that punctured Shigeru Miyamoto’s arrogance of how he defined a Mario game (Miyamoto had little to nothing to do with NSMB DS).

The reason why NSMB DS and NSMB Wii were successful is because they were the first 2d Mario games in decades. It was interesting to see them played with modern technology and to see them do new things with modern hardware. However, there were significant problems. “This is the only time Nintendo gets to put these games out,” I warned back then. “2d Mario is defined by its fresh content. NSMB DS and NSMB Wii possess no new content whatsoever. They add nothing to the Mushroom Land mythos.” The 3d Mario games were soaking all the assets like music and art while the 2d Mario games got crap. Super Mario Galaxy games got symphonies while NSMB got ‘wah wah’ as its music. It’s fucking insulting. And yes, Nintendo, the consumers can see this.

Shigeru Miyamoto and other Nintendo developers have no respect for 2d Mario players and consider them an obstacle to 3d Mario being popular. It is why Super Mario Galaxy 2 was shipped with ‘instructional DVDs’ in order to convert 2d Mario fans to 3d Mario. Nintendo saw their own customers as the fucking problem because they chose to buy Nintendo Product A instead of Nintendo Product B. This is partly why Nintendo is in financial hell at the moment. All this has been building up. The market wildly responded to NSMB DS and NSMB Wii and Super Mario Brothers 25th Anniversary because we were saying, “We want Classic Nintendo back, not N64/Gamecube Era Nintendo.”

Nintendo cannot read the market at all when it comes to Mario. When NSMB U was first shown off at E3 2011, it was called NSMB Mii where the biggest ‘feature’ was the ability to play as Miis. ARE THEY FUCKING SERIOUS!? It was so insulting, so degrading. Apparently, Nintendo got the message on that backlash so NSMB Mii was renamed to NSMB U and playing as the Miis was not spotlighted. That’s an improvement, but there is still so much wrong with their approach to 2d Mario.

According to NSMB U Iwata Asks, Nintendo went across NSMB U by focusing on ‘level design’. They even had a Nintendo class on ‘level design’ which, I believe, also was the level design was to infiltrate to other Nintendo games. What I gathered is that Nintendo saw the success of NSMB DS and NSMB Wii was due to ‘level design’. I kid you not.

So the common complaint I hear about NSMB U is that it feels like it is a giant DLC. This is entirely consistent if Nintendo focused on little more than ‘level design’.

For those who lived through the 1980s and early 1990s, you know that the new Mario game was the flagship of the Nintendo console. The Mario game was the cutting edge of console graphics, console sound and music (the original Super Mario Brothers popularized background music), and console technology. Super Mario Brothers was beyond any other game at the time. Super Mario World was the posterchild for the 16-bit generation.

But each new Mario game introduced a new chapter of Mushroom Land which snowballed and created the Mario mythos. In an interview in the 1980s, Shigeru Miyamoto said that Super Mario Brothers 3 was designed to ‘further explore each Mushroom World’. Yamauchi is to have said of the original Super Mario Brothers that he knew it would be a hit because it had swimming, jumping in the clouds, being in castles, it was all over the place. Super Mario World had Dinosaur Land complete with Yoshi. Super Mario Brothers 2 had Sub-Con and its fruity universe of Shy Guys and Birdos.

Proper Mario games are a universe. They were not just about ‘level design’. They were a universe in themselves. A Mario game is not just calculating jumps and how to get to the flagpole. A Mario game is immersion into another world like Alice falling down the rabbit hole. When was the last time Nintendo came up with a new world for a Mario game? Nintendo is content to recycle content from the first four Mario games but consumers are not interested in that. Unlike hardcore Nintendo fans, 2d Mario fans have standards.

Many analysis has been made to the poor sales of Wii U despite it having a 2d Mario game. Never once has any analysis considered whether or not this is a quality 2d Mario that 2d Mario fans wish to buy. I can tell you this is not the direction where 2d Mario fans want to go. They can sense the half-assed nature of the NSMB series, and they are on boycott. The fact that you have to pay over $400 to get to the 2d Mario is also ridiculous. Nintendo could bundle NSMB U with the hardware which would make it $350 to get to the Mario game. For some explicable reason, Nintendo refuses to do this. It will bundle in Nintendo Land. It will even bundle in Zombie U. But bundle in NSMB  U? No way. In the same way, Nintendo is willing to give away Mario 3d Land for free with a purchase of a 3DS but refuse NSMB 2 that same option (and note how dumb the idea of NSMB 2 is to just ‘collect coins’. Imagine the outrage if a 3d Mario game was designed just on ‘collecting coins’). I suspect the Nintendo developers are actively rooting for 2d Mario to fail because they see the game as ‘beneath them’. Miyamoto has made it clear this is the case with his public statements.

Nintendo fans are not this homogenous block of people who ‘like Nintendo’. There is far more variety if you scratch beneath the surface. People don’t seem to be aware of the boycott phenomenon that occurs with Nintendo products (and has been going off and on for generations). The best example to illustrate the boycott phenomenon is Metroid: Other M. Metroid fans boycotted the game because that is not where they want Metroid to go. Metroid Other M not selling doesn’t mean Metroid doesn’t sell, it means crappy Metroid doesn’t sell. There is a massive war going on between Nintendo developers like Shigeru Miyamoto and traditional Mario fans (2d Mario fans). They both hold nothing but hatred toward one another. You don’t think the 2d Mario fans know that everything they want, such as Giant World or Tanooki Suits, intentionally gets thrown in with 3d Mario (Galaxy 2, 3d Land) while they are left with literally generic crap?

2d Mario fans made Nintendo. Therefore, they have the power to destroy Nintendo. They’re boycotting that they have to pay over $400 to buy a 2d Mario that plays like a DLC download and brings less to the table than Super Mario World back twenty years ago.

Nintendo is in such big trouble with its fanbase. They have destroyed the Metroid franchise. I don’t see the Zelda franchise as recoverable. And I think the Mario franchise may be unable to recover from these ‘third string team’ NSMB games Nintendo keeps putting out.

Should the next 2d Mario not be like SMB 3/World elements? The games haven’t even gotten close to any of the original 2d Mario elements. Even the Super Mario Land games were more interesting than the NSMB factory-made mentality that is being shoved out there. At least the Super Mario Land games offered new worlds and environments to explore. We don’t need ambitious technology, we need ambitious creativity.

Even Super Mario Land offered a more interesting universe to explore than the NSMB factory made junk. Nintendo doesn’t need level design experts. It needs people who know how to create content instead of recycling old content.

This guy and his banana represent the potential audience of Xbone. He lost his life savings trying to get a Xbox Kinect. I bet he will buy a Xbone day one.

No way! I cannot believe it.

Reader, if you think you’ve seen it all with the Xbone, then you should click on the link. You’ll be laughing like I am.

It’s even funnier because the Wii would never get this kind of ridicule (instead they’d make jokes about themselves playing it at work or something like that).

Awesome!

There are also laws that only citizens can be hired as a workforce. But Microsoft flouts it all the time as many other companies do. I doubt anyone will legally challenge Microsoft. And if they do, courts may find the matter of a game console too ridiculous to ‘protect’.

Of course Microsoft intends to reach the mass market with this machine but none of that is really about having more Xbox One out there than Playstation 4 or Apple Tv.

You have to relate everything they said with the presence of Kinect and the fact it has to be always on and the fact that the console has to be always connected. The main purpose of this is data : Kinect scans  faces/living rooms/behaviours or the programs you watch or the people you chat with on Skype, all of that will bring data. And that’s how they want to make their money from, the same way as Facebook or Google (without really working).

If they sell 10 or 20 millions less Xbox One than any of their competitors, it’s not the way they’ll measure success or fail. It’s about how meaningful the data they pull out can be : Tv ratings more precise than ever, what ads really catch up your attention, how many persons are in the room, male/female, can we identify the unknown person that is with you in the room based on your recent Skype communications, are you single, kids around, etc ?

Nancy Tellem, former president of CBS and now head digital media at Microsoft, was by far the most important person on stage and she might even have had an orgasm just thinking about Microsoft intends to achieve.

This is where they want to be 10 years from now. And for gaming, it’s very independent from that (except for some of the resources). They believe they will be successul enough in the industry whatever happens and even if they’re far behind the Ps4 (considering the Xbox One could never be released in Japan or in 2015-2016 minimum).

Damn it, emailer. Never mention Nancy Tellem and orgasm in the same sentence. You’ll give us nightmares beyond the watercooler.

One competitor Microsoft is aiming against is Google. If you go to Bing, you can see Xbone in action. Microsoft could be trying to get Xbone to be an advertising data entity of the living room.

Only old people and women watch TV. TV has lost young men. Young men are on the game consoles. Advertisers want to reach the young men. You can see where this is going. Excellent point by bringing up the advertising angle and Tellem being from CBS.

Many reasons are said to be due to Wii’s success. One reason which no one wants to consider is that people, including gamers like myself who were out of ‘circulation’ for generations, flocked to the Wii because they saw the system as an attack on the Game Industry. The Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 were not cheap and kept trying to do non-game things like be a digital Napoleon and try to plant their flag in the living room by taking over the TV. The Wii-mote was like a giant middle finger to the Game Industry. The Wii was doing everything the opposite the way the Game Industry wanted to go.

Nintendo is the most interesting of console companies because they possess the power to destroy the Game Industry. And by destroy, I mean the power to change directions. Microsoft and Sony do not because they are leveraged by the Third Party Cabal. They do whatever EA and Activision tell them to do. They can’t survive without them. Nintendo can.

I’ve found it incredulous that Nintendo has tried to get the Game Industry’s participation with the 3DS and Wii U. They were dragged kicking and screaming to support the Wii and that was only when the Wii was sold out for several years in the United States. The only way they would have supported the Wii U is if it moved as many numbers as the Wii did (which was zero chance in this economy). The Game Industry dropped support of the Wii U. Iwata is to have said, “I will make them regret that decision.” I like hearing some fire come out of Iwata.

My point is with Nintendo, why do you guys even bother? The Game Industry wants you out of business. Why bend over backwards for these guys? Why not, instead, make an anti-Game Industry console. Make a game console that goes a different way than the Game Industry. The Wii was that console. The Wii U is Nintendo going the way of Xbox 360 and PS3 with a hardware doodad included (Gamepad).

With Microsoft going Xbone and Sony likely to do the same policies with PS4, there is a huge Blue Ocean in front of Nintendo. I fear Nintendo will follow the Xbone’s path because ‘if others are buying a game console that removes all consumer control, then we can sell one too!’ Such a path would have Nintendo be a minority console as when gamers are not given an alternative to the Game Industry’s path, they default to the one the Game Industry likes the best.

There is another path. Nintendo could make the next console give MORE control to consumers. Give us an account system. Let us carry our digital games to the next console. Give us more control over the OS and how we use the console’s online. Put out alternatives to the ‘blockbuster model’ such as that upcoming Luigi game (I know it was DLC) for $30. Not every game has to have a $100 million budget. And not every game has to be $60.

What will Nintendo do? I fear they will go the Xbone route and be a niche console because then they would always get to make the games they want. If they go the mass market phenomenon route, they would have to make games they don’t really want to make.

Never forget that the 1983 Video Game Crash was caused by Third Party companies. The console companies lost control and third parties stuffed their crappy games (they really were crappy) into the retailers.

Also, never forget that the NES was constantly hated by third parties because Nintendo imposed controls (obviously due to the prior crash). Third parties couldn’t ignore the massive NES market so they made games for it. However, as soon as there was a competitor (Sega), they jumped over as fast as possible. But Sega placed controls just like Nintendo did frustrating third parties further. In order for third parties to dominate, they needed a console company that had a weak first party. They found it with Sony and, later, with Microsoft.

How much of the Xbone is of Microsoft’s choosing? I see a puppet whose strings are held by third party game companies. The Xbone is designed for their desires, not the gamers. It only took thirty years, but 2013 may be the next 1983. And like 1983 where the full effect wasn’t felt until 1985, it may take years to see the full effects of the anti-console that Microsoft is launching.

I seriously am fucking punching myself in the face for ever buying an Xbox and Xbox 360. I partially contributed to this situation.

The only difference is that I had no way of knowing it would lead to this. People who buy Xbox One know exactly what it’s leading to.

I don’t believe the hardcore will keep their word. I also don’t believe Amir0x will keep his word either. Already, I am hearing the hardcore rationalize their upcoming purchase of Xbone with “Well, with the transition to digital games, there wouldn’t be used games anyway.”

Just wait after E3. All the hardcore will be lusting for the Xbone. The day before Xbone launches, the hardcore will be frothing at the mouth ready to buy games they will never own.

Did the hardcore protest 599 US dollars?

Did the hardcore protest the Red Ring of Death?

Did the hardcore protest the $60 price tag?

Did the hardcore protest paying for online multiplayer?

Did the hardcore protest Steam’s ‘always-phone-home’ DRM client?

Did the hardcore protest the nickel and diming of DLC?

What did the hardcore protest? They protested Wii Fit and how the Balance Board was going to destroy gaming. This is a story in itself.

When the Wii constantly sold out, third party companies began to try to duplicate the success of Wii Sports with ‘party’ games. Wii consumers (who we are told are unsophisticated) rejected all the ‘party games’ so much that retailers stopped stocking them. After this market rejection of their precious ‘party games’ came an intense marketing push of anti-Wii gamers, i.e. anti-casuals and pro-hardcore. If Wii consumers bought all those party games, I assure you the Game Industry would be very excited about ‘da casualz’.

When was the last time the hardcore protested something that the Game Industry liked? Perhaps the Mass Effect 3 ending. I’m honestly having trouble coming up with examples. The hardcore gamers are the Game Industry zombies. They march in lockstep to whatever the marketers say to go. Soon, the Game Industry will point to the Xbone and say how only a ‘true hardcore gamer’ plays on it. And all the hardcore gamers will rush out and buy Xbone day one. I guarantee it.

So where does this leave us? The hardcore gamers are getting the console they deserve. They deserve the Xbone with its Call of Doggies, Price-is-right, EA Sports (It’s in the game!), ‘watercooler’, “Xbox: Go Home”, Always-Attached-Kinect, and no more game ownership. Anyone who buys the Xbone deserve what they get.

Wait after E3. I bet all the hardcore will change their tune and ‘justify’ how they must buy a Xbone. And right before Xbone launches, the hardcore will dutifully report to the nearest Gamestop and stand in line and pitch tents.

At first I thought this was a joke article, its like these guys live in a completely different world to the real one.

When someone doesn’t seem rational, it is probably because we don’t understand what reasons they are saying the things they do. It is like with the Xbone gamers asking, “This console does not seem designed to be fun.” Oh, it was designed to be fun. It is fun for the third party companies. When we wonder how a bad game can be released, usually the answer is that it was fun for someone else. It was fun for the developer to make or was fun for the accounting office to ship so it fits into the quarter. It takes significant maturity to focus on the customers having fun and not yourself.

Rationality is just someone’s sense of fun. My guess is that the Microsoft VP is trying to make things fun for the investors. Investing is fun when ‘everything grows by 30% or more!’