Parish did an excellent review of Super Mario Brothers 5 (as did Kotaku). Parish is an interesting case. He started out this generation very unhappy with Nintendo. I guess he thought Nintendo was ‘destroying gaming’. But then something hit him. He realized that games like Wii Fit and all were going back to the roots of gaming. And I don’t think he would say that NSMB Wii is “destroying gaming” as some other people seem to believe.
From the review of Super Mario Brothers 5:
The funny thing is that back in 1991, I found my vision of the future to be decidedly uninspiring. I figured Mario would be running and jumping and tossing fireballs in a left-to-right direction until the end of time, and my friends and I wrote off Mario World for being uninspired. And yet here I am, 18 years later, far more jaded than I was as a kid, and I’m completely in love with NSMB Wii — the truest sequel Mario World has yet seen. You could argue that it’s just nostalgia and desperation speaking, since great 2D platformers have been few and far between since Mario World launched alongside the Super NES. But in fact, there’s much more than mere nostalgia working in NSMB Wii’s favor.
I’ve gotten angry emails from people thinking that no one else was disappointed in Super Mario World when the game came out. But there is confirmation from Parish that someone else, from that time, thought the same exact thing.
And, like Parish, over time I found Super Mario World to be glorious. However, I was waiting anxiously for a Super Mario Brothers 5… which never came.
Let me put it in perspective:
Pretend it is the Wii launch date of 2006 (“Christmas times a thousand!”). However, there is no Gamecube version of Twilight Princess. There is only the Wii version. However, I think you likely bought the Wii version anyway.
You buy Twilight Princess, and you enjoy it with your new console. You think it is cool how you can aim at the screen to kill villains. You are slightly disappointed in how formulaic the game seems. Although shaking the controller to swing your sword isn’t that exciting, you dream of a Zelda later on where you could do precise swordfighting.
What you get is something very different instead. Nintendo decides to release Zelda All-Stars which is Ocarina of Time, Majora’s Mask, and Wind Waker all with added motion controls (like in Twilight Princess). As a bonus, Nintendo throws in Zelda BS to say “get the unreleased Zelda game that never came to America!”.
So you buy Zelda All-Stars. You like it. You think it is cool having all that Zelda on one game disc. And Zelda BS is interesting. But yet… Zelda All-Stars does not satisfy your hunger for a new Zelda Wii.
“I want a new Zelda for Wii,” you say. Nintendo tells you to shut up: “You got a Zelda for Wii with Twilight Princess.” But you say that was a launch game. You want something that fully takes use of the system you bought.
What Nintendo makes instead is a spin-off full of funky colors and crying babies called “Tingle’s Island”. You go, “WTF is this!?” It is subtitled “Twilight Princess 2”. When you say you want the new Zelda game, they say it IS the new Zelda game. Nintendo then has a second party make an action RPG involving apes. Miyamoto then says, “These ape games will provide for the action RPG games for us.”
Restless, you get no Zelda. Maybe for the next console? Then the next console comes. Then you get Zelda: Scavenger Hunt where you do nothing but run around in circles trying to find a token. “WTF is this? Where is my Zelda?” Then Nintendo makes sequel after sequel to Zelda: Scavenger Hunt, even though they sell far less than the Zeldas you want to play. “Has this company gone mad?” you wonder. Depressed, you stop buying Nintendo consoles and stop console gaming in general.
That is the perfect analogy to myself. Keep in mind that Super Mario World was THE FIRST SNES GAME. It was the first SNES game ever made. And Nintendo made three Mario games on the NES. Surely they would make another one on the SNES. Nope. And Yoshi’s Island, while a good game, was not Super Mario Brothers 5. And Donkey Kong Country certainly wasn’t.
Nintendo consoles keep selling less and less. Those who stopped playing are not the Core Audience and we aren’t exactly the Expanded Audience. We are the Lost Audience.
NSMB Wii has a special cover on it. It is red.
“Why is IT special?” snarls a forum dweller. “Why is it special and Super Mario Galaxy wasn’t?”
“Yeah! Yeah!” pipes up another forum dweller. “I am mad that Super Mario Galaxy 2 is being delayed because of THIS game. How dare they make this game!”
It is special because it is not for you. It is for the Lost Audience out there. Nintendo is aiming to merge the Lost Audience and their current audience into one.
After twenty years of being in the wilderness, we’re finally being called back. You hardcore gamers, who whine that you are being ‘abandoned’, do not see that many, many Nintendo players were abandoned. The box is special because finally, we’re back.
That’s correct. The Old School gamers are returning!