Hi, I’m a long time reader (since the Birdman, I guess) and first time e-mailer. I know your mailbox is FLOODED right now, must be the “second coming” of Old School or something, so if you can at least read this, good for you :D.
Gaming Journalists (and many journalists by the way) are Machine Men, and they love their numbers.
Why would you put love and passion in your job when statistics can do the job?
SMB5 review from IGN, score 8.9 or “great”
http://wii.ign.com/articles/104/1043698p2.html
There is something wrong here, they can’t give the “must-have” it deserves.
These Machine Journalists were HAVING FUN WITH MARIO, but it is not good enough?
It is totally obvious they love playing but… they miss the point all the time.
“The graphics are not pushing anything on the wii”
Well, I think they are pushing, from the past, they grind those 2D sprites down to dust because there is 3D there, and 2D scrolling is only scrolling, everything scrolling there is high poly count! (as they used to say before!). And those rotating platforms are pretty, but in fact, those platforms couldn’t be done on previous systems.
“The Multiplayer Mode should have been online”
Well, there is an interesting thing, forget about HD televisions, there is a total lack of family interest in plugging their Wii’s to the Internet, that’s why Nintendo is giving away their VC games to anybody able to get these people down the line (in a good way of course).
Their lack of interest in online gaming and community, is because they are FAMILIES, they are a LIVE COMMUNITY, and almost free of charge.
No lag, no trolls, no cheaters, no griefers, no DEDICATED SERVERS (at least there is no need of them here), just off-line love and fun!
Only sad, semi-grown up, past-their-primes hardcore gamers are all alone, and need that machine to give them machine conversations and machine societies.
“Ooh, I got someone else’s totally irrelevant tweet!”
They still think social networks will change the world! (those technocrati!)
“The videos are great, but they should let you record your own”
What? Why in D-Pad’s sake would Nintendo put something so doodad in his game?
Is this journalist even trying? There are videos already, as well as there were Wii Music videos and Mario Galaxy videos!
A video editor? NO UGC please… next.
“They are not taking risks to the point they are being lazy”[…]”Two unnamed toad characters, veeery creative”
If the game Miyamoto launched in 1985 were called Super Toad Bros, then they would be the international timeless icons.
Creating two reasonable characters is “character development”, that’s another doodad.
PEOPLE DON’T CARE ABOUT MARIO, they want to play.
And they took the biggest risk, because NOBODY was expecting this game, but surprisingly, the Machine Journalists did (the best way to look like you are smart is saying “I knew it!” just when anything happens)
The saddest thing of all of this, is that the reviewer claims once and again that “This game is a blast with one, two or three friends”
But they can’t grade it with a 9, because they already “gave” that meaningless 9.7 score to Mario Galaxy.
Come on, they could still look like they are supporting MW2 if they gave this game less score than MW2 which is (9.5)
But I guess they are the machine men, and they must kill the killer app with meaningless numbers.
What a shame that everyone else on earth is playing this game and having real fun.
This has been the response I have expected. We have all wondered what would happen if “Super Mario Brothers 5” was put out. People think back to the Mario Mania of Super Mario Brothers 1 (but that was mostly about NES as the game came with NES), the Super Mario Brothers 3 launch, or the Super Mario Brothers 4 launch (which was really the SNES launch), and many assumed that Super Mario Brothers 5 would receive a similar reception.
Many people were concerned about the lack of hype Super Mario Brothers 5 was receiving. Certainly if NSMB: Wii was Super Mario Brothers 5, it would be hyped up to the world, right? Well, no.
How much hype did Wii Sports have in the “Game Industry?” None, really. How much hype did Mario Kart: Wii have? Again, none. When these games came out, they were immediately dismissed. Anyone who liked them were branded “Nintendo fanboy”. Yet, they kept selling and selling and relied on word of mouth. Word of mouth surpasses any and all marketing campaigns. It’s cheaper too.
When I think back to the games we, today, call classics and how they were received, it was very much in the same way. Games who had massive marketing such as Super Mario Brothers 3 were very rare. How much hype did Mega Man 2 have? How much hype did Contra have? How much hype did Super Mario Kart have? The classics were never ‘hyped’. They always came from right field. No one expected them. But people played them, found them fun, and told others about them (or played the game at a friend’s house). This is how the games spread in popularity.
How were reviews done back then? There were computer magazines that reviewed computer games. But I do not recall much of anything that reviewed NES games probably due to the Atari crash taking all the console print out. The only big thing then was Nintendo Power. And contrary to conventional wisdom that Nintendo Power was *pushing* and pre-selling games, the thing is that Nintendo Power actually chose the *good games* and tried to highlight them. In the first issue of Nintendo Power, Howard Philips would devote an entire page and demand that everyone play Mega Man 2. Looking back, I see Nintendo Power as an ‘aid’ that helped new gamers get into these very difficult NES games as well as immersing them into their game worlds. Nintendo Power cost Nintendo dearly to put out. And Nintendo Power did practically give away Dragon Quest 1 in order to attempt to make the RPG popular in America.
Gaming felt, back then, like a movement. I haven’t felt anything like that until the Wii.
I like to tell the story of when Super Mario Kart came out. People made fun of me because I said I was going to buy that game. “I just have this feeling about it…” At this time period, anything with Mario on it was considered ‘kiddy’ but most of this was due to Sega’s marketing campaign. I bought the game when it first came out. I played Super Mario Kart, and I just kept playing it and playing it. It was fun and addictive. Friends would come over and I would play them. I would play in battle mode. (Battle mode rocked.) It was fun. Everyone kept trying to borrow my Super Mario Kart or play it and this happened for years and years, even when the N64 was out. It was just a fun game to come back to.
Super Mario Brothers 5 has that in spades. The game is just plain fun and very addictive. It is fun to play alone or in a group.
One of the major changes that has occurred in console gaming is that in the old school days, you would be going through cartridge after cartridge. At the end of a good play session, you were surrounded by cartridges! But in modern gaming, that one disc sits inside the machine for about a week or so with you not really playing anything else. But once the game comes out, it is shelved and may not enter the machine again for at least a year or two, sometimes it never gets played again. The old school games were constantly played.
I think one mistake people are making with Super Mario Brothers 5 is to play it like a modern game. There is too much of a good thing. You are going to get tired of the game if you do nothing but play it for weeks. Game reviewers, who expect a ‘good game’ to entertain them for a week while it sits in their machine, are going at Super Mario 5 on that basis.
If you notice that game reviewers never return to the games they review unlike us, the lowly customers.
The strength in Super Mario Brothers 5 is that it is a game you can keep returning to and have fun whether it be single player or multiplayer. Mario Kart also has that strength as does Wii Sports.
Wii Sports was reviewed as typical Industry games by leaving the game in the machine for weeks and only playing that. “Durr, durr, durr, you run out of stuff to do,” says the game reviewer. But that’s not the point. The point is that you can return to it constantly. I would prefer to have a game that I keep returning to rather than one I shelf forever after playing it all the way through.
It would be insane in the Atari age for anyone to leave Frogger in their machine for a week just as no one in the NES age left Super Mario Brothers 3 in their NES for a week. Games kept being moved in and out.
Let us say I have two hours of time to play games for today. I want to spend those two hours going through several games rather than seeing how much further I can get in one game. I’ve noticed this behavior returns to me on the Virtual Console. A little Zanac there, some Super Star Soldier there, some Mario Brothers there, and to top it off with some battles in Final Fantasy 1.
I think the expectation that the game should take at least a week to play through (to sit in the machine) is a fog preventing reviewers to see the game’s true value. I also think there is something else.
I’ve noticed that everything Nintendo does that increases its sales and popularity is frowned on by the “Game Industry” and everything Nintendo does to decrease its sales and popularity is celebrated. Mario and Zelda games are very much ‘highlighted’ by the “Game Industry”. I believe this is because they know the games will attract only the Nintendo fans and do not threaten the status quo.
Super Mario Galaxy does not threaten the status quo. Super Mario Brothers 5 does. The “Game Industry” knows the sales of classic Mario games as well as NSMB DS. Super Mario Brothers 5 appeals to customers who are not just Nintendo fans.
There has been much “anti-hype” about this game prior to release. There was much talk, for example, that it was the DS game ported to the Wii but with multiplayer. I believe some of this “anti-hype” was coordinated by competitors. Nintendo’s competitors cannot compete when Nintendo returns to its roots. Sega could. But Sega is no more.
If Super Mario Brothers 5 was receiving tons of hype and 10s in reviews, I would instantly know it was a horrible game. Only “Game Industry” games receive such treatment. The angrier the “Game Industry” is at a game, the more uncertain are the game reviews, the better the game is.
Super Mario Brothers 5 is being reviewed how I expected it to. People who understand classic Mario, both user or professional game reviewer, call the game ‘magical’ and the review glows with praise. People who do not understand classic Mario but understand how big it was will give an uncertain review (like our IGN friend there). And then there are the “Game Industry” rags who understand that this game is a threat to the status quo so it gets dumped on.
I hope some small game companies realize they can make an old school type of Super Mario Brothers 5 game and be successful at it. They don’t have to blow up a budget to make a HD cinematic epic game.
I see Super Mario Brothers 5 as aiding Nintendo’s disruption of the “Game Industry”. It will show that classic gaming on home consoles still can bring in huge numbers. I hope it gives courage to other longtime game companies (like Konami and Capcom) to get back to their roots.
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