Email: Smash brothers

I was confused by your blog post where you talked about the Sakurai interview with Gamespot. You have always been an advocate for the destruction of the hardcore gamer, and you describe the hardcore gamer as someone who frequents online forums and who screams at the top of their lungs when gaming isn’t catering exclusively to them. That sounds like the Melee fanbase in a nutshell. 

 

If this had been Miyamoto who had said; “When you look at online game forums, you’ll see a preference for 3D Mario, and yet, I think there are lots of people in the silent majority who don’t post online who prefer 2D Mario”, you would have had no problem with that statement. This has been your point for a long time, that the hardcore is “leading gaming astray” with their vocal opinions and “must be destroyed” for gaming to thrive. 

 

It seems like you’re grasping here.

This is a nice try. But do you really think Smash Brothers Melee is a hardcore game? Melee was really when Smash Brothers became popular and, obviously, Brawl’s sales were catapulted to Melee’s success.

Something with Melee really made the Smash Brothers series come alive to gamers.

If you notice a constant theme I have here is that the successful origins of the franchise must constantly be remembered. Hence, the NES Zeldas for Zelda or early Metroids for Metroid or the NES and SNES Marios for Mario. The N64 Smash Brothers wasn’t around long as Melee came out two years later. And it is Melee that everyone kept playing.

Sakurai doesn’t want to go the melee route not because it is ‘hardcore’ but because it is already defined. Sakurai wants to go to NeverLand and ‘be creative’.

I preferred it when Nintendo developers called themselves engineers. They made better games then.

As for Miyamoto and 2d Mario, he always called us the minority and people who kept living in the 1980s. And yet, a massive flood of sales came to 2d Mario where most of it came from brand new audiences.

I have a question. Does Nintendo ever do anything they don’t want to do? Seriously. Look at their games. Is there anything being done they don’t want to do?

With the Wii, they were making games they didn’t want to make such as Wii Sports, Wii Fit, etc. Instead of calling it the Nintendo Wii-U, it should be called the Nintendo Vani-T.

I can’t wait for that ‘magic’ of integrated hardware/software to happen. Oh boy! It is a magical process, apparently, like alchemy. All it needs is the right software to show just HOW AMAZING THE GAMEPAD IS.

Oh man, the Virtual Boy was more interesting than this console.