LITB Post E3 Thoughts – Don’t call it beating a dead horse if the horse is still alive.
One of the biggest complaints I see when people discuss Nintendo’s E3 offerings is that they’re relying too much on the same franchises and simply “Milking Mario till he’s dry”. And I agree that in recent years the number of bad Mario spin-offs (Mario Pinball, Mario Party #__ and so on) have grown in size compared to the bad Mario spin-offs of yesteryear….wait. No, no I don’t. Not really. I mean Mario Pinball was still bad yes and the Mario Party series became a walking corpse but there was plenty of head-shakingly bad Mario Spin-offs in the 90′s. Hotel Mario, those Early Years Edutainment titles with the creepy voices…
The point I’m making is that you could call this franchise fatigue, if the franchise was indeed suffering from fatigue. The two most recent Mario Kart games still make it onto the NPD charts while many high-profile games released this year have already fallen out of the Top 20, never to be seen again. NSMB DS was released three years ago, and Mario Kart DS almost four damn years ago.
Some people like to lump this milking into the same category of SEGA’s manhandling of Sonic, but the difference there is that with the exception of Europe where Sonic is still treated like Royalty, he’s not that popular in the rest of the world. What SEGA does with Sonic is in response to his falling stardom. Sales are down? Well then the answer is simple, the games need MORE INTENSE STORY LINES with love interests and death and loss. That didn’t work either? Well then we should try getting Sonic back to his roots….but still through in an unavoidable gimmick section that makes up almost more than half of the game play time as you keep dying and trudging through the Werehog sections.
Mario meanwhile just does whatever. He doesn’t appear in Role Playing Games because of some unfounded theory that it’ll make him more hip with the kids. They just make those Mario RPGs because they get to work with the Mario Universe. Like with my thoughts on the Zelda series, I believe that each Mario genre appeals to certain gamers. Mario Kart Wii may have turned off many hardcore gamers with it’s emphasis on randomized items and social gaming, but obviously more than enough people liked the title enough to make it one of the best selling games of this gen period. Some call it a way to squeeze some money out of Mario’s popularity after Mario Galaxy came out, but what do you call it when the spin-off becomes far more successful than the supposed “Epic 3D Adventure” title in the franchise did. When more new gamers will remember karting around with Mario years from now instead of going on some epic-story driven crusade?
And then there’s Mario Galaxy 2, which people are already pointing to as just a quick cash grab that while fun will only dilute the Mario brand further than it already has.
Well they’re right. I mean before Galaxy 2 no other Mario game had reused the same engine only a few years after release in order to have a shorter development time and implement new ideas that didn’t get used the first time aroundoh wait a minute. We’ve been squeezing a dead cow for twenty years.
The SHAME OF IT ALL! – The Ben