Great job! I found it informative and entertaining. It probably helped in that I have no particular interest in either game as I lived through the high resolution uber-violent games a few years back on the PC and in my dottage I'm quite happy with pure fun things like running around the course in MK Wii.
It does serve as a reminder that budgets, programming time, disk space, memory, and available talent are all finite quantities and the developer must constantly make choices.
Like the classic decision process in battleship design where the three elements; speed, firepower and armor protection had to be balanced. Each could only be increased at the cost of another. More armor causes less speed and takes away tonnage that could be used to upgrade guns etc. The designer must balance graphics vs animation vs number of things happening vs framerate vs gameplay vs cut scenes vs longer storyline vs more gameplay modes and options etc. etc. He also has to do all this at a realistic cost that makes a profit and meets a reasonable schedule to get it out the door. The longer a game takes, the more it costs and the longer the time before any revenue is produced.
We all know games that, in our opinion at least, did a great job with the choices made and games where the game fails because inadequate attention was paid to some element. A beautiful game with poor gameplay will fail. A beautiful game with great gameplay that only takes two hours to beat will fail.
Your article makes it all the clearer why those games that are well balanced in all areas are to be applauded. It also makes it clear that two games can both be excellent even if different and comparisons based on nothing better than personal opinion are at best pointless and at worst just another platform for immature pettiness and fanboy hysteria to show its ass.
