My own thoughts on how to score with the Wii audience.

[theRepublic]

LordTheNightKnight said:

Veder Juda said:

LordTheNightKnight said:
"Nintendo spent the last decade trying to fix 3D Mario, while gamers simply didn't like 3D Mario, they wanted 2D Mario; Nintendo was following preconceived notions that 3D was better, or at least as good as 2D, and that 3D Mario had to be better than 2D Mario."

My solution, make the 3D games play like the 2D games. If there is a field, you don't have Mario spend 30 seconds to get to the other side. The 2D games didn't work that way. You put pits, blocks, and plenty of enemies as obstacles to the other side. And it's about getting from point A to point B, with only a few secrets to find. You don't replay the level multiple times from the MacGuffins.

In essence, treat 3D as just an extra dimension to the 2D gaming.

I believe that's what Nintendo was trying to do, adding elements of the 2D games back into the 3D ones, like those weird stages in Sunshine where you lose FLOOD and are just jumping over floating blocks to reach the goal.  But some things just don't work, like jumping on enemies; without a homing function, jumping on a goomba in 3D is harder than 2D, and don't event talk to me about trying to jump on a chain of enemies.

I think that a straight-up "get to the end" 3D platformer would have been better than what they were doing, what Malstrom refers to as "star finder Mario", but some people just want 2D platforming, and they will only be satisfied by a 2D platformer.

Yeah, the gameplay would have to be tweaked (especially for the camera), but the overall level flow is vastly different, which is what I meant. Even those Sunshine areas were not this.

This sounds a lot like a few of the levels in Galaxy.  Even then, it didn't sell all that well compared to other Mario games.

I think 2D Mario is just more accessible than 3D Mario.  It is just so easy to understand run and jump, while bigger worlds and exploration elements coupled with more complicated controls start to turn people away.