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HappySqurriel on 29 March 2010
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Khuutra said:
axt113 said:

History proves you wrong, you keep saying that 2D Mario wouldn't sell as much, sorry, but if that were true, then you wouldn't have seen NSMB Wii blow by every 3D Mario in a matter of weeks.  Also trying to point to SMW 2, which wasn't a Super Mario game just proves the weakness of your argument.

No a good game is a good game, is a good game, and a 2D Super Mario game is better than a 3D Mario, and that's been proven over and over, Mario 64 was a flop when compared to Super Mario games, and it has nothing to do with the times, if it did, NSMB Wii wouldn't have sold as much, but it sold far more, because its a better game, not because of the times.  But obviously you just don't have a clue of how the market works.

Stop this.

Trying to draw an absolute correlation between sales and quality is just as disingenuous as trying to draw an absolute correlation between Metascore and quality. Neither of them makes allowance for divergent value metrics, and neither of them is actually useful as a way to pick out games to play.

We can't kow if a 2-D Mario would have outsold 64 at the same time because it didn't happen. Trends may suggest certain things, certainly but those same trends tend to ignore the fact that NSMBWii was coming off of a 15+ year period without a mainline 2-D Mario on consoles. More, he has a point in that 3-D was the huge pushing thing for the N64, and contributed a great deal to pushing Mario 64 as far as it went.

Analyses of sales trends can rarely be cut and dry, and they certainly cannot be to the degree that you present here.

Just to add to this, some advantages that a well done 2D game from a major franchise has today that it wouldn’t have had back in the day are distinctness in the market (how many well made and well known 2D platformers were released in 2009?) and a pent-up demand from older gamers looking for a retro-experience.

If you took the top 18 (to pick a number) 2D franchises from the NES and SNES era, put a significant effort into re-imagining the experience in 2D, and released a new version of each of these games on a 3 year cycle you would probably see strong sales for all of these games. If you start adding in twice as many lesser titles from that era of gaming, and several dozen clones and copies of games, odds are pretty good that only a couple of games would see any sales; and their sales would be significantly lower.