why would Sunshine be a better comparison than NSMB? DS and Wii are going to have similar user bases, both in terms of size and makeup. Gamecube has a much smaller and more focused user base. NSMB is absolutely the best game to compare galaxy with.

I wasn't worried about SMG sales, so I'm not sure the reason for the thread, nor why it is being roped into a debate on SMG vs HALO 3, but since I'm avoiding work, I'll toss in my 2 pennies...

Some of the factors that I think is important to remember:

1) Halo 3 was incredibly frontloaded. It's like modern movie blockbusters that hype the shit out of their product and then drop off dramatically. Mario Galaxy was not sold in the same manner - it practically snuck onto store shelves.

2) Mario is simply the single most recognizable character in video games. Even casuals know him, and will be likely to pick up the title if the reviews are good enough (and they have been), so the "core vs casual" thing shouldn't be as much of a factor as it would be for some other franchises.

3) Mario's appeal is truly to all ages, and the Wii's numbers are growing faster than the 360's. In a year, I expect the Wii to have a 2:1 advantage world wide. Those 2 factors mean the Wii will have a much larger user base than the Older-Core-Gamer oriented Halo 3.

4) There is no shortage of good shooters on the 360. Hell, there's a bunch of good games this holiday that will give H3 a run for it's money (COD4, Mass Effect, BioShock, etc), but SMG is pretty much in a class by itself on the Wii. No other platformer is half as good (and if there were, they don't have the name recognition), and there aren't many titles in other genres to compete with either. In short, for the next few months at least, anyone who buys a Wii and asks "What games should I get?" will be told, first and formost, get SMG.

It's definitely not over.  Halo 3 had a much stronger start, but terrible legs.  Last week, SMG sold: 162,420 + 38,492 + 188,325 = 389,237 units in a single week.  It's only the third week, and clearly SMG is just getting warmed up.

What about H3 in its third week:  78,465 + 4,702 + 252,596 = 335,763.  Relative to SMG, it had an extremely hard dropoff.  Consider that it started with much higher sales and fanfare, and three weeks in it was already selling more slowly than SMG!

And last week?  Halo 3 sold:  62,409 + 1,075 + 54,417 = 111,901.   Don't expect numbers this low from SMG anytime soon.

Let's compare SMG at 25 weeks to Halo 3 at 25 weeks and see how they look.  If Halo 3 is still up by more than 1.5 million units, I will be extremely surprised.  I expect total units sold to converge around December 2008. 

SMG is a bigger experience than Halo 3.  It's newer, it's fresher, and it's accessible to more people. 

No. This is the trap that people fell into when trying to predict sales for SMG and used NSMB as the reference. 2D Mario is a different genre than 3D Mario. You can can compare the two and come up with lots of similarities but at root of it all they are very different games that appeal to their own distinct crowd. The comparison between the two can give you indications and you might adduce some small a priori noema that will help engender further investigation. Straight up comparison such as looking at sales for NSMB and assigning that some predictive value for SMG sales is not relevant because they are two radically different games.

 Husserl thought that the way we talked about comparisons was important and should be very specific. The intentional experience is the active one and may exist before hand, in principle, a priori. Specifying the noema keeps this in the objective vice the subjective realm. The analysis is a little like Kant's in the Critique of Judgment. So in the comparion you might find an element that is common to both SMG and NSMB is used to different ends and in an apparently not ironic sense. When you compare them their will still be tension between the modality of both uses.

Anyway, sorry for geeking out like that. All my graduate and post-graduate studies were in Philosophy, Greek Philosophy and the Early Church Fathers like Augustine up to Aquinas.

The sentence in question was what it was to very narrowly define what type of comparison could yield grist for discussion. 

FWIW, SMB3 was bundled with the NES for the last couple of years of its life. It was packaged as The Challenge Set.

 I would add that while both games are iconic, one has competition and the other doesn't. Already there are lots of people are passing over Halo 3 for Orange Box or Call of Duty 4, and with another legion of shooters coming to 360 in 2008, Halo 3 will only face more competition.

 SMG's competition is what? Dewey's Adventure? The only platformer currently in SMG's league is on PS3, and there's nothing on the horizon that looks like it has a chance to dethrone SMG.

I believe that you completely failed to define "intentional experience".  I suppose I could have been more clear that I was looking for a definition instead of an identification. 

A bit of Internet research tells me that "Intentional experience refers to real entities, objects that actually exist.  Frege pointed out long ago that when somebody is thinking about the moon, it is not just the idea of the moon but of an actual, intentional experience in which the moon is the appearing reference or phenomenon." 

This contrasts with what I might naturally presume the term to mean, that is, an experience one has intentionally, on purpose as opposed to involuntarily -- such as the "look and feel" of playing the two games.  Instead it seems that "intentional experience" only means something akin to a real-world reference instead of an abstract idea. 

Am I wrong?  I'm kind of dashing this off in a futile attempt to not be late for work. 

[edit:  source]