Come on you're telling me the creators of these nintendo game can't come up with new and exciting characters?  I love all the old time characters as much as the next gamer but I don't want to see 10 years down the line and still seeing the same old same old.  Been there, done that, bought the t-shirt and now it's a cleaning rag.

@Infamous23: All of those writers are the exception rather than the rule. 99% of books that deal with what could be considered pulp material are...well, pulp. 

A great writer makes the difference. What you listed are great writers.

Same with games: they can have pulpy stuff if they want and still be quality...if they're handled by a very quality developer. God of War, for example.

However, 99% of games that appeal to their audience with sensationalist covers, professed "maturity", excessive violence, sexualized dolls of women and so on....are just that, trash.

It's a hell of a tougher sell to get adults to buy games about apes and plumbers.

Games, at their heart, are defined as good or bad, pulpy or artistic, by how good of a game they are. And that's what Nintendo does best. Embracing gameplay and foregoing market appeal, "mature" image, and demographic targeting is a hell of a lot more mature than slapping a hyper-muscled dude and a nice pair of tits and ass on your gun-and-exploding alien infested box art. 

I know that many people love Nintendo the way that they are, but I am here to show undeniable proof why living in the past is a problem.  Sure, people love Mario, Donkey Kong, Samus, Kirby, and the rest, but Nintendo really should move on to biggger and better things without revisiting the same ideas over and over.  Tired and true is becoming just plain tired and maybe not that true at all. 

I'll show you the dangerous ground that Nintendo is treading on by taking a closer look at the years in which Nintendo is reliving with this year's E3 announcements:

1928.  Nintendo is taking us back to this year by showing off Epic Mickey.  How?  This is when Steamboat Willie was released and it is celebrated as the birth of Mickey Mouse.  Unfortunately, also that same year on July 6th, the largest hailstone ever found fell out of the sky onto Potter, Nebraska.  It was seven inches around and weighed 1.5 pounds.  I don't know what that converts to in metric for people that aren't familiar with measurements in standard, but that's enough to crack you head open violently if it descended from the heavens.  Is this the sort of thing that Nintendo should be reliving?

1981 is the year that Mario and Donkey Kong first appeared in Donkey Kong and both have new games coming.  Also, on August 1st of that year, MTV debuted.  It singlehandedly destroyed music and started reality television later on in it's existence with The Real World.  To hell with you MTV.  Not even Men Without Hat's The Safety Dance can justify your existence.

1986 is the year that the Legend of Zelda, Metroid, and Kid Icarus all came into the gaming world and have new games releasing.  I know what you're thinking.  How could someone possibly not want to relive that?  Unfortunately, on April 21st, Geraldo Rivera opened Al Capone's secret vault live on The Mysteries of Al Capone's Vault.  The show was hyped up for what seemed to be fifteen years straight.  All that was found was a bottle of moonshine.  Rumor has it that it was actually set down by one of Geraldo's camera operators.

1992 is the year that we all first met Kirby, the star of the upcoming Kirby's Big Yarn.  On November 27th, Brett Favre made his first start for the Green Bay Packers.  I have never been right in the head since that day.  I am a Chicago Bears fan, after all.

1997 is the year that the game GoldenEye 007 hit store shelves and now we are being treated to a new one.  On December 19th of this year, Titanic was released.  Need I say more?

Another huge concern I have with Nintendo living in the past is the announcement of the 3DS. 

"But Mr. 316, the 3DS is the future," I hear some of you saying. 

Not so fast.  It's the past...

The popularity of 3D stems from 3D movies.  The first film of it's kind hit theaters in 1922 and was named The Power of Love.  That's pretty far in the past, isn't it?  It didn't really catch on and was extremely rare up until the Golden Age of 3D which was 1952-1955.  Some of the features made from that time included Creature From the Black Lagoon, House Of Wax, It Came From Outer Space, House On Haunted Hill, and the legendary Robot Monster.  The 60's through 80's had a bit of a revival with classics such as Amityville 3-D, Friday the 13th Part 3, Jaws 3-D, and Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone.  In 1985 IMAX came into existence, and there have been several forms of 3D since then.  The rest, as we say, is history.  Now it's extremely difficult to see a blockbuster movie that doesn't have showings in 3D.  Roger Ebert has stated on numerous occasions that 3D is a gimmick when he hasn't gone on at length about gaming not being a form of art.

It could be worse for Nintendo though.  They can't copy their own system like others are which brings us to the year 2006.  Nothing too eventful happened except for the release of the Wii.

In conclusion, I just want to state that you shouldn't live in the past like Nintendo.  You might find yourself enjoying their sequels and rehashes and you might wind up having an avatar of Sean Connery as James Bond.  How lame is that?  Don't live in the past.     

Wrong, that's the problem of the PS3.

The issue is with your dating of Pulp Fiction rather than what I said.  I couldn't remember the time period, so I trusted yours to be correct.  It actually spanned from the turn of the century to the 50s.  Pulp remains a slang term to describe fiction that appeals to readers through the same themes as pulp fiction.  There is no more pulp fiction as there are no pulp magazines to publish it in.

A writer is completely capable of writing pulp fiction and literature.  I'm not debating that.  Fitzgerald actually wrote a bunch of romantic short stories for magazines that were comparable to the terrible romance novels of today.  He also wrote The Great Gatsby, a fantastic piece of literature.  However, that does not make all his work literature.  Same applies for all the writers you mentioned.  Just because someone writers literature and pulp fiction does not make pulp fiction and literature one and the same.

You do realize that DKC Returns and Kirby's Epic Yarn were in far into production well before NSMB Wii was released, right?  It's not like NSMB Wii is the first 2D platformer they've released this generation, either.  Platformers is kind of Nintendo's thing.  We had a Paper Mario and Wario game before NSMB Wii.  This is not some fad they accidentally created and are jumping on.  This is their bread a butter.  Nintendo is THE BEST platformer developer in the world.  What's more, anyone who bothered to watch 15 seconds of either DKC or Kirby would recognize that these games play style is COMPLETELY different from NSMB Wii.  Kirby has never been a big seller, either.  It's a classic with the core Nintendo fanbase, but that's about it.

Finally, your arguments for why OoT and SMG 1 and 2 are rated as the best games of all time (Well above GTA IV, I might add.  I dunno where you got that from.  Click on the link, maybe?) are because of a lack of quality games on the systems they were released on?  Ignoring the incredible amount of classics on the N64 and the solid list of games on the Wii, let's pretend you're right.  So what?  Are game reviewers incapable of playing games on other systems?  Great gameplay is great gameplay, regardless of the system.  Even if I play along with your "They've overrated cause the N64 and the Wii had no games" argument, you can drop them five points and they're still well above 90% according to dozens of reviews.  They remain well recieved games.

However, the N64 and Wii libraries don't suck, and reviewers don't magically overrate games for being on those systems, so your point sucks in general.