Declined on a per-household basis as multiplatform ownership grew. Also grew largely to penetration of untapped territories (something Sony, more than the PlayStation, gets credit for), not within existing markets.

Before he radicalized, i avidly followed Malstrom's arguments. PS1 and PS2 are handily over-credited for market expansion work.

Malstrom is still sucking I see.

His glory days are long past.

or conversely..

Is what you get from his blog frequently.

Unfortunately, there is some truth in that statement. Of course, between the global economic downturn and the standard flow of the console cycle, lower sales should not be unexpected.

Of course, the industry still had half-a-billion in sales last month (USD just in the US).

Mike from Morgantown

The actual span of time is pretty much irrelevant, but it depends on what you consider a "real 2D Mario" game. Yoshi's island came out in '95; NSMB in '06. SML2 in '92. So it's either 11 or 14 years.

As for Darksiders, I dug up this old interview on Google:

Inc Gamers: What did you guys make of the Zelda comparisons that various people made to the first Darksiders?

Marvin Donald: We’re honoured by it, we’re huge fans of Zelda. Those games are definitely an inspiration for the kind of work that we do. We like their style of dungeons, puzzle solving and general pacing and we think [the comparison] is a very positive thing.

Seems pretty straightforward to me. As for Naughty Dog, that was mostly just speculation on my part. They were making 3D platformers around the time Super Mario 64 came out, and as their first game wasn't tremendously well-received, it's not a stretch to think they would have studied what Nintendo did. See what they could learn from Mario, and apply that to their next games. GTA3 came out in 2001; Crash 2 and 3 were released before it.

Goldeneye wasn't that big a game tbh. Great game of its time, but not even as big as Galaxy.

More like 14

I think one can be inspired by something and appreciate comparisons to it without them being terrribly apt.  

Like I said Crash 1,2 &3 are like very much like traditional Mario games.  They simply use forward and back as  well as up and down instead of left and right up and down and they switch to the latter pretty often too.  Jak 1 is very similar it just has massively larger areas that aren't quite as constrained to the straightforward tunnel that the Crash games were. Jak 2 & 3 (03 and 04 respectively) were the games that I mentioned as being more influenced by GTA 3 than 3D mario.  The 3rd person shooting mechanics, The hub structure and more open ended mission/stage structure.    

I believe he got some buzz and attention, because he rode the devil's advocate thing regarding the Wii and motion control.  Now people have factored that into their view of things, it is likely that he is out of material and figuring out other things to get cranky about, likely misreading why he got attention initially.

Why always people that make crappy games talk shit about amazing games......envy maybe

sweet, sweet poison!