Cunger was going to reply to you, but instead of clicking "quote" he clicked "report".

So lo and behold I'm minding my own business when suddenly I get this giant report about Mario and Expendables and what-not... but then I realized it was all a mis-click. I was pretty confused for a second haha.

Here's his "report" on you.

You want me to be specific and that's difficult for me to do. But I'll try. Recently I was forced into watching a movie called Lorax and the whole thing just seemed to be a ploy to get kids to care about the environment. It was like a life lesson for kids. Very cheesy stuff if you are an adult. They also had a bunch of kid songs in the movie that were designed to make the movie and the environmental values stick in the kids' heads for longer. I know that always used to work with me when I was a kid. I still have some of the Lion King songs stuck in my head ;)... Mario is just strait up gameplay. If there happen to be childish moments in a Mario game I wear them like a badge. They take me back and are nostalgic. The same why I can get a kick out of the purposely cheesy moments in a movie like The Expendables 2 that take me back to a time when Chuck Norris was actually cool. The difference between Mario and Expendables is that the non-cheesy moments in Mario are actually amazing and surprising with new gameplay twists ect. If Expendables didn't have the cheesy moments it wouldn't have anything at all.

The links you've provided tell me you've got a bad case of nostalgia. The original Super Mario Bros.'s color palette was mainly brown because of the limitation of the hardware. In fact, most of Mario's features like his cap, his overalls and his mustache were there because they provided an easy way to differentiate between body parts with the few pixels and colors they had available for the character. As consoles got graphically stronger, Nintendo added details but still keeping in mind the original design and if you look at the picture below the evolution is pretty cohesive.

Sorry about that!!  I am new to the site as a poster although I've been following the site for a long long time.

Play Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door if you haven't. Definitely not kiddy and it has the best Mario story.

This explains alot of what happened, and it only got worse:

I know I can do better to explain this, but that's as far as I've gotten today and it took me time to develop this post.

The Fifa, Gran Turismo and Madden games don't have any story at all, why would sport games need a story?

Because Mario was never about depth in the first place, and I did give you big example of depth in the RPG series, I think you are mistaking depth with tragedy.

Mario isn't intended to have a great story, it's a save the princess game, and the actual focus is the platforming.

You want a random story example, okay.

In Mario Galaxy, many Toads were left homeless from the Mushroom Kingdom attacks, many probably perished in the fire and destruction. The Lumas where about to freeze to death, many probably did.

Rosalina is condemned to eternal loneliness in space, without the hope to ever reunite with her loved ones, they are probably dead by then.

The people and servants in the castle are nowhere to be seen at the end, I guess they were slaughtered by Bowser.

What happened there? And I don't get how his voice got "worse"?

The reality that it's hard to put into words proves a few things:

1) We don't talk about it enough, those of us interested in this kind of thing, within the gamer community.

2) I lack background in the study of art to really express my thoughts.

3) I should replay all of these games again to better judge.

@Le petit prince. Yes, I'm familiar with that, and yeah I see the resemblance with SMG though I"ve never read it completely. Thing is though, LPP doesn't have any music, and that's an important element in the topic. Graphical detail is another, but maybe Nintendo needs the WiiU to impress and put more detail in the already gorgeous 3D Mario. 2D Mario is looking promising with NSMBU, but still it looks like the direction is still lacking (though more data is needed).

Did you listen to the other two clips? It's hard to tell what is Galaxy and what is prior, though I searched long and hard to find them, to no avail. If anyone finds the sound clips, do post them.

For now we don't have evidence, but it's my undertanding that Mario became more high-pitched and kiddy as it went along, to satisfy the need to not "scare" children, as he talks about in his interview "I'm going to be talking to children, I wouldn't want to have a stuffy voice" (paraphrased).