Now you're talking. Yes, joy is an emotion, that's for sure, but it's best lived in balance with other emotions. If I were to desing a joyful Mario, I would make sure to not cause that joy to be the sole emotion felt.

Joy is one of those emotions that is best brought to life by hardships or when faced with a threat or an ennemy. As such moments of joy only then take their full meaning.

The feeling of threat and urgency is very poorly portrayed in Mario, and the joy being so omni-present really drowns out any other emotion.

Though you can understand my appreciation for the emotion that joy is, the pictures you gave, a person, in the sunset, wearing a hoody, and just enjoying the nature around him, paints a very different picture from the overly bright worlds of Mario, especially the latest incarnations.

Lastly, in my opinion, joy is most often experienced within, with the outward expression of that in most cases being an unforced expression that doesn't necessarily involved shouts of joy. Joy can often be espoused with serenity.

But that's a good post. Thanks.

The feeling of threat and urgency doesn't need to be portrayed by Mario (but it is to a certain extent since you can see him struggling when he reaches 1 life). As the player, you're the one feels the sense of threat when you dodge bullet bills, jump over electric current, barely make a jump in time, get knocked down by a cosmic clone, etc... then when you finally get the star you can rejoice with Mario because the hardship you've just faced has paid off.

See, I disagree. I agree with what you put in parentheses and that's important.

In my view, the main videogame character should be the link the player has to the virtual world, and should help the player get immersed into the world he's connecting to. As such, if Mario is getting blown by a gust of wind, he should be holding his hat, or clinging to his body and push forward, or if there's lava below him he should appear to struggle.

To add insult to injury, if you see a character that on the contrary only portrays always the same emotion on screen, then it is totally anti-climactic, it totally breaks the mood and the scene. So for one same emotion portrayed over very different obstacles is a glaring desing mistake.

And so thought the expectation is high, I expect Nintendo to design different emotions in the character throughout different challenges. Wind Waker was an interesting take on this, but the problem is that link is in 3rd person view from the back in most cases, and they only used simplistic facial expressions. There is much that can be said by the body.

In 2D Mario, it becomes even more important to have both facial and body language to reflect what is happening in the game, since the character is that much more visible in his entirety. 3D Mario in 64 and Sunshine gave us a bit more of Mario's face I think since we had full control on the camera back then, but still in galaxy there are a few cases where we can see all of mario and as such they should work on these things. After all, it's the character we see through nearly every moment of the game, so it's not that much to ask, especially seeing that these games are multi-million$ sellers.

I'm trying to find some graphics on Super Metroid on the net, but if I remember correctly, when Samus was low health her body said so. I think mario does in the 3D incarnations I'm not sure. But here are some vids for super metroid that show some interesting character design (it's all awesome, but the most interesting part would be at 8:00):

And I know this is a trick, but look at the art. I think we see a glimpse of this on power bomb use:

Only now I fully understand what you meant: OMG, Mario's been teletubbified!!!   =8-O   

Exactly :)

Those quotes were snippets from a couple of articles I have read in different places.  I believe them to all have originated from (or can be confirmed by) this "Iwata Asks" interview between Satoru Iwata and Shigeru Miyamoto though.   In the interview, Miyamoto explains that the game was originally supposed to take place in a scrolling maze.  But, since arcade boards didn't allow scrolling at that time, the 4 separate level screens were chosen to progress the game.  Also, Miyamoto goes into in depth explanation of the design of the original Mario (Jumpman) with choices made according to the restrictions of how many pixels that could be used at that time.  I figured the actual interview would be of more value to you than directing you to an unproperly sourced wikipedia page or random unsourced fan site.

http://iwataasks.nintendo.com/interviews/#/wii/nsmb/0/0

Also, sorry for the delay!  I was much busier at work yesterday than I am today, lol

This thread makes me remember about the "Samus Aran as a gateway to her POV of the meroid universe thread" a while back!

@HappyD: I get what you're saying ol' chap (to some degree), like the few that tried to look at your POV. To tell you the thruth, like Mr. Kahn said, your poor choosing of words really made it hard for others to atleast try clicking with you, with that said, I'll stop beating the dead horse....

While I myself have next to no conflict with Nintendo doing what they've done with the main Mario series up this point, you do make some excelent points. The only thing you can do to make these tiny upgrades is that you acquire the aformentiont degrees, study japanese like a mad man, move away to Japan and hope that you get a job at Nintendo or fly over their with riddled ammunitions and put the end of a barrel of a gun on the producer's head and threaten his life to make such small changes.

But it seems that you don't have to do all that, NSMBU is doing just the stuffs you mentioned (maybe not off the bat). Heck even the asthetics of the first world looks marginly livier/organic than the games before it (atleast to me).
And here's my gripe that may coincide with yours when I saw the earlier build of the game being played on a vid: when the player stops controlling Mario/Luigi, they stare back at the player after a while. Now it would be much more acceptable to me if Mario actually looked at his surroundings as well. It kind of remind me of Sonic's idle sprite back in the Genesis days, but he did more than just looking back at us. Those are just my thoughts for now.

And one more thing, Mario actually has a different idle animation when he's low on health in the 3D games, he's even gasping for breath.