I'm a huge Nintendo fan. At least, I have been since I was a kid. I owned everything except a GameCube/GBA. I never owned a gaming system by any other company until I got a 360 in 2010.

When the Wii U came out, I snapped it up day one. My wife, who does not play almost any video games, gladly played New Super Mario Bros U with me, as she had done with NSMB Wii. We had great fun and played through the game.

Then a few more games came out. Game & Wario was a huge disappointment. We expected a new game at least as fun as WarioWare Smooth Moves. What we got was... lackluster at best. They were right to give it a name other than Warioware. I don't believe they should have released that in the state it was in, lower price tag or not. My enthusiasm for Nintendo was certainly lessened.

Anyway, yadda yadda. I got a few other of the Wii U games (all while doing most of my Nintendo gaming on the 3DS) and enjoyed them just fine. I loved playing CoD on the gamepad screen so that my wife could watch TV and thus not be mad at me for using up the screen. I looked forward to SM3DW because everything claimed it was the best mario game since the NES days. This was going to be good. 4 player action - that's nice. I was very excited.

The game came out, I hungrily downloaded it. (I also bought an Xbox One that day, but that's outside the scope of this conversation). Ohboyohboyohboy, the new Mario! The game that all news outlets were praising as the second coming of sliced bread or whatever.

I thrust a wii remote into my wife's hands, and we began our adventure....

and...

We played two levels, then she wanted to stop. The thing is, so did I. The controls felt so imprecise for a Mario game. We were trying to go at angles and it just wasn't working right. It didn't feel as precise as, say, NSMB U or Mario 64. It was this gross inbetween area. The 8-direction instead of analog control really felt off to me. And, aside from that, the weird way in which it was 3D - narrow corridors or boxes of action - didn't really appeal to us either.

My wife said she wasn't really interested in playing it any more. I waited about a month before I even wanted to try it again, and we fired it up, played two more levels, and felt similarly disatisfied. A couple nights ago, I played it myself on the gamepad screen while my wife watched TV. I had a reasonable amount of fun in the first swimming dinosaur level. Okay, let me rephrase that: I greatly enjoyed the slide music from Mario 64 featured in the rather bland swimming dinosaur level.

I told my wife, after finishing the level, that it was kind of fun. "Do you want to play this level with me sometime?" She declined. My wife now has expressed that she no longer wishes to even attempt playing SM3DW. I, myself, feel only lukewarm at best and kind of sad at worst about it.

Hopefully DKC:TF is fun to play together, but I am pretty sad I missed out on this chance to play with my wife. Games like that only come along every few years and I am disappointed this game was so far from what we wanted in a new multiplayer Mario we aren't even going to try.

Beyond that, I'm disappointed that it's not anywhere near the level of quality I expected after it got such great reviews. It almost makes me wonder if Malstrom's insane foil-hat conspiracy theory that people give Nintendo amazing reviews when they make games that aren't going to sell well IS in fact true: people give bad reviews to 2D Mario because it sells amazing and steamrolls the industry and bad to 3D because it isn't as good. I mean I don't really believe that, and I think Malstrom has slid off the deep end, but it does make you wonder. People praised this game like it was the best thing to ever happen. I don't think it warrants such high levels of praise at all.

So, what's up? Am I the only person to feel this way? Let me know! I hope this doesn't offend anybody who likes the game. That's not my intention at all! I'm just relating my position and my shock at enjoying this so much less than I expected. Thanks a lot for reading.