Actually, I think you all are being pussies. It's not like he was glamorizing Nazism or Hitler. Just trying to demonify Mario ... and be a little troll. Which is kinda stupid since he made such a big deal about it in his threads.

of course

What Hype? I've not seen "Mario banks here" signs outside of banks or Mario Galaxy Mountain Dew.

Halo 3 for me didnt quite live up to the hype so i suppose theres every possiblity that SMG might not either. But i have my hopes.

Considering pretty much all of the hype has been built around feedback of people who have played it, rather than advertising by Nintendo, i'm not too worried..

Deleted by moderator.

Good point. In addition, most of the videos and screenshots are of actuall real time gameplay, not cut scenes. 

It's not like it advocates Nazism or glorifies it in any way. It was very obviously a joke - a clearly self-aware reductio ad Hitlerum.

Any offense taken from this is only a result of a portrayal of Nazi symbols, and that seems an awfully high bar for decency standards. He's not communicating an offensive idea, he's not being serious, he's not actually making any claims at all about the Nazis, and to the extent that he does mean Hitler to be analogous to Mario, he's saying something negative given his view of Mario.

Can it be painful for some people? Yes, and that's regrettable. You can censure someone for deliberately offending another (calling someone, particularly a Jew, a Nazi without really good reason), for taking an absurd and offensive position (Holocaust denial), or for generally acting to glorify something evil. However, he's just talking about Nazism. Surely the topic on which someone speaks isn't something that they should be censured for.

Surely we all agree that a serious discussion of Nazism is fine. Is the problem that he's using swastikas to make a joke? Again, this isn't a standard that we usually apply - lots of people make jokes all the time about past atrocities, and a message board is closer in culture to a school cafeteria than to an office building. I think the problem is less that he's being too offensive and more that some are too sensitive. Anyone who would be deeply hurt by this image would be hurt by any reminder of the Nazi regime, and that's too restrictive.

Good points GotchayeX. That's how I saw it, and as someone whose grandparents were Holocaust survivors I really don't see how it could have been anything more then a joke. I admit it, I laughed. The thing is, if he really wanted to be offensive and trollish he could have posted up a picture of tub girl or that goatse guy and it would have been sick and nothing funny about that. I'd rather see someone post a picture like Hitler Mario then anything perverted and just sick.