Mario 3 is the best game in the series, and best platformer of all time for me simply because of the level design and controls. You had pixel-perfect control of Mario in that game where you can turn on a dime and easily control your jumps in mid-air, where in the original SMB (as well as a ton of other NES platformers) your momentum carried you forward and it was nearly impossible to correct your jumps mid-air. Games like Castlevania were notorious for this.

It also had the coolest power-ups of any game then and now. I really wish NSMB Wii would have incorporated some of these. The cape in SMW was nice but just not as cool as the Raccoon or Tanooki suits in SMB3.

What the heck are you talking about? 

These don't make a game good, they just make it sell well and sales don't equal quality.

It's a platformer.

It's no more or less accessible than platformers are today.  That's one of the niceties of the genre.  You have like two relevant buttons and mostly simplistic objectives.  It's not like FPS where you have a crapload of buttons to memorize or RPGs where you have to nagivate half a dozen menus just to find out how hard your character can hit something.  Accessibility is a feature of the genre.

As for difficulty, not really.  Super Mario 3 is easy especially when paired next to Super Mario Galaxy's harder levels.  Despite that, you know what makes Super Mario Galaxy superior though?  You can skip the really freaking hard levels.  Anyone can do the easy missions and finish the game.  Unlike SMB3 where if you don't have a cloud to pass a hard level, you are pretty screwed.

What.  The.  Heck.

Even if we ignore the level design in non-platformer games (of which there are many with brilliant design), you're still pitting it against the entire rest of the Mario series including NSMB, SM64, and SMG.  Out of all of those I was always most impressed with Super Mario 64 because every world except a couple was something new and interesting.  Every painting was a fresh experience.  You know what wasn't a fresh experience with every area?  World 3 in SMB3.  I swear every level was more or less the same.  Not the hardest world but definitely the most boring.

Super Mario Bros 3 is a great game, but your list sucks horribly.

I think its the best Mario of all time but not even close to the best game of all time.

It's more like your understanding of the concept of greatness "sucks horribly".

IE. the greatest nation in the history of Europe was the Roman Empire during the Antonine dynasty. Despite the fact that even the current nation of Belarus has a more powerful military (with its guns, missiles, and artillery), electricity, and many other technological means that make it vastly more advanced than the Roman Empire.

I'm sorry but that bolded part may be one of the most brutal ownages I've ever seen.  That was a really good comeback as obviously dtewi had worked himself into quite a contradiction haha. 

For 2D versus 3D, you ahve compare game sin their own respect.  Meaning it's contradictory to say that every game that is considered good now is automatically better than the ones beforehand due to advancements.  Because then you'd have to be able to make the same argument that if 2D and 3D were flipped in years that they'd come out that the same would be true.  It's an obvious contradiction.

That is why we judge games on their own merit rather than how they compare to others or how they "should be" in the future.  Doing so is silly because it's either good at one point or not good at all.  Meaning even though it might seem "aged" that doens't mean it's worse than it was before because it is still the same game.  ONly perceptions have changed and even then that doesn't mean they can't like what was good beforehand.  Argument that newer things are always better than older things is actually an appeal to novelty fallacy so let's avoid using it.

AS for the OT, I don't think SMB3 is the greatest game of all time but it is surely a timeless classic that I still enjoy today.

Jumpin, drawing parallels between the Roman Empire and SMB3 is not the same thing as providing a definition of greatness. I think this conversation will go more smoothly if you define greatness, because you are meeting a lot of discord until that is clarified.

I also don't see what his concept of greatness comes from or what does he want to define as greatness, I would really much like to know.

@Zucas

I tried to say that same thing to him, yet he has his mind set up about older games being surpassed in quality, just because they are part of the past.
I'm not going to argue with him anymore, what got to me was that he implied that the only way for people to look at older games with the same respect and give the same proper treatment as we do newer games, is because of some twisted sense of nostalgia. That I cannot accept, for all the reasons i've enumareted in this thread.

I find it funny that anyone can proclaim their favorite game as the greatest game of all time. Their is no such thing as the greatest game of all time, its all a matter of opinion. I'n my opinion Super Mario World was the best Mario game made and many share that opinion but does that make it the greatest game of all time? No it doesn't, it doesn't even make it the best Mario game.

Nostalga, lol. Nostalga is not what makes past Mario games so good. Gameplay is, why do you think Nintendo had so much success with NewSuperMarioBros? its a 2d side scroller? Mario's gameplay is some of the best in the games industry and an old Mario game is still awsome to play today regardless of nostalga.

He's associating that the Roman Empire achieved far greater feats with their respectivly limited capabilities. Where as the other govenrment technoligicly is far superior. In comparison of these two empires which achieved greater success. 

In relation SMB3 achieved incredible fiscal success on a far inferior machine. This was a game that saw such success because the game was good with it's limited capabilities. Now we see games which are vastly superior in technological design, but don't stand near as great as SMB3. If said games are truly far superior than SMB3 then all these games should be outselling it.

Well that's my take on his comments and makes the most sense to me.

I don't know.  I haven't played it yet.