Smash Bros? How about all the Mario sports titles, and Mario Party? And Zelda, even? That's just offhand: should I get a list?

I thought the software lineup was great.  I own more games for the GC than any other console.

^I did too, until people said I was a retard for thinking that lol....
eh, except animal crossing...I REALLY hated that game.

I think I stated pretty well how much the reviewers influence Wii owners.  If anything, you should be saying reviewers helped sell Mario Galaxy better because of all their 'GOTY' hype and such and you already thinking the game isn't selling well.  I personally feel Wii owners don't take much stock in online reviews much.  If that was the case, more games like Muramasa and Zack and Wiki would be selling.

In the end, I could disect every sequel on the Wii and we could figure out why certain games didn't sell as well and others did.  Its not as cut and dry as Mario Galaxy selling less than expected and all these other games selling better, therefore Mario Galaxy is a failure.  Heck, a bigger shock would be why games like Super Paper Mario and Smash Bros sold better on Wii then their prequels on the more 'core' focused GameCube.

Plus, once again, Mario Galaxy did outsell Mario Sunshine.

I think Rol just likes to predicate his threads with ridiculously false premises. Mario Galaxy a failure? That's laughable. Why even discuss this?

Despite having great art design, music and creativity, the gameplay was repetitive and for the most part very easy. Mario 64 was more challenging, so at the end you had to go from point A to point B to get a star and without much trouble at it.

That made the game boring in some of the first levels and having to play the same level like 4 or 5 times to get all the stars..... I think that's what really turn off a lot of people, who probably thought the rest of the game would be like that. Not because of the first 15-20 minutes, but the first 3 galaxies.

Except for some levels like Good Egg, Space Junk and other, most of the levels I really enjoyed were in the second half of the game.

A friend of mine just played through Galaxy a couple weeks ago, and he was smoking through the levels because he's a seasoned 3-D Mario nerd like the rest of us. His roommate played Galaxy a year ago, and beat the whole game. She sat around and watched him play, and every time he got a star after a few minutes, she got pissed at him and said "What the hell asshole, that one took me half an hour!!!"

So the game is really challenging for some people.

I think the game had a good difficulty. It had a great balance where the parts that were too hard were still fun, and the parts that were too easy were still fun.

I even liked the first cutscene. It was still pretty short, and just a huge epic intro thing to start you off. But then... that rabbit chasing tutorial area was just a horrible moodkiller.

The genius of most Nintendo games is that they're not only fun to play, but they're fun to watch. Spectators will enjoy it, and then maybe consider trying it later, and then maybe buy it. It's not fun to watch people chase rabbits. It's the most boring thing to watch in any Mario game. I think that this intro may have slowed down the usual word of mouth.

You'd be hard pressed to find a series that has iterations on both GC and Wii and didn't sell better on Wii.

Super Smash Bros. Brawl
Mario Kart Wii
Super Mario Galaxy
Mario Party 8
Mario Strikers Charged
Animal Crossing Wii
Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn
Super Paper Mario

Hell, even Resident Evil 4 which isn't even a sequel but a port (with vastly superior controls, admittedly) sold better on Wii.

The only game that sold better on GC that I can think of is Metroid Prime, and that's still just the first one. Corruption did better than Echoes did.

EDIT: Oh, and Twilight Princess on Wii outsold Wind Waker and TP on GC. Not combined, because that's asking a bit much, but not that far from it either.

EDIT 2: Just checked and saw that Mario baseball did better on Wii too.

I agree that there are things Nintendo could have done that would have boosted the sales up over 10 million, but I don't think it's fair to call SMG a 'failure' because of it.

What Nintendo really needed to do, however, was market more effectively to the blue ocean. That means focusing more on the player and demonstrating that the player is having fun, and token motion controls simply do not work well enough for that: you have to go whole-hog. It's a design flaw that sadly has been repeated with NSMBWii, for which I predict similar sales figures.

If you want to market to the blue ocean, you have to not only make the game look fun, but to make the gameplay -what the player is actually doing- look fun. Button-mashing just doesn't cut it.

Well, actually you're right.

Slow start:
True. My girlfriend wouldn't sit through half an hour of intros before playing. On the other hand, SMG is a complex game anyway, and I am glad it is...

Cutscenes:
I don't mind some cutscenes, but in Galaxy they felt tacked on - like the director decided last minute that he had to tell a story (which is pretty much what happened, according to "Iwata asks"). Big settings, dramatic turns - it's all cool and welcome, I like an epic FEEL. But the Rosalina-Luma story was just embarrassingly kitschy.

Still it's one of the best games I've ever played, maybe the best.