I hope to god that the new sonic remake goes back to the sonic 2 and sonic & knuckles days, those were some fun times...oh and sonic's boss battles were always better than the lame mario bowser boss battles...the princess is in another castle ?whattttttttttt....smh

Nothing is timeless, especially in pop culture and one day Mario will have to hang up his suspenders for good.

I don't think the franchise will ever die though.

If we talk about quality gaming (my opinion): the 2d Mario games are cheap knock offs of the 8 and 16 bit era. Which are much better games.

3d Mario on the other hand are much better, and I would compare Ratchet and Clank to 3d Mario over Little Big Planet.

Though anyone who says Ratchet and Clank isn't a quality series is just a Nintendo fanboy. It's not my type of game but for a series that has been around 17 years less than Mario and never been bundled with a console it is doing very well for itself.

I still believe that if Microsoft wants to be a true contender on all fronts, they need a mascot, and Banjo is the best they got. Now that Peter Molyneux is the head of Rare, he could get them to make a quality Banjo Kazooie, or MS could outsource it to another studio since Rare is first party.

All I'm saying is that not even trying to compete with Mario is just retarded, and a quality Banjo Kazooie gamer is the best chance to build a mascot that MS have.

i just mean are there any clones. every1 says clones come into existence but none have this gen

I think they have a mario killer with little big planet. It's just a matter of time.

It depends on who makes mistakes, and who can do things right.

Laughing. My. Ass. Off.

No....LBP isn't even in the same LEAGUE as Super Mario Galaxy. To suggest so arguably takes a serious hit on your credibility.

How the hell are they even being compared? LBP is a 2D style platformer, and Mario Galaxy is a 3D Mario game! Now, on the other hand, I can easily see LBP competing directly with 2D Marios in terms of quality.

I think LBP was supposed to be a game that would appeal to people who like Mario. bviously it didn't kill anything, but it did pretty well. I think MS was hoping for Banjo to be something that competed in the HQ family friendly gaming arena, but it tanked for sales.

If Sony or MS wanted to make a Mario killer, they'd have to go back in time to when the NES came out, release a console, and put the character in 5 games per year on average.
Nostalgia is what makes Mario such a huge pop icon.

Master Chief is close, but he doesn't have the personality or exposure or likability. Sony doesn't really have anything. They had Crash and Spyro, which were perfect rivals, but then they completely abandoned them. Snake is even less well known than Master Chief, and Sackboy is still too new to have any kind of impact.

The only other character(s) that Sony could potentially say are mascots, are Ratchet and Clank, but they don't have the versatility of Mario.

On top of that, Mario is only the most famous Nintendo Icon. After that, you still have Link, (whom everyone calls Zelda due to bad marketing decisions), Pikachu, Donkey Kong, and Samus.

Masterchief is probably a bit more famous than Samus, and Ratchet and Clank/Snake are behind all of them pretty much.

Yea, I also bet that nostalgia was what made him huge in the first place....