Mario Baseball

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Why can't they stop putting Mario in every general-genre game that they make?

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Because they fucking suck. Jeez, what more will it take for you people to realize this?

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Originally Posted by Johnny Undaunted

That was Irem's, not Nintendo's.

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Yep... for internally developed NES sports games there were...

-Excitebike (1985)
-Baseball (1985)
-Golf (1985)
-Tennis (1985)
-Pro Wrestling (1987)
-Soccer (1987)
-Volleyball (1987)
-Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! (1987)
-Ice Hockey (1988)
-NES Play Action Football (1990)
-NES Open Tournament Golf (1991)

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Originally Posted by jarrod

-Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! (1987)

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Nintendo needs to stop with the Mario spinoff's and immediately start work on a new Punch-Out.

Be careful what you wish for, you'll probably end up with Mario Boxing.

Though, come to think of it, the ability to beat the tar out of Mario is something I could get behind.

It's odd to see Nintendo go in the direction of a major sports line now... they usually take the less popular sports. Golf, Tennis, Pinball...

I was thinking that Mario Bowling would be next, I could actually see that one working and seeing it be awesome, since there's no bowling games out there at all.

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Originally Posted by NeoZeedeater

What pisses me off is that most of these aren't even Nintendo's original internal teams. If Nintendo could previously crank out a bunch of new games without these outside/new developers why can't they do it now?

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Sure... I think a large part of it is due to development becoming so much more complicated though. In the NES days RD1 could have a 4-5 man team make a game in a few months, today a new Metroid or Wario Ware will take four times the staff three times as long. And that's for relatively cheap GBA development, console games are exponentially more resource hungry. Less risks are taken when so much more is at stake, console games can't be profitable by selling just a few thousand units these days.

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Originally Posted by NeoZeedeater

I'm not saying these aren't new Nintendo properties or arguing their quality but it seems odd that Nintendo old teams alone used to be able to do so much. In the 8/16-bit era only a few Nintendo games were done by outside developers like Rare. Now the majority of their games are.

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Well, that's not entirely true. Nintendo was pretty cozy with Technos, IREM, DMA, Rare, Bandai, Maxis, BPS, Argonaut, HAL (pre-investment), Jupiter and quite a few other developers in those days too, not to mention they regularly distributed games for companies like Capcom, Square, Hudson or Enix in foreign markets often. Nintendo's always spread development, in fact their current developer philosphies seems closer to their NES roots than the N64 2nd party dependant days in a lot of ways.

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Less risks are taken when so much more is at stake, console games can't be profitable by selling just a few thousand units these days.

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You say that, and I hear you, but why are exciting, innovative, edgy games coming out from so many companies not named Nintendo?

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Originally Posted by diffusionx

You say that, and I hear you, but why are exciting, innovative, edgy games coming out from so many companies not named Nintendo?

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They are? Where?

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Originally Posted by jarrod

Sure... I think a large part of it is due to development becoming so much more complicated though. In the NES days RD1 could have a 4-5 man team make a game in a few months, today a new Metroid or Wario Ware will take four times the staff three times as long. And that's for relatively cheap GBA development, console games are exponentially more resource hungry. Less risks are taken when so much more is at stake, console games can't be profitable by selling just a few thousand units these days.

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That's what I figured but then again other developers like Sega(until they left hardware) managed to maintain consistent quantity over the generations so it makes me wonder if there's more to it than that. I mean, Nintendo used to always have something huge and completely new for their system launches but now it never seems like they have anything ready.

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Well, that's not entirely true. Nintendo was pretty cozy with Technos, IREM, DMA, Rare, Bandai, Maxis, BPS, Argonaut, HAL (pre-investment), Jupiter and quite a few other developers in those days too,

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Those were still the exceptions. Nintendo-developed stuff definitely outnumbered those games. Today it seems like every Mario spin off is given off to some new developer.

"They are? Where?"

Exactly. Remember that he doesn't actually play the games he refers to. Pulled this with RnC 3 and others the other day.

Come to think of it, the games he plays now are Warcraft *3* and a crap MMORPG. Really edgy and innovative stuff there.