Friggin' everything is reboots.I touched on this a little bit the last time I whined about
Sonic 4, but Plinkett pretty much covers it in that review (with some potty words). Movies have to all be super-dumbed-down blockbusters based loosely on things everyone remembers, but only using the few things that everyone remembers about it, because they have to have a huge opening weekend to make money*. When people think
Star Trek, they think "Beam me up Scotty" and Chekov saying "wessel" and Kirk having sex and things blowing up (which is mostly their memory of
Star Wars seeping in). They don't think philosophy, or slow, thoughtful plots, or Q, or anything like that that's more for fans.
This is why
Sonic 4 sucked. There is nothing original in there, other than the stupid un-Sonicy puzzle gameplay in the Labyrinth Zone. They took the blockbuster reboot thing too far.
Nintendo is doing the blockbuster reboot thing too. They need to sell their games to big mass audiences. Part of the reason
Super Paper Mario has such a low rating on Amazon is because it was marketed as a blockbuster reboot when it was really a continuation of the
Paper Mario series that was even more fancrufty than
Thousand-Year Door. People who hadn't played video games in years bought it because they thought it was
Super Mario Bros. with smoother graphics, not a text-heavy action RPG with an unskippable 5-minute intro like its predecessors. This is also, I anticipate, why
Paper Mario 3DS is looking so generic, and why the only partner we've seen so far is a generic Chomp rather than an actual character. They want to sell it to everyone who never played a Mario game between
SMB3 and
NSMBW.
It's not going to work, though. The people that stopped playing video games from 1996 to 2006 stopped for one big reason:
The shift from 2D to 3D is too much for them. They don't want to bother with it. And they certainly don't want to use a controller with so many dang buttons on it.
They came back in 2006 for one big reason:
It's a TV remote that works like an NES controller with a gun trigger and a big round button in the middle. To play the game that comes with it, you don't even use the buttons, you just shake it. That's simple. That's manageable.
This is not manageable. Look at the [darn] thing. It's already got sliders and knobs and dials and lights all over it, and now you wanna add this thing onto it to give it another joystick and two more buttons (for a total of four buttons where I can't even see them)? And they think this is going to win back over the crowd that left when they shifted to 3D with a big three-pronged controller? And they think the way to win back that crowd
is with 3D? Double 3D -- a 3D game with a stereoscopic display.
No. The reboots will fail, and it's gonna be a Gamecube again. The fans will get their fanservice, and there'll be a second 3DS
Paper Mario that has the old Dry Bones design and Goombaloads of fanfic fodder.
*- Complicating this is the way that Hollywood plays stupid accounting tricks to make it look like movies are unprofitable if they need to. The studio will create a separate company to make the movie, which is still entirely controlled and funded by them, and then they'll charge themselves exorbitant amounts for distribution and marketing, so that on paper, the company that made the movie never made a profit, but the actual studio did. David Prowse (the guy in the Darth Vader suit) has never received residuals from Return of the Jedi, because ROTJ, one of the top-grossing films of all time, has officially still not turned a profit. But that's beside the point, mostly.
When was the last time Mario got to use the Super Leaf in a 3D game?
When was the last time Mario got to fight Boom Boom in a 3D game?
When was the last time Mario had to jump onto a flagpole in a 3D game?
When was the last time Mario did that stuff in a 2D game? Boom Boom and the Super Leaf have only been in
one game to date, and flagpoles are only in the original
Super Mario Bros., the lazy sequel to the original
Super Mario Bros., and the two uncreative rehashes of the original
Super Mario Bros.. The point is that before 2005, Mario was always doing new stuff. Now he's riding the nostalgia train.
