As you can see by my avatar, I'm not exactly a Nintendo hater. (Besides the fact that I've just been lazy and haven't changed it back since the build to the Revolution unveiling.) Still, though, there was an era on not just Gamecube, but GBA as well, where they seemed to really just phone it in and acted like not a drop of effort was needed past console launch, and in some respects not even before that.
Sunshine was one of the best examples of such a game. No, it wasn't a bad game, the core gameplay was decent and an improvement in several respects over Mario 64. But so many aspects of it could've and should've been better.
Graphically the game was hurting, and really shouldn't have been. Stop screaming "GRAPHICS DON'T MATTER" for a sec, and realize if there's no real reason for the trade-off, why make it in the first place? When you compare Mario 64 and Sunshine, yes, then you can see the contrasted improvements. But to look at Sunshine by itself betrays not only the boxy N64 design roots, but also just some very weak work. Signs blurred to bits, textures just... bleaugh. One of the prettiest areas, Sirena Beach I think it's called, is also one of the most restricted, because you spend almost every mission past the first two running into that stupid hotel and playing Ghostbuster again and again. What's more puzzling is to compare the current stuff to very early shots and materials, which show a completely different, more interesting hub style. Kind of flowing like a Sonic Adventure title, and I think the sludge looked better, too. But most painfully, for as long a time they spent working on the title, they showed it at E3 with 60FPS, but said they were having trouble holding it in the later levels, so when actual release comes around, it's revealed they've chopped it to 30FPS, and it STILL slows down. (Possibly because of the way the water/reflections are coded.) So it's quite possible the early graphical design got pushed back to make way for a better framerate, and then the framerate got cut anyway. And I still can't get over them using pre-rendered, compressed movies for cut-scenes that look like they could've been done in real-time, and yet forgetting to even just patch a hole in Mario's neck when he looks down in the _ending_ movie.
Gameplay... yeah, it was good, and I did like the hover/boost function of the jetpack, but some areas were awkward and unclear to navigate, and the fidgetty camera system that rebounded between being dumb (acceptable) and "intelligent" (fighting you for no reason) didn't make it any easier to figure out the routes through some of the unclear areas. I especially loved the silhouette system for when you were behind walls because of it, which showed Mario clearly, and absolutely everything else with a "?", even the Yoshi you might be riding. Many of the area mechanics or challenges consisted of knocking you off something uncontrollably and agitating or killing you (the wind Boos and bee hives, for example), either one requiring you to repeat a segment until you got your counter-attack/avoid timing right. And so many people cite the retro/blocky levels as great, but while I liked some aspects of them, not only did they have the exact same problem everyone picks on the recent Sonic titles for (being suspended over pits), but many of the mechanics and challenges weren't about you besting the area so much as knowing Mario's limits before he did something you didn't want him to do. My particular favorite is having to walk up a tilting object, to the point whether you could either walk over the rim and be walking on another face, or jump and make the transition. Guess wrong either way, and Mario slides off to death 99.9% of the time.
And it seems like they cut out or ignored things significantly. Years and years after the screaming about no Luigi in Mario 64, and they STILL manage to leave him out? A rather unimpressive one-stage Bowser fight? Maybe the latter ties to a big secret they kept bragging about at first, but then shut up about. Someone here said that the interview was later said to be pointing to the Shine Shirt, but I don't know about that. I've already pointed out that book hidden in the bottom of the Noki Bay stage in a structure designed to be walked through, and they played up in the game that something was wrong with Gadd. (That maybe he's creating situations to test his inventions? I don't know. But Gadd supposedly gave Bowser Jr. his gear, and the way they portrayed it didn't sound like he was forced.)
Mario Kart: Double Dash is also a decent example. Graphically eh in spots (although some of the distance focus effects were interesting), pretty weak music and stage design for many tracks, and above all else, screaming for online by the fans, the perfect time to do it, they go so far as to add in LAN play over the modems, but they refuse online play? Not even a matching service for people willing to otherwise play server. (And the modem situation itself was a mess, their promise to start production on them as soon as a game needed them, then still refusing when Sonic Team kept saying, "Look! PSO, ready to go! Just as soon as you start making 'em!") Even the menus were just... odd. Why did it always exit out to the title screen, instead of the main menu?
To add to that, four years without a single proper original Mario title on the GBA, not even on the level of the Super Mario Land titles, was quite a bit insulting. The port efforts should've been an accessory to original development, not a replacement. It was nice that SMA3 and 4 got added levels, but 4 didn't even have a big chunk of them released, it's impossible to get all the rewards in the game normally simply because there's not enough levels to earn the required Ace coins! All because of the e-Reader, but let's not get into THAT little pleasant peripheral. (I.E. Nintendo's name for "Microtransactions.")
But what really ticked me off is that they kept farming out their core franchises or turning in simplistic ports. I know they WERE tooling away at some big titles, like Wind Waker, but Nintendo is too large to be completely ground to a halt by one core title. Meanwhile, both their console and portable licenses were being filled by Flagship, Hudson, HAL, Namco, Sega, Alphadream, and others, while they still put out virtually no new licenses, and made titles to their existing series at an incredibly slow rate. Yeah, there's Pikmin II, Paper Mario 2 and a few other scattered gems, but even given the exponential difference in dev effort required since the N64 or SNES eras, their production speed seemed to grind to a halt. Maybe because they were assisting with other titles and their farmed-out ones closely, but their own production really suffered because of it, and if they were so distrustful about the result of their farmed-out licenses, maybe they shouldn't have farmed some of them out. I know hindsight is all too clear sometimes and they may not have realized it would take so much touch-up work to put the farm-outs on the level they'd like, but there just seemed to be so little pay-off for it.
I don't know, this isn't the most organized collection of thoughts on the matter. But either way, I feel like the DS is... wow, just a breath of fresh air after the generally stale GCN and GBA period. I mean, damn, in a relatively short time, we're getting TWO different Mario-style platformers. The concept is so shocking that the working title for one has been "New Super Mario Bros." for a long time now. Mario Kart? It's online. An Animal Crossing that fixes every problem with the GCN one, and is online too... damn, that's just beautiful. I would've bought the console even if that was the single only game ever released for it. And 3rd parties are following along with excellent titles of their own, like Castlevania: DoS, Sonic Rush, and Viewtiful Joe Scratch.
I want to see Nintendo what they're doing now on the DS on the Revolution; obviously different in terms of gameplay/interaction, but developing lots of fan-favorite projects that make proper sequels of existing licenses, not spin-offs or awkward gimmicks changing the gameplay too radically, but logical sequels and extensions, along with smartly-designed new licenses, like Another Code/Trace Memory. Games coming out more often that seem like real effort was put into them to make them optimal, not "Oh, let's push out a new Mario Kart. Miyamoto can diddle around for 20 years with Mario 128 "tests", but it seems like he wants to do something completely new, not make a Mario sequel, so hand the Mario sequel off to a dev group that can be trusted with it, like HAL or possibly Alphadream (I don't know how their polywork is, but M&L was spectacular, and M&L2 looks similarly excellent), and let Miyamoto design something new with his ideas, without worrying about how to tie it to Mario. The controller interface for the Rev will indeed make things tricky, but he's been talking about Mario 128 experiments for years (even saying E3 2004 that he wasn't sure which platform it would be on, Rev, GCN, or DS!), and he was probably person 1 to know about the new Rev control interface, heck, he probably helped design it in part. So if he's still mulling over how he should make a Mario title with it, making it sound like he's going to pull another Sunshine on us with a water pack or some other sort of gameplay-altering feature that takes away from it being a "Mario" title (he's gone so far to directly say that it could even be a Sunshine II, he isn't sure), I really think he should focus his creative efforts on something different and new, akin to Pikmin.
Like I said, I'm not a Nintendo hater. I'm just so frustrated that a console like the PS2 offered up some prime gaming goodness, both classic and new (I mean, platformers alone, by dev groups close to Sony, include at least three Jaks, three Ratchet & Clanks (four if you count the most recent one as being in the same style), and three Sly Cooper titles. Nintendo pushed out one Mario platformer that underwhelmed in many respects. Give me the games and I'm happy, but for a long time, Nintendo wasn't giving up the games they got famous for, just these weird half-efforts often tethered to some game-changing gimmick. Mario was cleaning sludge off walls, Samus was in first-person and really focusing on her shooting, Mario Kart was quite obsessed with having two chattery item boxes per funny car, and Starfox kept wanting to walk everywhere. (Actually, I shouldn't even name that, since one was a forced conversion of Dino Planet by Rare at Nintendo's request, the other a farmed-out effort to Namco. But I figured if I even came close to mentioning the forced Zelda graphical style change, I'd be harmed by the defensive mobs.) But man do I love what they're doing with the DS, and I want them to keep it up as long as they can manage it. When I saw a picture of a Doom Ship stage in the new Mario Kart DS, I knew things were right with Nintendo again.
