LogFAQs > #906509390

Metalsonic66 posted...

Mario never had a plot. And Mario Kart Double Dash was definitely different from MK64.

CyborgSage00x0 posted...

Complaining about the lack of Mario plot is just silly.

Ehh. To be fair, the original games didn't have a plot because they were released at a time when it was almost impossible to integrate plot into games due to technological limitations. And we as an audience accepted that lack of story because we understood there really wasn't much alternative, and we'd never really seen story-intensive games to contrast it against.

But that was 30+ years ago. Since then, games have evolved, technology has improved, and plot has become integrated into most games to at least some degree. We've grown more sophisticated as an audience, and we tend to expect more out of games than we did in the past. We demand they do better because we've SEEN other games do better.

And to pull out my personal favorite cliche when talking about entertainment media, we live in a time when alternative media options are more prevalent than ever before in the entire history of the human race - there are now more worthwhile media options than any single human being could ever hope to experience even across multiple lifetimes. So we tend to specialize - we expect more from each individual piece of media because it has to EARN our attention. And the entire idea of shared pop culture is slowly becoming obsolete, because the children of today are going to grow up in a world where most people HAVEN'T watched the same things or played the same games as everyone else.

I was willing to dump dozens of hours into a game like Super Mario Bros as a kid because I didn't have all that many alternatives. Today, I barely have enough time to play half the games I want to play (watch movies I want to watch/read books I want to read/etc), a game which doesn't hit all of my major expectations isn't even in consideration. And if that's the reason Wave can't justify playing those games, then it's a perfectly valid expectation.

Though personally, I gave up on the Mario games decades ago because I thought the platforming went to absolute shit since the franchise went 3D. And at this point I'm so far out of practice and old enough for my reflexes to start slowing down a bit, to the point where I derive almost no satisfaction from platformers as a genre at all anymore.


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
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