Mario Kart however seems to keep on getting better and better. 64 was quirky. Game Cube better graphics but tried to hard to be different. DS was INCREDIBLE and still is the best example of Online Gaming for the DS. Likewise for the Wii version; that plus honestly GREAT motion controls... Wow! The last two Karts have topped each other and nearly everything else. There's a reason I think Nintendo is selling it's Swan Song System Bundle with Kart included, I think. I'm hoping Wii U is going to be a very ROBUST online system and Kart may serve to be the reminder of that until U comes out.
Kart, I'll always try. Smash always has SOME kind of History interwoven into it that I always love to revisit. Will the 3D and the vehicle transformations be enough for Kart, though? I dunno! If the water handling is like Wave Race, maybe! If the Flying is like Pilotwings, sure! Why not? They are already touting it as one of the BEST examples of 3D on the system, so I'll at least HAVE TO give it a look!
I have purchased every mario kart game including portable titles, apart from the dreadful 64 version.
They are great games and if I feel like it, as I often do, I sell them on ebay once I am done. I wasn't intending on getting mario kart 3DS but once you see the trailer in 3D, you want it. It's just fun and it only comes about once every 4 or 5 years.
The Wii renditions of Animal Crossing and Mario Kart were the best versions so far and they did include enough improvements to be worth buying. Mario Kart Wii had new tracks, new karts, an improved graphics engine but most importantly a great 12 player online mode with a dedicated channel that you could install onto your Wii memory. It allowed probably the best online game implementation on the system and it was addictive and a breeze to play matches with people worldwide. The stats and visual depiction of your progress vs your friends on time trials was clever, inventive and fun too. You could also send challenges to your friends.
Animal Crossing Wii has significant improvements over the DS version, on the surface they look the same but the devil is in the detail.
There are many improvements and changes to be found in Animal Crossing: City Folk, but they are all so small that the untrained eye (or overly compressed video) may find them undetectable.
A warning: what follows is an unabashedly detailed list of all the little things I noticed in City Folk that make it different from other Animal Crossing games -- read at your own risk.
For starters, multiple tweaks and upgrades have been made to the game's presentation. At first glance, City Folk looks exactly like its GameCube ancestor, but play them both side-by-side on an HDTV and the differences become painfully clear. In City Folk, textures are much tighter, colors are more vibrant, objects are made from more polygons, and animations are smoother and more plentiful. Most of the improvements are subtle, but some, like the new fruit, fish and bug polygon models, are really striking. For people like me who have always liked Animal Crossing's visual style but found the DS and GameCube entries hard to play due to pixelated textures and wooden animations, City Folk is a huge relief for the eyes.All the same, City Folk's improved looks are just window dressing, and they probably could have been achieved on the GameCube. The new things about City Folk's presentation that are really worth noting have nothing to do with graphics, and everything to do with minutiae. You can now change the camera angle to a worm's-eye-view, so that you can both see objects passing overhead (like UFOs and balloons) as well as items hidden behind stuff in the foreground. You can now take pictures of on-screen events at and save them to your SD card. From there, you can play around with them in the Wii Photo Channel, or just send them off to a friend. The game can be played one-handed, with the Nunchuk or the Wii Remote, with or without motion controls. This last addition is especially nice, as junk food and Animal Crossing were practically made for each other.
I'm not even close to being done.
The catalogs of the fish and bugs you've collected are now fully animated. At the local beauty salon, you can now purchase any of your Mii's faces (which, sadly, isn't half as creepy or Leatherface-inspired as it sounds) to be worn whenever you like. You can still design your own pixel-based texture maps to be used as billboards, flags, grass-replacing ground textures, etc. -- but now, if you're designing them to be used as shirt patterns, you can design the front, back, and sleeves of the shirt as well. You can go to the town hall and complain about other villagers who you think are too sloppy or rude. Walk across the same stretch of grass for a few days in a row, and a dirty path will form in the grass. You can randomly bust in on the Resetti brothers' secret HQ and totally freak them out. The guy who runs the coffee shop with store your gyroids for you if you kiss his ass for long enough. Bees are easier to catch. Fish have more unpredictable AI. The tri-force animation now has a little glow at the end.I could go on, but I won't (for your sake and mine); suffice it to say that there are more changes to the way City Folk plays than you can tell from a few hours (or even a few days) of playtime.
I'm not saying the games couldn't use a good old shake up, because I would love for Animal Crossing to evolve or at least change setting. But there seems to be enough value in the game and just enough difference or improvement to keep on playing.
gamingeek said:... I sell them on ebay once I am done. ...
Maybe that's the difference. I still have them all, so when I need to I can always pop them back in.
Kart will always stay as a "buy once a generation" now due to its online mode. You want to play the game with the online community, then you better buy the latest edition. I suspect Brawl is also headed in that direction (assuming they give it a better online mode next outing).
aspro said:Maybe that's the difference. I still have them all, so when I need to I can always pop them back in.
You should just keep the latest one which is usually the most fully featured. Maybe download the SNES one for nostalgia.
I think compared to other driving games, it's pretty good. I mean in the sense that during the PS2 era they had Burnout 1, Burnout 2, Burnout 3, Burnout Revenge all on PS2. In the same period on GC there was only 1 mario kart game. I think that's what Nintendo do, pretty much with most of their franchises. Occasionally we get 2 marios per gen or 2 zeldas if you count Twilight Princess as a Wii and not a GC port. But I don't think anyone is complaining about more of games of that calibur.
Ultimately with games like Mario Kart and AC, you get the feeling that there is so much wasted potential, in keeping what's familiar and what's good they don't push change enough. There is just enough change to get by. There have been mechanical differences in mario kart like the two player swapping in Double dash and the variety of karts and weights you could use and then the bikes in the wii game and the online game.
I have not even bought it once, and that is unlikely to change.
All the FIFAs and PESs make up for it, though.
Aspro on Smash Bros, I had my fill by the time I rolled into Brawl. I think a sequel could be much better if you could download UCC like in Boom Blox Bash Party and if the level creator was more intuitive. Using the Wii U touchscreen to create stuff should make it better.
I woke up with a start this morning realizing this is an invalid topic of discussion.
There have been 13 GTA games since it was released in 1998, that's one per year. MK and SSB have been released with much less frequency. Then you have FIFA, Madden etc... that get annual versions without much change. So if anyone wants to buy a MK every 3 years that shouldn't be an issue.
There are a lot of games like that, that people tend to forget have nearly yearly installments. There have been 8 Metal Gears in the last 10 years (9 if you count the two versions of MGS3). Nobody ever says there are too many MG games though.
aspro said:I woke up with a start this morning realizing this is an invalid topic of discussion.
There have been 13 GTA games since it was released in 1998, that's one per year. MK and SSB have been released with much less frequency. Then you have FIFA, Madden etc... that get annual versions without much change. So if anyone wants to buy a MK every 3 years that shouldn't be an issue.
It's weird, but Nintendo is the one who usually gets the hate for releasing the "Same" game over and over again. You see it all the time at Gamespot...by certain regulars. It's sort of valid with Animal Crossing. Besides exchanging items online, the Wii version does absolutely nothing better than the GC version. In fact, I kind of preferred the Gamecube original because it had Super Mario Bros, Zelda 1 and Punchout in the game! I bought all three versions of AC and definitely have reservations about purchasing another AC game until Nintendo can show me something different.
Mario Kart, on the other hand, improved dramatically with it's online play and motion controls. My favorite Mario Kart yet! I had a blast with it's online mode.
robio said:There are a lot of games like that, that people tend to forget have nearly yearly installments. There have been 8 Metal Gears in the last 10 years (9 if you count the two versions of MGS3). Nobody ever says there are too many MG games though.
You can't count direct re-releases though. The re-releases have been ridiculous fot that series, agreed, but at least they make no pretense that those are new games.
travo said:It's weird, but Nintendo is the one who usually gets the hate for releasing the "Same" game over and over again. ...
Mario Kart, on the other hand, improved dramatically with it's online play and motion controls. My favorite Mario Kart yet! I had a blast with it's online mode.
I think it may have to do with the amount of time that passes between each one. Since the releases are so anticipated the expectation level may be higher (as I predict it will be for GTA5). No one expect Madden to do something different, because it's just, "this year's Madden".
aspro said:I woke up with a start this morning realizing this is an invalid topic of discussion.
There have been 13 GTA games since it was released in 1998, that's one per year. MK and SSB have been released with much less frequency. Then you have FIFA, Madden etc... that get annual versions without much change. So if anyone wants to buy a MK every 3 years that shouldn't be an issue.
It's a vaild topic, but I think some people when they talk about these games they forget how other companies pimp their games every year, I mean we did have 3 GTA games on PS2 and only one Mario platformer in the same period.
This gen we have:
- Assasins Creed 1
- Assasins Creed 2
- Assasins Creed Brotherhood
- Assasins Creed Revelations
- Assasins Creed Bloodlines PSP
- Assassin's Creed: Altair's Chronicles DS
- Assassin's Creed II: Discovery DS
In the same period we have had:
- Animal Crossing Wild World DS
- Animal Crossing City Folk
So yeah I think perspective is needed, they aren't whoring home console Zelda games out, they take 4 years to make.
If we look at the platforms and not just the franchises, which is fairer: say Mario Kart DS, that came out in November 14, 2005 so by the time the next portale mario kart comes out it will be 6 years later.
If we look at Animal Crossing DS that came out December 2005 so by the time we have a 3DS one (which so far is poised for a 2012 release) it will be 7 years later.
I agree (since it was my point 
) but in the case of the console AssCreeds there was a[pparently a lot of change between 1 and 2 (and since they fixed it they are apparently now stuck on 2.1 2.2 2.3... 
And technically there were 5 GTA games on PS2 (when you count the two that were ported from the PSP).
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Tell me to get back to rewriting this site so it's not horrible on mobile---
Tell me to get back to rewriting this site so it's not horrible on mobile
I never bought one and never will!!! Muahahahha!
I agree about Smash, there were big improvements there.
I bought every Mario Kart game released to date, and I can finally state that I am completely burned out on the series. I am done, at least for a good long while. Same with the Animal Crossing series (FU, City Folk! 
). If I ever return to AC, it'll be the DS version I still own but have no way to play. 
Yodariquo said:I really don't think Smash Bros belongs in there. Melee was a monumental improvement over the original, and it's not as if Brawl stood still, though I wouldn't consider it anywhere near the accomplishment of Melee. And that's it. Three games, with the latter games being incomparable to the first.
To the untrained eye (me) I could not see a difference between the N64 and GC version. And the Wii version was unplayable (but looked the same).
Same for Animal Crossing and Super Smash Bros (specifically these franchise, not Metroid or Mario, which changes each generation).
Up through this generation I made sure to buy every single iteration, (SNES, GBA, N64, GC, DS), but at this point, it's become clear to me that Nintendo doesn't really intend those games for me. They are for people who may have never played the games before (or perhaps have only bought it for 2 generations in a row). As for me, I think SSB maxed out on the GC as AC and Mario Kart did on the DS.
Miyamoto has said as much, when asked about why they bring out the same games over and over with very little change, with his quote about tens of thousands of six year olds being born every day (implying that it's okay to keep doing the same thing, as it will be new to someone).
Well? How many of these have you bought, and are you going to stay on the train through the U and 3DS? Do you need anything new in these games to get you interested, or is it okay to just keep re-treading them with better graphics and a new gimmick or two that gets abandoned the next time out?
EDIT:
I woke up with a start this morning realizing this is an invalid topic of discussion.
There have been 13 GTA games since it was released in 1998, that's one per year. MK and SSB have been released with much less frequency. Then you have FIFA, Madden etc... that get annual versions without much change. So if anyone wants to buy a MK every 3 years that shouldn't be an issue.