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The Evolution of Mario
Decaffeinated Jedi writes "NFG Games offers an interesting look at the visual evolution of Nintendo's Mario from his humble beginnings as a monkey-chasing carpenter to his more recent incarnations as a Koopa-stomping plumber. The retrospective doesn't stray into 3D Mario territory, but it does include every 2D version of Mario released between 1981 and 2004 -- including early consoles like the Atari 2600 and Colecovision."
From the article:
The SNES versions of Super Mario Bros 1, 2 and 3 are considered the definitive Marios.
By whom? Heathens perhaps. SMB 1, 2 and 3 were for the NES. The cart for the SNES was the same games just touched up a bit. So surely, the NES versions are the definitive ones...
Quite why he chose not to include Mario 64 and Mario Sunshine, I dunno, but he looks pretty cool in them.
Paraphrasing the article:
When you show them as 80x160 images on VGA resolution monitors, of bloody course they do.
Quoting the article:
Dark colours around the edges. As opposed to his lovely hand-drawn sprites, which have BLACK FRICKIN' OUTLINES. More consistent, perhaps, but not inherently better.
Bleh. Dumb. This isn't the evolution of Mario, this is some kind of retro artist elitism. Not that there's necessarily anything wrong with that, but when you call your article "The Evolution of Mario," it'd be cooler to talk about the changes in his visual style than to flaunt your wicked cool retro-gamerhood. Please. That's, like, all of us.The United States of America: We do what we must because we can.
You want Devil's Advocate? I'd be more interested if it were a PCE pinball game, but okay:
Do some research into who the names behind MvDK. A Kyoto rep was the art director, but check out who was under his direction, compared to those on the art teams for all the Nintendo-produced/-published games in the "Mario game" canon that you cited in the article.
This wouldn't neccessarily lead to the clear conceptual differences, but damn if it doesn't open the door for the possibility.
And "Jumping the Shark?" Please. A JTS point is a point of no return, which in this business is clearly impossible. Game releases within a series or franchise may or may not be episodic, and neither must the art direction of one game build solely (or at all) from the game that immediately preceded it. Basically, you've witnessed that one game can look incredibly different from its predeccessors. And the very next one may look even better than any previous effort; you won't know until it's released. And if that point comes, nobody will feel duped that what they're now looking at, and what they've been looking at all along, is a hand-drawn character named Mario. JTS just can't happen under those circumstances.