Nintendo announced New Super Mario Bros. 2 for 3DS over the weekend, seemingly separate from the recent trademark filing for a “Super Mario Bros. 4”… yet surprising no one, given the insane sales of the original NSMB and its Wii follow-up. As often happens when news of a guaranteed best-seller hits the Internet, social media chatter about the game has been resoundingly negative; Mario fans willing to go to bat for the game or speculate that NSMB2 won’t be a soulless cash grab destined to disgrace the franchise/the platform/the entire concept of video games at large seem almost overwhelmingly outnumbered by cynics convinced it will do all of that and worse. You know how the ancient Mayan calendar ends in 2012? Possibly because the world ends? Yeah. New Super Mario Bros. 2’s fault. Reddit said so.
This negativity makes a certain degree of sense, as web forums and game-centric aggregator sites are dominated by avid gamers who follow the news closely but aren’t necessarily the target audience for the mass-appealing NSMB games. The warm reception originally afforded to the first DS entry has largely been reconned out of existence by people who found the dynamic and inventive Super Mario Galaxy titles more to their liking; they look back and realize that they were simply happy to have classic Mario in any form yet have come to find Galaxy’s fresh new ideas better match their expectations for a Mario game. Add to that the fact that the Galaxy games sell only a fraction of the NSMB titles — disturbing the perpetual chip on the nerd collective’s shoulder — and you have an us-versus-them tempest brewing in a Super Mushroom-shaped teapot.
