I've been hearing a lot from the gaming press and gamers about how NSMBW is sure to surpass the sales of SMG, and perhaps even overtake the 360 SKU of Modern Warfare 2 this year. They talk about it as if its success was assured from the beginning, a foregone conclusion. And first day sales of 500,000 units sure seem to support this prediction.

The same gamers also often lament the fact that Nintendo skimped on presentation, played it safe, instead of giving NSMB Wii the full AAA treatment a Mario game deserves.

Some things are undeniable. Nintendo did skimp on presentation. There's no doubt the game doesn't look as good as it could have. There's no doubt the music could have been new, and orchestral instead of midi. There's no doubt they played it very, very safe.

However, this valid observation is often followed by an asinine explanation: laziness.

Right. Nintendo could have done a better job with the game, it's just no one there felt like it. That makes a whole lot of sense.

On a recent 1up podcast, a guest from Capcom explained that if they are releasing Super Street Fighter 4 on the retail market instead of making the update downloadable content, it's because those things have to be planned from the start, and the people at Capcom weren't sure at the project's onset that the game would be a sales success. With our hindsight and the knowledge that it sold millions, that sounds ridiculous, but the fact is, before SF4 came out, the market for fighting games wasn't exactly thriving. Capcom played it safe with a project it saw as risky.

The point of this tangent is obvious: the sidescroller market on consoles isn't exactly thriving either. I don't know exactly when Nintendo started working on NSMBW, but the fact is, since the beginning of this generation, few sidescrollers have been released with a lot of fanfare on the retail market. Little Big Planet, despite strong and commendable backing from Sony, has been considered somewhat of a flop (Media Molecule has no plan for a sequel), and Wario Land apparently sold 600,000 units worldwide (stronger sales than one perhaps expected, but according to the comments Jeff Kalles, former Associate Producer at Nintendo of America, made on a recent episode of NintendoWorldReport.com's podcast, anything less than a million units is seen as a failure at Nintendo). More recently, A Boy and His Blob flopped in America with fewer than 9,000 units sold in September.

No, the market for sidescroller isn't healthy. And I think we can safely assume that Nintendo is aware of this.

Therefore, isn't it more logical to conclude that if Nintendo "skimped" on presentation, if they didn't try implementing online early enough in the project, if this game isn't all it can be graphics-wise, it has less to do with "laziness", and more with a historically risk-averse company not taking chances with something that was NOT a surefire hit?

Even if it is a Mario game.

Even if on the DS, New Super Mario Bros has thrived. I think we're all aware the Wii and DS markets are significantly different.

Yes, perhaps Nintendo played it too safe. Thankfully, they didn't skimp on good game design or on fun. Let's just hope that with an eventual follow-up, Nintendo will have learned to have more confidence in the power of its mascot, and the genius behind it.