No more Mascots?

[Mirage]

It seems the days of Mascot games are numbered. Sony had Crash Bandicoot for a while, but let's face it, nobody ever played those and liked them.

Then there is XBOX, who as far as I can tell does not have any sort of Mascot. The closest XBOX has to a mascot is Master Chief.

Does anybody else want to see more mascot based games?

 

[Major]

There are tons of games/characters that could qualify as mascots. It's all dependent on how they're advertised.

 

[RossDude]

Official mascot games seem to be few and far between. I'm sick of all these Mario spinoff games. Give me a real Mario game where I don't just run around a beach. The Metroid series has made a good comeback this generation, but it practically didn't even exist back in the N64 days. Nintendo seems to be the only company that still shows off their mascots in abudance, but that's not necessarily a good thing.

 

[Mirage]

That's true. Games like Mario Golf and such are pointless. They can be fun, but they are automatically second to the real mascot games, like Mario 64, Mario Sunshine, etc, where the game follows the story behind the character.

Mario Kart was one game that I think did a great job of breaking the "bad mascot game" mold. It's a classic and focuses on several Nintendo mascots. Mario Party was similar, but got old after too many.

Sonic was great as well, but I haven't played a Sonic game since Genesis.

Nowaday's it seems that any exclusive game automatically becomes a "mascot" game for any given console. Like I mentioned before, Master Chief is a huge XBOX draw, and Final Fantasy for PlayStation.

But like Ross said, if we start to see Master Chief baseball... and Halo Kart... suddenly too much becomes a very bad thing.

 

[Gamechamp]

Actually, Crash Bandicoot had plenty of fans a while ago, including me. Then, Naughty Dog stopped making the games and someone else did, and pretty much every one since then has... well, just plain sucked. But I'm still a big fan of the originals.

 

[Absolute]

Beach Conspiracy

Give me a real Mario game where I don't just run around a beach.

Yeah.. and thinking back, when Sonic for Dreamcast came out, you also started the game off on a beach.. and it was a horrible game that pretty much took the controller out of your hands. Didn't wind-waker have a beach thing going on too? It's almost like producers these days think pretty water and visuals is the key to making a next gen game.

 

[RossDude]

It wasn't the beach itself that bothered me, it was that the whole game took place on it. Those visuals get a little repetitive. Mario 64 had all sorts of different areas - snow, lava, caves, mountains, grassy fields, a haunted house and more. Going from everything that Mario 64 brought to the table, to Mario Sunshine, it was kind of a let down.

On the subject of Sonic Adventure, yeah the first level starts you off on a beach, but that was to be expected. All Sonic games start off with some beautiful level like that. Also, while I do agree that too much of the game was done for you (the loops and everything), it was still fun. I wish they'd make a real Sonic game where all the levels are like that (but not in the stupid way they did it with Shadow the Hedgehog).

Lastly, Wind Waker wasn't going for pretty visuals. Most people disliked the graphics of the game. While I do think that the game did have incredible graphics at some points (that first dungeon, with all the fire and lava is amazing), they're actually pretty bland. I don't think the graphics were bad, I thought they worked well with the sailing aspect, but I think the game would've been more enthralling with realistic graphics.