It needs to be said, but I want to know how some of you view Mario games and where they started and ended at.
My take- I feel that Nintendo hasn't made a good Mario game since.. 3D world on the 3DS/wiiU and before that.. Mario Galexy and then.. since Paper Mario on the original Wii. those games were in my opinion the best of what Mario has to offer as it was originally intended. Fun, colorful cartoony, and exciteing.
If I had to tell you to play between Paper Mario Wii edition (not Wii U) or New Super Mario Bros Wii. I would suggest Paper Mario for the over all better experience for a Mario game. Granted it's considered a spinoff, it's more colorful and you could tell the devs actually cared about making a good game there.
Super Mario Galaxy and Mario Sunshine are games that make me wonder the following. They chose the water flood gimmick over a real sequal to Super Mario 64 with fixed physics camera, and everything. Then on the Wii, they chose to not make a good Mario 64 sequal there they kept everything small and simplified, and focused on the gimick of the console. Think of how we went from Super Mario bros 1 to 3, and from 3 to world. But that never happened going from the N64 to the Gamecube.
For the longest to time, it's been the spinoffs keeping Mario alive, super smash bros,, Mario Kart.. paper Mario if not for those all we would have right now would be dumped down Mario games like new super Mario bros u or the Mario 3d world (even tho its one of the best, it's not as good as it should be) with no real innovation for Mario or excitment.
If they don't make a real Mario game for next gen, as they did during the N64 erra, Mario will never be good again. Mario Wonder is not a next gen game, they held back all their best, and finally now they make a good looking 2d game. This is what we should had gotten on the Wii U launch.
Edit: the idea of a perfect next gen Mario game would be something that plays like like Super Mario 64 , but then the moving/running and jumping physics of what you get in the new super Mario bros including the wall jumping, and with character models looking more like something you'd see in Super Smash Bros Brawl for the best modern approach for what Mario is suppose to look like graphically. Odyessee, while the graphics are good, i'm not saying they are bad. For a Mario game they are out of place. Lastly as for the camera, the camea should control more freely with the right stick, kinda like how the camera in Rayman 3 would control as a comparison for 3d platformers. Of course my opinion isn't the absolute solution.
I agree that Super Mario 64 particularly hasn't aged, wouldn't it be great if Nintendo made a modern tripple a continuation of a game like Super Mario 64 with a better camera and better controls? They wouldn't even have to call it Super Mario 64 2, call it something else, but make the colors similar, but more next gen to that. Improve the polygon resolution, make the textures better quality. It's really not that hard, it's a game that Mario desperately needs but Nintendo hasn't done properly for the franchise.
I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that the people running Nintendo going form the N64 to the Gamecube had changed but the Mario creator was there (I atleast think he was) to work on Mario Sunshine, I don't get how they went from Super Mario 64 to Sunshine regarding the game mechanics such as the water flood.