It's not New, not in 2020 - and it's certainly not Super Mario Bros. either.
If the original New Super Mario Bros. was a game that venerated the legacy preceding it, if sometimes to a fault, Wii was the game that threw out that legacy in order to tack on a multiplayer mode that ultimately feels ill-fitting.
I've read that the NSMB games from this point onwards were treated as learn-as-you-go training projects within Nintendo for new hires to get familiarized to Nintendo's internal development tools and game development in general - I don't doubt that.
But more importantly, I feel that Wii was a party game first and platformer second. Traditional Mario platforming level design takes a back seat for gimmicks that often keep the players together, almost as if playing a Mario Party minigame: rotating platforms that travel along a fixed path, rising lava and lifts, bone coasters, autoscrollers and more.
Between all that, and the Propeller Suit - its primary function being to compensate for the hectic multiplayer, being overtuned in single player - Wii ends up being a very unappealing platformer to play alone.
Maybe the people who loved it played it with friends.
It's still decent at absolute worst for platformer standards, either way, but not much better than that.
If the original New Super Mario Bros. was a game that venerated the legacy preceding it, if sometimes to a fault, Wii was the game that threw out that legacy in order to tack on a multiplayer mode that ultimately feels ill-fitting.
I've read that the NSMB games from this point onwards were treated as learn-as-you-go training projects within Nintendo for new hires to get familiarized to Nintendo's internal development tools and game development in general - I don't doubt that.
But more importantly, I feel that Wii was a party game first and platformer second. Traditional Mario platforming level design takes a back seat for gimmicks that often keep the players together, almost as if playing a Mario Party minigame: rotating platforms that travel along a fixed path, rising lava and lifts, bone coasters, autoscrollers and more.
Between all that, and the Propeller Suit - its primary function being to compensate for the hectic multiplayer, being overtuned in single player - Wii ends up being a very unappealing platformer to play alone.
Maybe the people who loved it played it with friends.
It's still decent at absolute worst for platformer standards, either way, but not much better than that.