Ok, first things first:
http://wii.ign.com/articles/106/1061550p1.htmlThere's your link. Now, in the interest of fairness I would point out that this article was written by Daemon Hatfield, a former IGN Team Nintendo writer who has a known bias against the Wii due to being saddled with reviewing 3rd party shovelware during his time time working Nintendo. He is the fellow best known for his well thought-out argument on IGN Game Scoop after E3 2009 that "the Wii is stupid!"
In the interest of full disclosure, I haven't played 'Splosion Man, as I don't own a 360 and never intend to. Now, that said I can't find much to disagree with when it comes to the merits of NSMBW: it's not a bad game, but it's definitely uninspired and dull unless you have friends along to play multiplayer with you. The game just doesn't start introducing ideas new to a Mario platformer till very late in the game (though, again, to be fair it has the best World 8 and Bowser fight the franchise has ever had). Any game that
requires someone else to play alongside you to
make it fun just doesn't deserve exemplary praise in my books. It's a good game, just not a "great" game.
Let's go over his "evidence":
"Exhibit A: 'Splosion Man is more original" - I can't really disagree with that, based on what I've been reading on it. I will say that 'Splosion Man is a much more limited concept (triggering internal explosions to fling your character off walls and into the air through a gauntlet of death) than Mario, so it had better make the most of it. NSMBW just takes too long to get going and start showing what the designers can really make you do, at least for me.
"Exhibit B: 'Splosion Man does 4-player online Co-op" - Again, you can't really argue with this. It does, and NSMBW does not. You can argue whether it's really a detriment to NSMBW (and I'd say it isn't, really), but that is otherwise a feather in 'Splosion Man's cap.
"Exhibit C: 'Splosion Man offers more content for a fraction of the price" - I think it's disingenuous to compare the two games by pure level count. Maybe 'Splosion Man has shorter levels with less you have to do. I don't know. You also have to look at the quality of the levels themselves.
As for the rest, he essentially whines that more people know about NSMBW than 'Splosion Man, and are biased towards it because Nintendo has a bigger marketing budget than the makers of that XBLA game. While quite probably true, I don't see the point in complaining about it. All Mario games, including the 3D ones, get treated with kid gloves because he's a better known character than those that potentially do more interesting things with the genre. That's just how it is, and it's not going to change...especially on the Nintendo section of the IGN website. So he should shut the hell up.