This would have been a great game to add online co-op to. Asking me to pay $60 again for a good but not great Mario 2D platformer is a bit meh.

Meh. No one cared about this game when it was the big headliner early-years Wii U game, and I can't say I care about it now.  3D World was the one people actually wanted brought over.

New Super Luigi U is the best 2D Mario game ever made, and I'm happy it's going to be available on a console people actually bought.

Was it too much for me to wish for the two 3DS NSMB games to be included as a series collection?

I would only bought this if it included all the New Super Mario Bros. games. I wonder if Nintendo tries to sell this for $60.

I worry that the "Deluxe" moniker means yes.

They explicitly said they were adding Luigi U "free of charge" so hell yeah they're charging $60 for it and you should be thankful it's not $80.

Honestly by now it's not too much to ask for a new game in the series.

Is Peachette an abomination? discuss

There's only one 3DS game and that is NSMB2. NSMB is a DS game.

Honestly, NSLU is the only reason I'd recommend anyone to pick this up because it is great but it relies on a lot of the NSMBU assets which brings down the amount of enthusiasm I have about this game. It is the real reward for having to play through NSMBU which took way too long to become an entertaining game and really emphasized how stale that series was becoming.

NSMB U has the 2nd best level design in the entire 2D Mario series, with only Luigi U surpassing it.  Plus what's this about not getting good until too long?  The challenge picks up sooner in NSMB U then any 2D Mario since Bros 3 with only Luigi U surpassing it again.

Yes the artstyle can be considered stale since Nintendo carried over many of the same themes and settings from the previous NSMB games but the level design in NSMB U blows the previous games out of the water.  It's basically NSMB Wii on steroids and expands on many of gimicks and level idea's that game used and goes crazy with them.  Plus the Challenge mode was amazingly crafted for hardcore Mario players if they want to go for the Gold medal on each mission.

This is why I'm glad Nintendo has decided to port it since NSMBU and Luigi together make the ultimate 2D Mario experience and more people need to play them.

I've talked about it before in my Run the Series threads, specifically the first one on 2D Marios. Looking back at that thread, I see you had NSMBU and Luigi U up there in the 2 and 3 spots of your personal rankings. For me, NSMBU was 6 while Luigi U was 3. I gave my reasons for NSMBU there but I'll reiterate them here:

#6. New Super Mario Bros. U - I realized one day that I had 3 Mario games I hadn't even played in my collection which would have seemed unfathomable to my young self who would have wanted to play any new Mario game he could. The games were Galaxy 2, NSMBU and Mario 3D World. I went with Galaxy 2 expecting to dislike it the most since I've long been on record of not liking Galaxy 1. Turns out I was wrong about that and Galaxy 2 might be the best Mario game I've played since Sunshine. Anyways, I followed that up with NSMBU so maybe that has a factor of why I'm not as positive as other users on this game.

When I first opened and started playing this game, my cousin was visiting with me so we played through the first world and some other levels together. As I was playing it, I was locating star coins or hidden blocks like those beside walls at the door to a castle boss. My cousin couldn't figure out how I knew where to look and find these things when I was playing this for the first time. Thinking about, I just knew what to do from having played all the NSMB games and other Mario games up to this point. You've just long been trained on this stuff as a player. Yet, the more I played the game after he left, the more it stuck with me because I just wasn't finding the game super fun and was wondering if it was because of all the other Mario games I'd played up to this point. Was the series just too repetitive now? Was Nintendo too stuck in sticking to fans expectations? Could they change things up or would that be rejected? That was my headspace through the first 4 worlds.

Finally, in World 5, when I encountered a sort of repeat to the Forest of Illusion from SMW, I discovered the secret level through the Ghost House to the Parabeetle level and the game suddenly started opening up again in fun and challenge. There was the strange Van Gogh art level right after and I began to enjoy the game a lot. It definitely had a lot of hard secret exits and I ended up having to use a guide to find them which I hadn't done for a Mario game in a long time. Not sure if that's a good thing but it just seems to symbolize the unevenness this game had for me of being half blah and half really fun. It's just a shame it took so long to reach the fun point. I think SMW still has a better cohesive and put together overworld but it was nice to see that return ever so briefly in this game. But after this game, I also share the opinion that it is time to put the "NSMB" series to rest especially when the DLC expansion pack manages to outrank the main game.

Before Miiverse died, I remember RABicle posted on there about NSMBU and he was around the 2nd or 3rd World and talked about how he really wasn't feeling the game. He was kind of bored by it. I replied to his message and said I had felt the same and it took about halfway into World 5 for me to warm up to the game. I feel like there was another person who had a similar take about the first part of NSMBU as well but can't think of who that might have been or if my brain is coming up with a false memory.

Unless New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe is $30, I’d have trouble defending this as a deluxe package compared to Mario Kart 8 Deluxe and Hyrule Warriors: Definitive Edition. Those re-releases included all DLC in addition to some other, mostly minor additions (Battle Mode in the former is awesome and most definitely not minor). Nintendo already released a New Super Mario Bros. U/New Super Luigi U bundle on Wii U. The additions of Peachette and Nabbit aren’t enough to double-dip.

I’m glad people who missed these games on Wii U have another chance to play them, but this is a hard pass for me. Had it included remasters of the other games, this would have been an easy buy. Oh well.

While I think this is the best NSMB game, especially when NSLU is included, I have no reason to buy this again. If they added online play then I would be tempted. The whole Toadette thing feels like their way of adding Peach as playable without changing the "story."

Remember when we got something awesome like Super Mario All-Stars? Pepperidge Farm remembers.

I can somewhat understand not including the handheld titles, but the Wii one should have been added at the least. Guess I can hope for a legacy bundle of the DS/3DS/Wii games down the road.

I've also put on hold any intention of purchasing old Wii U games, because I have a feeling everything Nintendo published (and probably a number of non-Nintendo published) games will be ported to Switch by the end of the systems life.