So for years, Nintendo has always been the butt of the joke. If you don’t remember, maybe this advertisement will jog your memory:

ohhh nostalgia :)

Nintendo has always set a benchmark that other companies have striven to beat.  Some may argue that with the Wii’s massive amount of shovelware that the competition has them beaten outright, but of three major home consoles they always seem to have games in the top ten every month and the Nintendo DS looking to be the best selling console of all time.  Read and watch more after the jump.

Well, once again Nintendo seems to be in the crosshairs again, as Activision’s Blur and the PS3’s PlayStation Move peripheral taking aim at the top dog company.

Of course, you may have seen this commercial already on TV, when I first saw this, I was on the floor laughing.  Nintendo invented the Kart racing genre back in 1991 with Super Mario Kart on the SNES.  The game was simplistic in design and took full advantage of the SNES’s Mode 7 graphic effects.

Woo-hoo! Mario #1!

Yeah, we’ve seen them all over the years.  Millions of kart racing games would come out over the years, all with licensed characters including Star Wars, LEGO, Nicktoons, Cartoon Network, Crash Bandicoot and most recently SEGA.  Essentially, Activision is trying to incite that all of these games (including it’s originator) are “kiddy” and trying to get you to “grow up” and play Blur.  I played the multiplayer demo but wasn’t blown away by it.  To me, it felt like a Need for Speed game with WipeOut weapons, and completely unoriginal.  But this is what advertising is about, trying to give the consumer incentive to buy the product.  Part of what makes a kart racer so fun is the exotic locales of the tracks.  Sony’s ModNation Racers seems to have gotten that feeling down perfectly.  Sony isn’t without taking a stab at Nintendo though with this recent video from Sony’s ever-changing VP of “insert department here” Kevin Butler.

Of course, this isn’t the first time a Sony “mascot” has mocked Nintendo.  You may also recall Crash Bandicoot doing a similar job back in the 1990’s.  And Sony, via Squaresoft, took another jab at Big N when the Final Fantasy franchise made the jump from the SNES to the PlayStation with Final Fantasy VII back in 1997.

Since then, a lot of these little marketing stunts have blown over, most of them fondly remembered by gamers.  Final Fantasy, Sonic and Crash Bandicoot have all made their way onto a Nintendo console.  The question now is, how long before Mario is seen drifting through the streets of San Fransisco in a Toyota Corolla or Kevin Butler in his Nintendo debut “Wii VP” (due out on the Wii2 in 2016)?  See more mockery and another thought on this subject on kotaku.com