You're judging your chickens before they hatch 
You've seen a 2 minute trailer of 3D world and you're completely writing it off....
No, i've seen 5 entire levels of it and completely writing it off. (The 5 Demo levels shown at best buy and E3)
So... jumping at paintings instead of into stars is a major new thing?
And shooting a water gun is different from fire flower.
K.
I don't consider sunshine to be a platformer, so lumping that with 64, 3d and galaxy isn't correct.
That's like saying Mario Kart was such a new Mario platformer.
How the hell do you not consider Super Mario Sunshine a platformer?? Because he can spray water or something??? The game has every convention of a platformer, you job is to jump around the area getting to different places by jumping and using Fludd to reach the star at the end or kill bosses, Also NINTENDO Calls it a freaking platformer! Just because you don't think it's a platformer doesn't mean it's not a platformer, it's like saying I don't class mario kart as a racing game but a beat em up game. That doesn't make it a beat em up game. It IS A PLATFORMER.
And the MAJOR things to Super Mario 64 and 3D land is the levels themselves...
Take the first level for example, you can go up the bridge, jump up to the left, straight forward. You can gain either Star 1, Star 3, Star 4, Star 5, Star 6 or 100 Coin Star if you pick star 1 in the star option screen. So much freedom. Its a giant open area where you can go wherever you want.
3D land, where can you go in each level? ooh ya, the only possible way to go because there is only 1 possible outcome, the flag post at the end. ya maybe you find a pipe somewhere else as a shortcut but that's all. It's stupidly linear. Take this level, the only possible way to get to the end is to go forward than to the right. bearly any freedom. in the more open level worlds you can explore a tiny bit but the only reward for it is a star medal at the most. Galaxy is pretty much like this but with a gravity Gimmick and 2 options to go, 1 way to go to the normal star and another way by feeding the hungry luma. but once you choose 1 of those 2 options thats all, just straight to the star and that's it. There is bearly any exploration in these games. Super Mario Sunshine on the other hand when you choose 1 star you can either do the 1 star or a different one, but that has exploration due to the scale of the levels, you explore the place and find blue coins scattered around the place, do 100 coin mission find out how to do that star etc.
