Anyone with a soul misses the MM3 Rush Jet. That's one thing I liked about 8; even though you couldn't use it anywhere, the basic mechanics were brought back, and you even had a Rush Jet boss fight.
Loyal fans enjoy more of the same. Especially when it's better through more polish and thought, rather than innovation via different approaches.
Very true. You can only re-invent the wheel so many times, and it's rather naive to assume that an existing approach can't stand another revision. Compares sales of the Mario Galaxies to NSMBWii sometime.
For that matter, how many game franchises are considered peaked at the first entry as opposed to a sequel or two later? MegaMan, Sonic, Mario, Zelda, Metroid. The consensus of "perfection" for a great many franchises tends to be the second or third game in.
Even now MMU has been cancelled and MM PU didn't do overly well.
PU, IMHO, failed because it was a bad remake. It was packed with great features, for sure, but it was marketed as an MM1 remake, yet the actual gameplay feels nothing like MM1. The game is WAY too claustrophobic, more like a GB game. It's also badly balanced; many times Easy is moronic while Normal is positively ball-breaking, with no happy medium (case in point: Yellow Devil). That'll definitely put off the newcomers.
It also probably didn't help public relations when Capcom went Grand-Moff-Tarkin-grip after somebody noticed that the "downloadable" costumes were already on the UMD disc...
MHX was a better remake, at least, and offered a nice balance of fresh content to boot. But nerf the game's primary weapon, and the original trounces you. That's life. I don't know what idiot let a 2-shot Spiral Charge out the door.
As for MMU, it's hard to place that much value on a MM2 remake when the last two Classic games were in themselves heavy MM2 tributes (9 especially). Throwing in a wonky art style while maintaining that same "slide is evil" status quo; the lack of buzz around the game doesn't really surprise me. Still sad to see it go, just not as much as I'd have thought.