All I can say for this is that I am really dissapointed in Legend of Zelda was beaten by Madden. Becase I think its is a better game. Also with the release of Phantom Hourglass this week I would like to check out the new stats for that.
Ont he subject of Pokemon over Mario, Most people think that they all hate Pokemon because it has been "labeled" as childish, but you can be sure they have at least one piece of pokemon memoribillia (sp?). But I think Mario will still go strong, since the characters are very verstile by making games from everything to from Sport to games were your main method of attack is pretty much using a water pistol. But I think that the Pokemon games aren't just pulling in enough new fans. This is because the one thing I think that made Pokemon special back in the day was that it did have a television show that sort of went along with the story lines in the game. But as you can see now days nearly every game has a TV or movie to back it up. This might be different for you people in the US. But I grew up in a small country town in the middle of Australia where we only got our shot of anime in the mornings and the only good thing on was Pokemon. So it steadily became a craze in our town with little competition because of our "isolation" from the rest of the world.
But I do think if pokemon had a new idea that had never been done before there would just be a giant explosion of fans waiting to buy the game.