Hoping this will result in more amazing Mario Mercedes commercials:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HumAWTYh92c

The collectibles in Burnout: Paradise felt much like platforming with a car. It's good to see Mario push this concept further with assistance from Mercedes Benz.

small fun things like these are ok i guess, but putting advertisements in games is far more dangerous then anything boob-related.

I don't see anything wrong with Nintendo getting some corporate sponsors, it gives them much needed extra cash and gives gamers free content but of course in our internet entitledment age someone will still bitch about content being free, the same lame ass idiots who honestly think paying for Hulu or Netflix is somehow better than just letting GM or Proctor and Gamble pay for content and let the networks stream it over the air for free, yeah free is a bad idea, free is evil.

I think there is a place for product placement in games.  NOT advertisements.  I don't want some pop-up ads or commercial breaks or nonsense like that.  There is a difference between that and product placement.

My attitude is that if the character needs to wear shoes, why not make it a real pair of shoes and get some product placement money out of it?  If they need to drive a car, why not make it a Mercedes if they're willing to pay for it?  But the procedure is that you design the setting and the game and the characters as you normally would and then apply some product placement if it fits.  And you don't draw special attention to the product in a way that takes the player out of the game.  With movies for example I don't mind if the characters are driving a Mercedes if it makes sense that their character would drive a car like that (ie: low income person does not have a brand new car) but I get annoyed when the camera blatantly pauses on the logo for two seconds and really pissed off if the characters start talking about the product itself in the conversation.  There is a natural way to do it and a forced one where a glorified commercial has been inserted in.

Pikmin 2 did product placement really well.  You're collecting junk and it is heavily hinted that the planet is actually Earth so why not have some real products?  If anything that makes it feel more authentic to have 7-Up instead of some made up soda brand.

Mario in a Mercedes does seem a little weird since the series doesn't take place in the real world and the vehicles in the Mario world have a cartoony appearance that doesn't gel with real cars.  But Mario Kart 8 and Super Mario Maker don't have any particular narrative to them.  They're just games.  If Link can race with Mario with no explanation or you can turn into the Wii Fit trainer in Mario Maker, what does it really matter?  This is just something silly added on.  But if Super Mario Galaxy 3 had Mario pop by in a Mercedes that would really take me out of the game and make no sense in that context.  I wouldn't like that at all.

But we're always scared of these things getting out of control.  We don't want blatant ads in products we've already paid for.  If any videogame company felt they could get away with charging you $100 for a game that you had to still pay microtransactions to play and with unskippable ads every five minutes, they would.  I have no trust in these companies.  So one day it's Mercedes in Mario Kart and it's kind of amusing in how silly it is but we're worried that tomorrow it will be Samus Aran getting a can of Pepsi from a Chozo statue.  So do we rally against this, which isn't really a big deal, so that we stop Nintendo now before this gets out of hand?  Or do we wait until they do do something we really don't like?

They had coke cans in the Japanese Pac-Man, they had Pizza Hut billboards in the TMNT arcade game, product placement and advertismenets are not inherently bad, the model you described would not fly, but that is now what is happening nor is it what people are describing.

I'm just curious who they think it going to go buy a Mercedes after seeing one of these ads in a Mario game.

...Crap, guess I'd better start saving up now.

Who among us hasn't impulse-bought a luxury sedan now and then?

Well there were rumors back in the 90's how Gran Turismo persuaded a bunch of interest in the cars featured in that game that were previously unknown. Maybe Nintendo is re-branding their low sales numbers into some sort of elitist culture and Mercedes is a part of that re-branding?