From
Category:Crossover Games, we get the following list of crossovers in the broadest sense of the word (boldface ones are currently given full coverage):
Art Style: PiCTOBiTS
Captain Rainbow
Game & Watch Gallery series
Itadaki Street DS and Fortune Street
Mario & Sonic series
Mario Hoops 3-on-3
Mario Kart Arcade GP 1 and 2
Mario Sports Mix
NBA Street V3
SSX on Tour
Super Smash Bros. series
Tetris DS
Wario Blast: Featuring Bomberman!
PiCTOBiTS and
Tetris DS are just puzzle games so there's not really much to cover anyway, so their info being confined to one page seems reasonable. The three non-bold games
are lacking in coverage, and
Densetsu no Stafy is only covered on the
Video game references page and Sta(r)fy's article itself (
Starfy#Densetsu_no_Stafy_series) (and Wario's page (
Wario#Densetsu_no_Stafy_3) mentions it too).
The only reason
NBA Street V3 and
SSX on Tour have game pages is because the
Mario characters are playable, which elevates their appearance above your run-of-the-mill cameos (items, pictures, costumes, name-drops, homages, etc.), hence they're not relegated to the Video Games references page. By the same logic, one could reasonably argue that Wario's role, while non-playable, was still important enough to warrant a page for
Densetsu no Stafy 3 too. However, calling these three games crossovers and giving them full coverage would definitely be going too far.
The way I see it, they're
not crossovers, they're more like... guest appearances. More than cameos, less than integral aspects of the game; enough to argue for full game pages, but not enough to warrant full coverage. Treating these games the same as full-on crossovers like
Mario Hoops 3-on-3, where
Mario material is half the game, would be a huge misuse of our time, effort and server space. Unlike actual crossovers, these games have nothing to do with
Mario besides what little
Mario material has been thrown in. If you take away the
Mario stuff, these games are essentially the same (Starfy could get help from anyone; the sports games can go on without a couple players and a hill or whatever), but you can't take
Mario out of the actual crossovers without seriously crippling the games.
That being said, as far as I can tell (my knowledge of this game being admittedly limited), Birdo
is a major character in
Captain Rainbow, and I believe her absence
would take a decent chunk of plot out with it. Furthermore, the game itself seems to be built like a multi-series crossover platform:
most of the characters are from other series... However, the main characters are original to the game, as is the setting and story and whatnot. Therefore, I wouldn't put it on the same level as
Super Smash Bros., which would be nothing without the crossover series, and which
heavily features
Mario content (a lot more than the somewhat-re-imagined Birdo and some cameos). On the other hand, saying it's the same as
NBA Street V3,
SSX on Tour and
Densetsu no Stafy 3 doesn't feel quite right either, but ultimately, I'd rather have one solid page about
Captain Rainbow, rather than the handfuls of under-tended stubs that would probably result in granting it full coverage. (Most users are not going to know or care enough to write extensively about a Japan-only game that's only tenuously connected to
Mario.) If we clean it up and write about the full plot, and not just the
Mario stuff, I think we could do
Captain Rainbow justice with just the game page.
tl;dr vesrion: There's
cameos, there's
crossovers, and there's in-between "
guest appearances". This last type are games that feature
Mario content (i.e. in large supporting roles or as playable characters), yet are rather removed from the
Mario series itself, and are not centered around their
Mario content. (On the other hand, if you take the
Mario stuff out of a full-on crossover, you're pretty much killing the game.) Also bear in mind the fact that our userbase is probably not going to be able or willing to devote large amounts of time and effort building up pages about games that are only distantly related to
Mario.
