Alright so let's begin with the last of E3's press conferences. Nintendo began with a really cool Zelda trailer that was accompanied by a live orchestra. Even though I'm not a huge Zelda fan, I rather enjoyed the montage. The Miyamoto came out and spoke about Zelda's 25th anniversary. Instead of doing a game release like they did with Mario, they chose to do something special on the systems.
Link's Awakening will be made available on the 3DS store. On the DSi, Four Swords Adventure will be released for free. Ocarina of Time is in a few weeks, then of course there's Skyward Sword which they say will be coming to Wii (perhaps a smart move now) this holiday season. There will also be orchestral concerts around the US, Europe, and Japan highlighting all of Zelda's great music. Along with this they announced two soundtracks for the game.
That was about the end of the cool stuff in the press conference. Iwata came out and teased everyone about Cafe and then left. Reggie came out and talked a lot about 3DS. They showed off a lot of games we already knew about such as Mario Kart and Kid Icarus. There were a few new titles though. Mario 3D looks really cool and the announcement was Luigi's Mansion 2 was rather nice. Aside from that there wasn't much else to say about the 3DS. There was some boring announcement about a 3D Pokedex that no one wants and so on.
The big reveal of Cafe had everyone pretty hyped up. The problem then came when Reggie revealed the name to be "Wii U". You could practically hear the groans across the internet. Nintendo proceeded to spend a lot of time on the controller and how it can be used while someone else watches the TV and so on. It looked kind of cool, but we were all wondering where the actual console was, along with its games. Turns out they didn't want to show either. We got a really quick look at Zelda running on it (though it looked a lot like Twilight Princess) and a new Super Mario Bros. game.
In the end it turned out everyone had very little to show. They confirmed a new Smash Bros game, but they had no trailer which makes the announcement useless. We know there's going to be a Smash Bros game on the Wii U because there's been one on every Nintendo system since the N64. The only reason they should come out and say something without a trailer is if they planned on skipping a generation or something.
EA came out and made some vague comments about Nintendo's online system, and then left. Um... okay. They then played a sizzle reel comprised of third party games. This was both good and bad. The good was Darksiders 2 being a launch title, Colonial Marines getting shown, and the announcement of Ninja Gaiden 3. The bad was all of the other third party games that aren't new. Games like Arkham City that are getting ported to the Wii U will be six months old by the time they come out for Nintendo. What's the point then?
Overall their presentation was confusing. Maybe a live demo would have helped cleared things up, but the purpose of the controller seemed gimmicky yet again. Where is the whole "recapturing the hardcore" thing? Yeah, the got a few third party titles on their system, but most of them we've heard of already and are already coming to other systems that have a set install base. Where's the online system everyone wants? The list goes on and on. For a company who promised to cater to the hardcore audience with the new system, they failed pretty hard.
While I enjoy the idea of new hardware, I expected more of the reveal to tell me why I should own the system. All this did was tell me it existed, which I already knew from all the leaks. I'm currently more excited for the PS Vita.
Overall Grade: C - Zelda was awesome, no lies there. The 3DS section was pointlessly small and the Wii U reveal was extremely underwhelming. It was nothing compared to last year's conference. Maybe next year, Nintendo.
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