Remember When Press Conferences Were About New Content?
I really hate having to write these types of articles. I love Nintendo and it pains me to have to talk so badly of them. But seriously. Come on. The other press conferences this year were as follows:
Microsoft: Bombed.
Sony: Eh.
EA: Terrible.
Ubisoft: Average.
This wasn’t a tough scenario. Nintendo should have been ready to blow this one out of the park. It was a fastball straight down the middle. It was a perfect storm of awesome that had the potential to send chills down the spines of every gamer watching. Instead of going for the home run though, they apparently decided to fake getting hit by the pitch and hobbled along to first base, managing to barely keep the game going, and build little if any hype for the next at-bat.
I’m not talking about baseball though. I’m talking about Nintendo’s E3 press conference from earlier today. That extraordinarily average showcase of 75% content we already knew about, 15% stuff we didn’t care about, and 10% awesome gaming. It was perhaps the biggest letdown of the last six months as far as gaming is concerned, and to top it all off we didn’t even learn anything new at their roundtable discussion. Literally, they took that precious time to re-cap everything we didn’t care about from the press conference, and skip out on all of the good stuff. It’s been such a bland day for Nintendo I had to paint myself rainbow colors just to stay awake.
Admittedly not the best idea I’ve ever had.
Let me show you the list I have compiled of “Things Nintendo Showed at Their Press Conference” sorted into two categories: “Stuff that was a surprise”, and “Stuff we already knew about”.
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Stuff We Already Knew About:
Pikmin 3 – Talked about two years ago, last year, and before E3 this year.
New Super Mario Bros. U – Demo’d last year, talked about earlier this year
LEGO City Undercover – Talked about last year
Batman: Arkham City – Came out last year
Darksiders II – Revealed last year
Mass Effect 3 – Came out earlier this year.
Tank! Tank! Tank! – Came out in 2009. Yes. Seriously. Three years ago.
Tekken Tag Tournament 2 – Came out last year in Japan
Trine 2: Director’s Cut – Came out last year
Ninja Gaiden 3: Razor’s Edge – Revealed last year
Aliens: Colonial Marines – Revealed last year
ZombiU – Revealed a few days ago
Luigi’s Mansion 2 – Revealed last year
Paper Mario: Sticker Star – Also revealed last year
New Stuff:
Scribblenauts: Unlimited
New Super Mario Bros. 2
Wii Fit U
NintendoLand
SiNG
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Look at those lists. You see which one is bigger? In case you can’t tell, let me show you a few graphs illustrating just how big of a gap this is.
Some of you may say I’m being unfair. That, perhaps I should include games like Project Whatever600 by Platinum Games, or that I should add ZombiU to the list of “new games”. Okay. Let’s say I did. Now we have two more games on the “new stuff” list.
And then you realize that 2 (if not 3) of the games already aren’t something that really qualify as “big announcements”. I know Nintendo has to appeal to the casual gamers- and I love that they do- but they aren’t allowed to spend 5 minutes talking about how there “isn’t enough time for everything”, and then go ahead and spend 10 minutes explaining the minigames in their next collection, 5 minutes showing off some singing game that I still don’t understand, and even more time talking about 3DS games that have a dedicated press conference tomorrow.
And seriously, stop ending your conferences with games like “Nintendoland”.
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