Nintendo Has, Once Again, Changed the Game

This is my obligatory “Here’s what’s going on at E3 just so you know” post.

So, just one day into the pre-E3 shows and we’ve already seen the effects of last year’s presentation by Nintendo. I don’t know if it’s just my imagination, but it seems like as time goes on, more and more people are waiting for Nintendo’s “OK” before they start trying out new things, as though they’re using the big N as a guinea pig for them to invest in new ideas. This year it was probably the most prevalent, save for perhaps the year we saw Move and Kinect revealed.

I watched Microsoft’s conference this morning and just finished Sony’s a few minutes ago. Both of them had one thing in common: The desire to have a second screen for their console. Microsoft had SmartGlass and cross-platform Xbox Live support, while Sony touted both the newly named Playstation.Mobile, and Vita’s ability to connect with the PS3 in “new” and “innovative” ways. The ironic thing here is that we’ve seen this from Nintendo in the past, not only in the tablet-controller of the Wii U, but in the connectivity of the 3DS, DS, Gameboy Advance, and Gameboy connectivity to their various consoles. They are neither new nor innovative as ideas, but perhaps their widespread use will be.

But can it work? And more importantly, can it catch on?

The question I’m most concerned with is one of accessibility. When I played the Wii U last year at E3, it was clear that it had both legitimate uses (Ghost Recon, Zelda) and incredibly gimmicky uses (pretty much everything else). While I can appreciate the gimmicks to a degree, the trick to getting this to work on a larger scale is to focus on the things that are extensions of what we know about playing games- things like drone monitoring, item selection, and menu navigation- and stray away from the goofy and inaccessible things like video chatting, voice commands, and no-hands control. Sure, they seem like good ideas on paper, but they just don’t work like we want them to.

So anyway, once again the show belongs to Nintendo. Whether they succeed or fail (the more I learn, the most I’m betting on the former), they can continue on knowing that they are at least still looked to as the one company who actually does something innovative in an industry full of copycats. Hoorah!