Although I wanted to write up a sort of “Here’s What Nintendo Did At E3″ or “Yeah, We All Know About the new Metroid, But Here’s Some Stuff You Might Have Missed at E3″ or “Damn, Is This A Clever (And Short) Title For a Blog Post About Nintendo’s Activity At E3 Or What?” post since E3 actually happened a week or so ago, I simply haven’t felt like it at all. Like most of anything related to Nintendo as of the past console generation or two, it’s hard to get excited about much of it, and I’m not just saying that because I’m still bitter about Mother 3 not getting a North American release (I mean, there’s a patch now. It’s their loss.)
In typical Nintendo fashion, the biggest reveals that anyone cares about were hardly revealed at all, and even the ones nobody cares about weren’t spared the usual iron box of secrecy. Take a look at the announcements about Metroid: Other M, Super Mario Galaxy 2, and even the stupid Vitality sensor. That’s literally all we know about them. We saw a trailer for Metroid and Galaxy, but when asked how exactly the games are played, Nintendo quickly shut up. The video game industry have been doing this for forever, but it still feels kind of lame that we’re supposed to be all excited about these games, yet we know nothing about the actual, you know, game part.
Now, to be a complete hypocrite, man, I’m curious about the new Zelda. Yes, there’s a new Zelda for the Wii. Doesn’t that say something? The only thing we’ve seen about that game is a piece of concept art that was only shown behind closed doors to the select few. Regardless, as annoyed as I might be with Nintendo for any stupid reason (“Hey, they’re making a multiplayer side-scrolling Mario?” “Yeah! You can play as Mario, Luigi, other Toad, and other other Toad!” “What about… normal Toad?” “Hey! Vitality sensor!” “What?” “Metroid!” “Oooo…”), I’m fairly intrigued with this whole “not holding a sword” business:
Shigeru Miyamoto: Well, the story setting for this Zelda is, of course, in a completely different era and Link is older than he was previously. More approaching adulthood. There is one hint. Maybe from the art work you can see that he’s not holding a sword.
IGN: Has he lost his Master Sword?
Shigeru Miyamoto: [Laughing] I just wanted to make sure that you understand we are making it. That’s all I’m going to say on that subject.
More recently, Miyamoto has announced that the new Wii MotionPlus will be “required”. Given how MotionPlus basically just lets the Wii do what it was supposed to do was back when this thing was still called the Revolution (remember that?), this next Zelda had better be good. I’m not really worried about them experimenting with the series a little, since I was really hesitant about Phantom Hourglass’s touch controls, and I wound up putting more effort into that game than Twilight Princess, which I actually haven’t finished yet, not because it’s hard, but because I rarely feel like playing it. I’m certainly not saying it was bad, but when a series that good starts to feel a little stale, well, that’s where you gotta let Miyamoto do his thing. Which occasionally might be Nintendogs, but it’s all well and good!
And in all honesty, I can’t remember anything else that I wanted to talk about from E3. I don’t follow Sony and Microsoft, not owning any systems from either of them (although I wish I did just for that Beatles game. I watched the videos of that in action, and talk about your heart going boom when you cross that (figurative) room!), and, as you might have guessed, I don’t remember a whole lot of offerings from Nintendo that really grabbed my interest (at least not yet. Who knows? Maybe when we see the actual game parts!), except IGN’s been raving a bit about Scribblenauts, and I’ve watched some of the gameplay, but I’m not sold quite yet. I like the general idea, but based on the levels they showed us, if the levels don’t use the concept well, that’s going to ruin the whole thing. Watching the E3 walkthrough (yes, the “God on a skateboard with a shotgun” walkthrough), it seems like the idea is better suited for a sandbox game than a generic “collect the star-shaped-not-a-star-to-progress” game. And if there really is “nothing you can’t do” to solve the puzzle, then how is the game going to present any challenge? How can you have a difficulty curve when you can do anything conceivable, say, God on a skateboard with a shotgun, to do something that could be done just as easily (or at all) with a simple axe? Don’t get me wrong, it’s pretty cool that you can supposedly do “literally anything”, but I don’t think we’ve quite seen the point of it yet.
And I suppose that’s all I can think to talk about. Whoop.
EDIT: Once again, I had an idea of what I wanted to do and Yahtzee did it better. As is life.
