HEY!
Nice to see that we have a community thread again. I had off on Tuesday & Wednesday, but have worked an average of 14 hours over Thursday & Friday, so I'm quite behind on my Nintendo/E3 news. My complements to the OP creator!
Where have I been? IRC. It spoiled me. I figured it would be the safest way for me to get through this admittedly trying week; having to self-censor stinks, especially during E3. As an added bonus, folks who would come in and bash/troll Nintendo fans would actually get banished on the spot. So someone calling Nintendo fans "creeps" or, say, "genuinely frightening people" would get
kicked. I'll say it was quite refreshing.
Hmm..
But enough about that. That stuff is boring, haha!
The conference left me with mixed emotions. Disappointment, anger, confusion, uncertainty, fear, excitement, happiness.. the whole gamut. I was left wondering what in the world all of Nintendo's studios have been doing over the past year or two, considering the dry spell that the Wii has been through over that time frame. Out of all of these numerous studios, they had so little to show.. and it was a bit upsetting at the time.
My main anger was that such a disproportionate amount of time was spent on certain titles instead of showing other items that were apparently ready to be shown during the week. To devote such a large percentage of the conference to Wii Sports U, Ubisoft's dance game, and NintendoLand after claiming that they're going after the "core" gamer with this system was a HUGE alarm bell in my mind. I've said in the speculation thread(s) that this week would be a moment of truth of sorts, showing us whether or not Nintendo really "gets it" as far as core gamers' sensibilities are concerned, and as far as their fans' desires are concerned. The conference went pretty far in convincing me that, no, they don't quite get it yet. So this was a bit upsetting.
After sleeping on it, I awoke and spent much of Wednesday watching video footage from the show floor. Lots of good, good stuff slated for launch window got me into a good mood pretty quickly, I've gotta admit. The more I thought about playing Mario and Pikmin during my Launch Week vacation, the better I started to feel about the whole thing. Then I saw that ZombiU had potential, and that Project P-100 was looking quite remarkable, and my mood improved further. Launch is looking pretty great, I've gotta say.. I can kinda understand why Shane Bettenhausen was feeling so up on the whole thing.
Overall, E3 pretty much confirmed in my mind that Western support is going to be quite anemic again, save for a small handful of development houses. I'm more wondering what Japanese support is going to look like. At this point, I'm going to be happy if Nintendo just remains profitable and outsells the GameCube for this coming generation. Color me pessimistic, I guess?
Visions of camping-out for a pre-order are now dancing in my head. I'm looking forward to finding-out the date, price, final Launch Day titles, etc. I'll likely get more and more excited as we get closer and closer. Gonna be really, really fun going through all of that craziness again. And now that E3 is over, I'm ready to begin the long goodbye with my Wii. I'll be playing through Super Mario Galaxy 1 & 2 over the summer; it'll be quite a proper sendoff, I think.
