E3 Madness, Part 2: They Smile in Your Face, All the Time They Wanna Take Your Place
Posted by Nate Patrin at 2:00 PM Jul 15, 2008
More than anything, I really want to love Nintendo. I don't mean on the level of getting a Triforce tattoo and setting up a Shigeru Miyamoto shrine or anything -- I just like the idea that a video game company can be successful and innovative and kinda weird at the same time. My DS is going to almost singlehandedly preserve my sanity during a 16-hour round trip via train to Chicago later this week (at least after I'm done reading The Crying of Lot 49 and Carl Wilson's 33 1/3 book about Celine Dion), and every time I wonder if my Wii was worth buying I remember the sparse but highly entertaining times I've had with Resident Evil 4, Super Mario Galaxy and No More Heroes. They're two of the most well-thought-out and compelling video game platforms in ages -- and sometimes, I think it'd be nice if Nintendo actually remembered that.
Unfortunately, it seems like the people Nintendo are aiming for this generation consist of two groups, as Gary Hodges mentioned before: people who really, really, really like Nintendo -- the people who would cut off a pinky finger without anesthetic if it meant it'd make Super Smash Brothers Brawl more fun -- and people who never picked up anything video-game-related in the last 15 years until the DS and Wii came along. The former group is fine enough; just because I don't geek out over Animal Crossing or Pokemon or Mario Plays Some Kind Of Sport doesn't mean I won't join their teeming ranks once a new F-Zero or Punch-Out! title hits the radar. But it's the latter group that Nintendo spent most of their time catering to at their E3 conference, and man -- I don't want to begrudge the casual gamers anything, but it could have been a lot more compelling.
Long story short, the ongoing theme of the presentation was "smiles" -- as in, putting them on peoples' faces and so forth. The stuff they mentioned that core gamers might be interested in was interesting enough; for me, the idea of a Grand Theft Auto game on DS, even if it's a Liberty City Stories-style mini-version, is plenty to get excited about, and if I wasn't already getting it for some other platform I'd definitely be interested in a DS Spore title. (I might still buy it anyways, even if I do get it for PC or 360.) Throw in some Animal Crossing and Pokemon for the Nintendo diehards, some multi-platform titles for people who prefer the Wii controller or don't have any other console and at least some mention (albeit fleeting) of a new Zelda game, and you've got the makings of some promise for the holiday season. So what do the casual gamers get, besides the bulk of attention during the presentation?
Not Disaster: Day of Crisis, that's for damn sure.
-Cammie Dunaway, who looks like a character Tina Fey might come up with if she had a longstanding grudge against marketing flacks, bringing up the possibility that you could eventually use your DS like a PDA. Two scenarios she mentioned specifically: you could use it at the airport to keep tabs on where to pick up your luggage, or take it with you to Safeco Field and use it to keep track of other games' boxscores. Except that most airports and ballparks have displays that help you with these things already. Hey, you want to have the DS and air travel "come together in a different way" or make it a must-have accessory for baseball fans? How about a new Pilotwings game or a baseball game that isn't a complete atrocity?
-The official onstage unveiling of the Wii remote's "MotionPlus" add-on, which gives it true 1:1 movement. This looks amazing, but to show it off with Wii Sports Resort... well, I'm kind of mixed. Yeah, Wii Sports is the most successful game title of the last few years, and I'm probably bound to buy the sequel anyways (especially if they include the MotionPlus as a pack-in, which I suspect is what's going to happen), and one of the games is a one-on-one swordfighting competition (!!!), but it's Yet Another Mini-Game Collection, and for core gamers those things can have a shorter shelf life than guacamole.
-Wii Music. This was... well, a lot less fun to watch than it might be to play. This game's presentation ended Nintendo's press briefing, and it started awkwardly, with a guy holding a Wii remote and nunchuck and stomping on a Wii Fit board flailing manically at the air as the game reproduced his movements. It would probably be more impressive if they'd hired somebody who didn't make Meg White look like John Bonham to show it off, though their emphasis of luring in people who might not be good at traditional rhythm games and using Wii Music to teach them to play instruments in real life might not have been as effective. Which would've been a moot point anyhow, as Miyamoto came out on stage using the Wii controller to "play" saxophone in a way that had no actual logical connection to the way a saxophone is actually played. And any interest I had in gathering up two or three Wiimotes at once and Rahsaan Roland Kirk-ing it went right down the turlet once I heard that awful, dated MIDI-esque fartsqueal that attempted to pass for a saxophone. This could be some kind of technological breakthrough, but I'm not playing it if it makes me sound like I'm playing 1980s infomercial music. And then there's the grand finale, where a group of people got together and played the Mario theme as though they had taken the very song itself out by the train tracks and gotten it plastered on Boone's Farm. Hey, what just got announced yesterday? The Rock Band 2 tracklist? And Devo's on it? Yeah, I'll be over there now, thanks.
Obviously this conference wasn't for the hardcore gamers, who also tended to snort derisively at the future-blockbuster Wii Fit last year -- and as it turns out, Brawl wound up getting revealed the next day. But when company president Satoru Iwata talked about how Nintendo would continue to shift paradigms and claimed that "even when something is revolutionary, it can become boring" -- well, I had to agree.
