E3 for Big N (2008)

I watched the Nintendo presentation again and I'll give my thoughts. I was only half paying attention to it this year.

The presentation was really light. Like last year, Nintendo seems content to coast on it's success. It's odd, really. I'm not complaining because I thought the thing was ok but I wish they would stop showing sales charts and make the show more exciting like their famous 2006 effort.

They started off by showing off some snowboard game. I'm not into a game like that, so I didn't care.

They next brought in the president of Nintendo to talk about blah blah blah. Basically it was the standard we rock and here are the buzzwords speech. Thankfully after a while they showed off the first must have game for me, Animal Crossing Wii. It looks way too much like the DS version but it does have voice chat which I'd like to try with Lita. I hope Nintendo opens it up and allows you to play with non-friends, but I doubt it. I hope Nintendo reveals more info about which games will use the Wii Chat thing.

After that I think they moved on to DS games. They talked about Spore and another Guitar Hero DS game, and I'm interested in neither. They did mention GTA for the DS, which has me interested. Will it be 3d? If they pull it off, I may be interested, even if it'll lack the sound track of the other games. They mentioned Pokemon something, but I didn't care and I think they wasted too much time with it.

They finally brought up what should be huge news for the Wii. They showed off the Wii MotionPlus, which will likely tell us if the Wii sinks or swims from here on out. The Motion Plus allows the Wii Remote to be more accurate, which it hasn't really since Wii Sports baseball. I've complained about how Nintendo seems to have dropped the ball on accurate motion and to tell the truth this thing should have been out at launch. Still, I can't wait to see what Nintendo (and hopefully some third parties) will do with this thing besides Wii Sports Resorts. By the way, Resorts looked like a lot of fun even though it's another mini-game collection. I definitely want to try the sword game and hope that Nintendo offers some online. This is the second must-have game.

The show concluded with Wii Music, which seems like a missed opportunity to me. I'm sure it'll be a great family game but I think if Nintendo revealed a big franchise title they would have had a much better presentation. I'm going to withhold my opinion on Wii Music for now but it better not be random button pushes that do a preset musical. Let's hope Nintendo has thought this one out right by the holiday season.

At the end of the show Reggie took a shot at the competitors. Good for him.

After the show I went to some gamefaqs boards to see a lot of nerds whine like they did last year. So I guess that means the Wii will continue selling strong. See ya next year!