#oneaday Day 912: Nintendo hmm

Nintendo's eagerly anticipated Direct from E3 2021 was today and… it was okay. There were some nice reveals — most notably a 2D Metroid game that has apparently been in development hell for a long time, which is cool to see, and Project Zero 5 getting ported to modern systems — but the whole thing left me rather underwhelmed.

I certainly didn't come away thinking that they'd "saved" E3, as some people have been arguing. The fact that people were saying that at all is more an indictment of how moribund the other offerings this year have been — and things haven't gotten any better since, with what could have been a cool and interesting Bandai Namco stream ending up being 5 minutes on a game that no-one really gives much of a toss about.

The one thing you can say in Nintendo's favour is that they didn't forget to show the games, and they didn't waste time having some anonymous suit coming on stage and spouting business garbage.

They showed quite a lot games, in fact. It's just… I'm kind of finding it hard to get excited about the increasing number of "remasters" we're getting these days.

Being able to play Super Monkey Ball again will be cool, I guess, but I've already played Super Monkey Ball. And Advance Wars… while it'll be great to see that series back, I'm not big on the new art style for the units; Advance Wars always felt like a series that should have stuck resolutely with pixel art. But times change, I guess.

It'll be nice to have all the Danganronpas (except Ultra Despair Girls, annoyingly) in one place, particularly with the stupid prices V3 goes for these days, but that's not exactly an E3-worthy "big reveal".

I guess the best thing to do with Nintendo's presentation is look at not necessarily what all this means right now, but what it potentially means for the future.

A Project Zero 5 rerelease means there could be more Project Zero games in the future — or just some more enhanced reimaginings like Project Zero 2 got, that would be neat. (An official localised release of the fourth one would be great, too.)

A new Cruisin' game is a high-profile acknowledgement that the arcade racer is far from dead.

And the aforementioned remasters of Advance Wars potentially open the door for new games in the series in the future, which I don't think anyone would complain about.

So like I say… I wasn't super-impressed by Nintendo's offering this year, but I wouldn't necessarily say I was particularly disappointed either. I just think they've done much, much better in the past — and I suspect the ongoing COVID situation probably has a lot to do with why this year's lineup was so relatively weak.

Anyway, here's hoping for some actually exciting news to come from the "show floor" (not that there is one this year) because otherwise E3 as a whole has been pretty much a bust for 2021.

Roll on Tokyo Game Show, I say!