Spent most of yesterday morning with a laptop balanced on my knees and cold coffee next to me watching Nintendo's E3 thing instead of doing literally any of the work I was supposed to be doing. Worth it? Mostly. Not entirely.
Nintendo skipped the big stage presser this year and did a pre-taped "Digital Event" instead, which dropped online the morning of the 10th while the actual show floor in LA was opening up. I get why they do this now, no risk of a mic cutting out, no awkward live crowd shots, but they opened with a Robot Chicken puppet segment and I need to talk about that for a second because it was genuinely one of the strangest things I've watched a company put out on purpose. Reggie and Iwata and Miyamoto rendered as felt puppets, bantering about game announcements like it's a kids show. I know some people are going to love it, it's got that so-bad-its-good energy, but I sat there half-cringing and half-checking Twitter to see if anyone else felt the same. A lot of people did. A lot of people also didn't and thought I was being a grump about it. Fine, maybe I am.
Once they got past the puppets though, the actual footage won me over. The new Zelda for Wii U, no title yet, they're just calling it "Zelda Wii U", opened up into this wide open field with Link riding around on horseback, full draw distance, no loading corridors that I could see. After Skyward Sword, which I liked fine but which basically funnels you down a hallway with extra steps, this looked like a real shift. Miyamoto talked about wanting players to be able to see a mountain in the distance and just go climb it if they want. That's the pitch that got me, not the puppets.
Splatoon was the other one that stuck with me, mostly because I did not expect it and I'm still not sure how to describe it to anyone who hasn't seen the trailer. Kids that turn into squids, shooting colored ink to cover territory instead of shooting each other to get kills. It sounds like a pitch a marketing team would reject in the room. And yet I've had the image of a kid mid-dive turning into a squid stuck in my head since yesterday afternoon, so credit where it's due, it worked on me.
The thing I'm more skeptical about is Amiibo. Little figures you tap on the Wii U gamepad to unlock stuff in Smash Bros and presumably other games down the line. I've watched this exact toys-to-life thing play out with Skylanders and now Disney Infinity, and it always ends the same way — a shelf of plastic figurines you feel obligated to keep buying at twelve or thirteen bucks a pop because you already have six of them and might as well finish the set. I don't doubt it'll work financially. I just don't need another aisle at Target dedicated to figurines I feel guilty about not owning.
Small complaint, unrelated to any of the games themselves: my internet connection at home is not built for a household streaming a pre-recorded video while I'm also trying to keep four browser tabs open refreshing live reaction threads. The video itself never buffered, weirdly, it was everything around it that choked. My laptop fan sounded like it was preparing for liftoff by the end of the hour. I really do need to replace this thing, I've been saying that since last winter.
Sony and Microsoft already did their conferences earlier in the week and I only half paid attention to those live, mostly caught the highlights after the fact, so I can't really compare how the whole show is shaping up yet. Might do a proper writeup once I've actually sat down and watched the Sony one in full instead of skimming a recap at midnight. For now I'm just sitting with the Zelda footage on loop and trying to figure out if the ink-squid game is actually going to be good or if I've just been hypnotized by a good trailer edit. Probably won't know for a year at least, knowing Nintendo's release schedules.