World Cup coverage has been blasting out of my neighbor's window all afternoon (Brazil-Croatia kicked off today, in case you've somehow missed it), and between that and the tail end of E3 news still trickling in, my brain is fried in the best possible way. But I want to talk about something that happened a couple days ago that I don't think is getting enough credit: Nintendo didn't do a stage show at E3 this year.
Instead they put out a pre-recorded "Digital Event" on Tuesday, and it opened with this genuinely weird claymation skit, Reggie Fils-Aime and Shigeru Miyamoto as tiny puppet figures, doing a wrestling-style showdown narrated like a bad 90s pay-per-view. I sat there for the first thirty seconds not sure if I was supposed to laugh or if something had gone wrong with the stream. Turns out it was intentional, made with the same studio that does Robot Chicken. Which, honestly, tracks.
Here's my actual opinion and I know some people will disagree with me: skipping the live stage was the right call. Sony and Microsoft both did the standard thing this year, big convention hall, celebrity intro, executives reading off teleprompters, that weird forced applause every time a logo appears on screen. Microsoft's was fine (Halo: The Master Chief Collection bundling all four games remastered for Xbox One is a genuinely good idea, I'll give them that), but it still had that stiff corporate-keynote energy that every single one of these things has now. Sony's had the No Man's Sky reveal, which by every account I've read stole the whole week, some tiny UK studio showing off a procedurally generated universe you can apparently fly between planets in without a loading screen. That one I believe when I see it, not before.
Nintendo just... didn't do the stage thing. No live audience reactions to manage, no risk of a demo crashing in front of a room full of press. They could edit it like a video because it was a video. And the content held up. The new Zelda footage, no title yet, is the first time in a long while a Zelda reveal has actually made me sit up. It's an open horseback landscape shot, looks almost Skyrim-scale, and after years of fairly linear dungeon-crawling Zelda games that's a real shift if they follow through on it. I'm trying not to get ahead of myself since it's not coming until sometime next year at the earliest, but it's the first Wii U game in a while I've actually wanted rather than just noted.
Splatoon was the other one that caught me off guard, an ink-shooter multiplayer game where you're covering the map in paint instead of racking up kills, as a totally new IP from Nintendo, which they almost never do anymore. I have no idea if it's actually going to be good, the tech demo footage was pretty rough, but I appreciate that they're trying something instead of just wheeling out Mario Kart DLC and calling it a show (which, for the record, did not happen, and I was a little bummed about that).
The part I'm more skeptical of is Amiibo, the NFC toy figures you tap on the gamepad to unlock stuff in games. It's obviously them trying to grab a slice of the Skylanders and Disney Infinity money, and I get it, that's a real business, but I've bought exactly zero toys-to-life figures in my life and I don't see this being the one that changes that. We'll see. There was also a very brief Star Fox tease, just an Arwing flying around, basically no information, which felt like it existed purely so nobody could say Star Fox wasn't mentioned.
Anyway. My one real complaint about the format: because it's pre-recorded, you lose the chaos, the thing where a presenter fumbles a line or a demo hangs for a second and you get to feel a little bit of real human nervousness in a room full of executives. I actually kind of miss that. But I'd trade that for less forced-clapping any day of the week, and apparently so would a lot of other people this week, since this is the one E3 conference from this year I've seen people actually rewatching clips from instead of just summarizing in a news post and moving on.