Nintendo's E3 2012: We're Hardcore Now, so Let's Sing at Nintendoland

Today we talk about Nintendo’s Press Conference and why it should have knocked our socks off, but didn’t.


Pikmin 3. Awesome.

What about last year when you said you wanted to appeal to the hardcore gamer?

What else do you have?



Batman:  Arkham City.  Cool cool.  

We’ve seen that before, but cool new control features.  Okay.  What else? 

Assassins Creed 3. Alright. I’m liking it. It’ll be on other consoles too and all, but that’s cool. Looks cool. You have something else, right? 


Zombi U. This looks good. I’m liking what I’m seeing here, BUT I will hold my real opinions on the game until I play it. There was another game I was interested in playing before a Nintendo console launch that looked better in the trailer than it actually turned out. 


Right Ubisoft?  



Nintendo, come on. You’re holding out. 


What else do the third parties have for us?  




This is when I felt like something was off about the presentation. Last year, Nintendo was standing up and saying, we’re a console for everyone, and we want to bring the hardcore gamer back to us. Then you show us this.  Why would you allow that?  You could have skipped the casual stuff and shown it on the show floor.  People will buy it regardless.  If we're trying to bring the "hardcore gamer," we need something strong. 

Then New Super Mario Bros U. Cool, a new Mario game, but isn’t this identical to the one that’s already on Wii? I mean, it looks incredibly similar...

One is from Wii and the other from Wii U?  Can you tell?

Wii Fit U. You do realize people didn’t understand that the Wii U was different than Wii, right? Do you know how many people have Wii Fit already? Why do you need the second screen exactly? You know that my balance isn’t that great and I could fall forward and oh, I don't know, break the controller? 


Why are we talking about the 3DS here when there was a reserved 3DS Conference the next day? This particular presentation should have focused solely on the Wii U. 


Still, no release date. No console specifications. Just more focus on the controller, which yes, is cool, but what else? We want more info!  


Instead, you decided to focus most of the time on Nintendoland, which is fine. It’s a new game and all, but this conference showed us all something. You weren’t entirely honest about your “we want the hardcore crowd back.” 




This conference showed me that the Wii U wishes to hold on to the casual audience with family games, and sprinkle some more mature rated titles in the mix as well. Guess what? The Wii already did that, and it was not taken seriously by most gamers.  I suppose now there will be a lot of PS3 / XBOX 360 ports, but is that enough to win people over?


What’s really different about the Wii U other than:

• Tablet Controller 
• HD Graphics 
• More powerful than the Wii

Can someone tell us? Please. It’s your turn. Leave in the comments what makes the Wii U different than the Wii... and what you think about Nintendo's 2012 Conference.


- A.G.