Here comes Nintendo to once again save the gaming industry from a tremendously shitty Not-E3 here in 2023. It’s actually crazy how subpar Not-E3 2023 has been, but here comes Nintendo flying in with what should be a great show because… I dunno, no one else was good, someone has to be.

I did actually watch this before writing any of this, because of reasons, and I even missed it live because of the same reasons, but let’s actually go through the show now. I do like going by Highlights and such, so I’m doing this here again. Highlights at different levels talking about my favorite parts of the show, down to the ones I liked least.

Let’s-a go!

There’s the usual February Nintendo Direct. I am gonna react to it. Whoa! So yes I am writing this intro before actually watching the Direct. It could be the most hype Direct ever, it could… not be. I have no idea, and I have no real expectations.

The rumor mill was a bit dry, but got a bit better… 2 hours before the Direct. There’s the Advance Wars rumors which are kinda dumb (the SKU changed on the eshop so people think that means it’s coming out right away, the other is a random wal-mart employee saying he saw a standee with a February 10 release date for it but provided no proof)… possible, but not likely based on why Nintendo indefinitely delayed the game. There was a bit of an “oof” rumor from Exputer saying they saw video evidence of a remake of Baten Kaitos, though this rumor is weirdly contradicted by this image just popping out a bit before the Direct showing a remaster collection of Baten Kaitos 1 and 2 rather than a remake of the first (could be faked of course). So either way, that’s possible. And that’s about it as far as anything interesting and new. There’s a Syluxhunter thing from last year about some F-Zero related thing, though no timing or details were given for that so… eh. Oh and there’s the whole TotK 70$ price and Metroid Prime 4 appearing/disappearing from online stores kinda randomly, I don’t think that’s particularly useful info as far as content… but it WOULD be bullshit if Nintendo upped the price of their games.

As far as expectations, I’m expecting Tears of the Kingdom to be shown very briefly, I feel it will be a bit more of a tease, leading to a separate Direct just for that game closer to release. I’m expecting something about Pikmin. I’m expecting to not see Metroid Prime 4. And I’m expecting DLC stuff for Fire Emblem, Mario Kart and maybe Splatoon. So that’s a good 5-8 minutes of the 40 that was announced accounted for, which means there’s a lot of time which could just be anything. And also Samba de Amigo since that popped up just a bit before the Direct started, no excitement for that.

So as usual, I’ll be giving short comments about everything in the presentation, and finish it off with my overall thoughts.

Let’s go!

Okay well I did say in the not-E3 posts that I would post a reaction for the Direct Nintendo would put out. I ignored the Xenoblade one because it’s dumb to spoil yourself too much on a game, but this is a bit closer to a normal Direct so… there you go.

Nintendo isn’t saving E3 this year, but hey, this might have… stuff.

I expect Dragon Quest Treasures to be shown (to what extent, who knows) since that is meant to get new info this month and there’s only a few days left, Mario + Rabbids 2 needs a release date (which got leaked by Ubisoft yesterday lol), and Bayonetta 3 has been very quiet since the trailer last year and it’s meant to be out this year still… That’s my only real predictions. The rumor mill has been going, but it always does, and it’s always wrong (even when it’s right, it’s just lucky guesses).

AS PER USUAL I am writing this intro before watching the Direct, and my reactions are written live as I’m watching it.

Let’s go I guess.

I’m super happy E3 was not a thing this year. The ESA sucks and E3 has been very pointless for a while, providing nothing good for the consumer. With the internet being a thing for a long time now, we should have evolved beyond E3 LOOOOOOOOOOONG ago. Nintendo, with their Directs, set the stage to how game announcements should happen. Sony badly copied Nintendo with their State of Play presentations (there’s been only ONE of them that has been any good so far (the March 2022 one)), but went a step further by dissociating from E3 pre-pandemic. That’s good. All companies need to dissociate from E3.

With E3 gone in 2022, people thought there’d be nothing, because people are idiots who thing the gaming industry revolves around E3 for some reason. But the presentations came just the same. Of course they would, game companies don’t just… stop announcing games because there isn’t an expo for journalists.

So let’s talk about this year’s not-E3 and see if any of the presentations were any good! Hint: no.

Well, so far not-E3 2022 has been pretty terrible. Very few highlights, very boring, games kinda melting into each other because everything is so similar to other things that are also being shown. I hope Microsoft can finally break us out of this funk. I am writing this short intro before the show, so my current expectations? Basically nothing. Lots going around about Goldeneye, but that’s about it. I’m sure we’ll see another new Forza too because it’s Xbox and apparently we need one same-y car game every year from them.

I don’t know if I’ll post this, but either way, I will have an overall not-E3 post once all this shit is done. I am waiting a bit to post that until we see when/if Nintendo does something.

Well, the countdown is about to be done.

I probably won’t post this. Sony’s State of Play presentations are always a bit lame. The last State of Play actually had several interesting announcements, with the problem on Sony’s side being that there was nothing exclusive, so all the cool announcements were PC and Switch games. Good job Sony.

So if I feel like this will probably also sucks, but I could be surprised. Maybe a PC game or two will pop up!

Well E3 2021 is done. It mostly sucked. There’s one part that didn’t.

So time to rant about E3 as a whole! There’s not even that much to talk about here, but I think I can use that fact as a platform to talk about stuff anyways.

I’ll be grading each presentation, and talking about what bothered me about them and maybe get to the core of WHY all these presentations suck.

Well I guess before I get to the Nintendo Direct, I’m gonna write my usual intro.

In-between my last post (the disappointing Squeenix direct) and this one, there’s been a few presentations, they weren’t good. Back 4 Blood got a bit presentation, it looks fine. PC Gaming Show was fairly boring but it had some interesting indies. The Future Games Show was pretty boring. Take-Two wasted everyone’s time with something WORSE than the Koch Media presentation. Capcom did nothing, might have been more useless than the Gearbox thing. Wow this E3 is bad.

And now it’s Nintendo’s turn. Literally only they can save this terrible E3. The bar is set so low.

Nintendo has a LOT of rumors going on. 2D Donkey Kong game by the Mario Odyssey team, a 3D Kirby, a 2D Metroid (this is a leftover rumor that ended up false last year lol), something Fire Emblem (so many different versions of this rumor), an exclusive RE game, new Mario Kart, and probably a bunch of other stuff I don’t recall because there’s so many fake rumors I can’t keep track. The big one is the Switch Pro… which won’t be shown in the Direct if it’s a real product Nintendo wants to release. I don’t know if any of those rumors will be true. The safe bet is to say they aren’t but some of them are certainly interesting and possible.

Outside of the rumors, there’s a lot of things we can assume will be there or not. BotW2 is almost definitely showing up though I believe it will only come out early next year. We’ll see at least one Smash character (maybe 2). Seems like we’ll see a new Monkey Ball, that got a real leak. Maybe we’ll see some Zelda 35th anniversary… stuff (I’m not counting on it). We’ll NOT see Metroid Prime 4. We’ll probably not see Bayonetta 3 but there’s a chance I guess. I don’t think we’ll see Splatoon 3. I don’t think we’ll see any Pokemon but there’s a small chance since there was no pre-E3 pokemon direct. Pikmin 4 has been “sort of” announced for years, a real announcement would be… a thing. And Nintendo generally does announce actual things at E3 so… I figure we’ll have one decently-big announcement maybe, whether it’s something from the rumors or not. After how bad the rest of this E3 has been, I’m not keeping my hopes up, but it would be hard for Nintendo to fail as hard as any of the other presentations.

As usual these are my “live” reactions to the event, I’m gonna edit those to make them readable and write overall thoughts at the end. The intro is written before seeing the show of course.

So anyways, let’s go. PLEASE Nintendo save this terrible E3. It really needs help.

Note: No I won’t do a post about the Treehouse stream, but I may talk about it in my “overall” E3 post after the event is over if there’s something shown there.

Well I don’t have a super long time to write an intro as I just finished posting my Microsoft post. Thankfully there’s been no other presentations in-between so I don’t think there’s much to talk about before.

Squeenix’s E3 presentations have varied in quality quite a bit. Some awful, some okay, they’re very random. There’s a few rumors going for this one, might be fun to see if they’re real. Namely a Dark Souls-style FF game by Team Ninja and an FF collection for modern platforms. Also we know Babylon’s Fall will be there, I’m hyped to see more of that and hopefully a release date finally. But after getting disappointed by Microsoft I’m keeping my expectations low here.

As usual these are my “live” reactions to the event, I’m gonna edit those to make them readable and write overall thoughts at the end. Intro is written before seeing the show.

Starts in a minute so… let’s go? Maybe Squeenix will be okay. I dunno, Microsoft managed to lower my hype substantially.

Well before I watch the presentation by Microsoft, let’s quickly go over yesterday’s E3 things I didn’t post about.

Devolver Digital was right after Ubisoft… Devolver always makes something really entertaining. The games? Not particularly interesting, IMO. Some looked okay but nothing really caught my attention. The presentation? Awesome fun, extremely well made.

Then there was Gearbox. They did literally nothing. Seriously. Fuck Gearbox.

I skipped UploadVR… partly because VR is lame, partly because I think I can’t even actually use VR anymore because of the current state of my eyes… I’d need to try it, but I think the screens would be in a distance that would suck for both of my eyes.

Oh and I actually logged into the E3 app. What the fuck is even this crap? Seriously I have no idea how to use it, what a shitty app. I got out of it after 5 minutes of fiddling with menus and not understanding what anything was. Good job proving your pointlessness, E3.

So anyways, now it’s Microsoft’s turn. I’m pretty excited for this, largely because Microsoft tends to be a good place for third-parties to do announcements. And also all games here will be multiplat, which is great. Their presentations in the past few E3s have been pretty solid, even when they didn’t announce things that interested me that much. I think this should be a pretty good presentation.

So let’s go with the live reaction! I’ll be writing my thoughts live, followed at the end of the show with my overall thoughts. I’ll post the entire reaction after I’ve edited everything. And as usual this intro is written before watching.

Timer is going down. LET’S FUCKING GOOOOOOOOO!