Nintendo
And in the meantime, while everyone was still excited, Nintendo presented some of its new developments. The case of the Japanese manufacturer is special, since it has been communicating in a different way compared to its competitors for several months now. Far from the glitz and glamour of the conferences, it was merely through a pre-recorded video that we were able to catch a glimpse of some of the games in development. Unfortunately, many of them are scheduled to be released by the end of the year or even next year.
Fortunately, the Kyoto-based company can rely on Mario Kart 8 to anticipate that the Wii U will be selling by the pallet. Even if the game seems to be a carbon copy of the 3DS episode, there are some new features hidden inside. We necessarily think of the anti-gravity option, just like a Marty Mc Fly on the tracks. We dread (a little bit) the addition of motorcycles, which were introduced with the Wii episode. We should hardly expect to encounter a lot of problems with the licenses, which are well known and recognized for their huge time-consuming factor, especially when you have several players.
And since one Mario can hide another, Super Mario 3D World can’t be ignored. Here again, it is surprising to see the lack of ambition behind a title that claims to be the brand’s flagship title, considering that it shares the same principle and organization as the 3DS episode. Of course, we naturally regret not seeing a game of the same caliber as Super Mario Galaxy, which back in the days of the Wii, was a real revival for the Italian plumber. In spite of the underlying pessimism that seems to cloud the end of this article, we are sure that Mario’s new costume, the cat costume, will win the support of the entire community.
The third major game of this presentation, Donkey Kong Country Tropical Freeze proves that the series is back on track, just like it was on Super NES back in the day. The Kong family (including Donkey and Diddy) was also featured a few years ago on the Nintendo Wii, and is now back for the Wii U, using the same formula that made its success in the past: a top-quality challenge, presented through a brilliant game design. I might be getting ahead of myself on this last point, but we can be sure that Retro Studios will come up with an excellent title.
The rest of the video was a rewind of what we’ve already seen, between multi-platform games and oldies, an expert eye couldn’t have noticed any real surprises. That is, until Nintendo pulled out a big rabbit out of its hat: Super Smash Bros. Sure, the news had been around for a while, but the pleasure of discovering the first images of the game (developed for Wii U and 3DS) left a smile, which had been missing for a long time, on the players’ faces. Many of them will tell you that they have already spent countless hours, and rightly so, on any game of the series. For the occasion, Nintendo brought out the big guns, by presenting three new characters: the villager (from Animal Crossing), the Wii Fit trainer (from … Wii fit) and Mega Man, certainly the character we least expected. A very nice confirmation for a title that still attracts a lot of players on previous generations of Nintendo consoles.
In the end, despite some big announcements (for both insiders and the general public) and release dates that are still very far away, we get the feeling that Nintendo is clearly in its own world, far away from the deadlines announced by its competitors. We were aware since the Wii that Nintendo wanted to pull away from the race for performance, it is now clear that the manufacturer wants to impose its own style of communication, even going so far as to drop the usual conference format. We will have to see if this matches Nintendo’s intentions in the long run.
