If Ubisoft is your drunk European cousin then Nintendo is your weird neighbor that likes to throw themed parties every weekend. “No Chad, I don’t want to come to your Alice in Wonderland tea party!” But the next you know, you’re dressed up like a white rabbit sipping tea… at least that’s been my experience with Nintendo.

The Good:

Smash Brothers:

Nintendo dropped all the good with their Smash Brothers announcement. Every character that’s ever been in the series is back. Maybe I’m forgetting something but with this announcement, this would easily be the biggest launch lineup for any fighting game ever. To make this announcement even better, as someone that hasn’t played a Smash game in a long time, it was great seeing old friends like Snake smacking Mario around. And most importantly, we got a release date of December 7, 2018. While it’s a little later than some thought, the fact that this game is coming out this year is huge!

The Games:

Smash Brothers closed out the show but that wasn’t all Nintendo showed off. While I’ll get into what didn’t show up shortly, what was shown looked great.

The Bad:

I think this is a problem that a lot of people run into every year with Nintendo where we just never know what they’re willing to announce. They come into a conference saying, “we’re only talking about games coming out this year,” but then, like last year with Pokemon and Metroid 4, they talk about games that are potentially years away. So heading into this E3 when they gave us that same speech we all assumed that a majority of titles shown would be games with release dates but then sprinkled in would maybe be Pikmin, Animal Crossing, or Pokemon. Unfortunately, we didn’t get any of those. That being said, Nintendo is a really weird company and could be announcing those on their Treehouse stream as I’m writing this up.

Conclusion:

With nothing really “ugly” happening with Nintendo’s E3 direct, it’s safe to say that they had a solid direct. As someone who has been on the fence about purchasing a Switch, this conference absolutely has gotten me one step closer to buying the console and with any E3 presentation, grabbing a new consumer is all you can hope for.