Yeah, Nintendo for the most part keeps everything under wraps until it's almost ready to be shipped. Hopefully this year, at this very event, they will break with that tradition that started this gen and start showing us gameplay and giving us info about their upcoming games.

Even NSMBWii or MKWii were kept secret until 2-3 weeks prior to release. Might work for them, but for new IP's I think it's a mistake. They need to show us all their upcoming games and have demos set up for each one of them. The ones that have been announced of course.

This isn't true at all.

They were, we only got the same videos from E3 on every event they attended. I remember correctly that new NSMBWii videos started appearing very closely to the launch date.

That does not mean that the game was kept secret. It was announced and showcased and even demo'd about half a year before launch.

Our own contributors played NSMBWii at E3. I don't remember the MKWii launch, but we knew well ahead of time that it would be online and that it would have bikes and stunts.

....MKWii, you mean?

I didn't know our contribs were there in 2007

Nevermind I am stupid

Well, I expressed myself incorrectly then. The games are shown once and then it's a long dry period, where nothing gets leaked until it's almost launch date. Same happens with Metroid OM, SMG2, Xenoblade, most of their 2008 conference games and happened to a lot of other games like Disaster, Wario Land, etc. That's what bothers me the most. Sporadic announcements like the ones of Excitebots, Captain Rainbow or Pokepark Wii also upset me. Pokemon did OK because it was a known IP, but the other 2 were dead on arrival.

Captain Rainbow wasn't dead on arrival because it was a stealth launch, it was dead on arrival because of the game it was.

I think Excitebots was a bit of a hard sell too... I mean racing robot bugs?  Honestly, I think Nintendo and Monster Games would've been better served just doing a new F-Zero as originally planned.

Still, I'd say both Captain Rainbow and Excitebots did even dramatically worse than expected.  There was more at play here than them just being relatively esoteric/niche/confused titles, Nintendo really handled them terribly.

The NSMBWii hype train, as i recall, started in September, in the sense of them starting to release more original content than what was just at E3. Mario Kart Wii had a good trickle.

Not every game gets the Dojo.