Is Mario Party a port too?

Fortunately not.

Nintendo – 9.1/10

Nintendo went the Nintendo Direct route again; rather than do a presentation in an auditorium, they had a pre-recorded package showing the games they had in development and some of their upcoming plans. They didn't talk about Metroid Prime 4, Bayonetta 3, or their online service, but instead focused more than half of their show just to Smash Bros. Ultimate, which is just fine by me. In 2016 they basically showed off Breath of the Wild and nothing else and many people said they won E3. For the record, they won E3. Breath of the Wild is one of my all time favorite games and the perfect launch game for Switch. Anyway, onto the summary!

Daemon X Machina – 6/10 – I wish we had seen some gameplay from this, but I love the aesthetic and the look/tone of it all. Giant mechs are always a tonne of fun to play with. I definitely know a lot of friends who will be into this.

Xenoblade Chronicles 2 Torna The Golden Country – 6/10 – I really need to get Xenoblade Chronicles 2, that's for sure. As it stands, this looks like a great expansion pack on top of an already great game.

Pokemon Lets Go Eevee/Pikachu – 2/10 or 10/10 – I am not nailing this down yet because I do not know at this point how 'traditional' of a game this is just yet. What we know is that it is a remake of Pokemon yellow but with REALLY pretty graphics and on the switch. We know there are pokemon battles and co op and motion controls and a cool pokeball controller that you can take with you. WE also know the battle system is at least mostly traditional, but not to what extent. What I don't know yet is if there are level ups, experience points, and battles with wild pokemon. If there is, this gets a 10/10 for me because how friggin awesome is that!? If it's ONLY the 'toss a pokeball' gameplay mechanic from Pokemon go, I give it a hard pass. We shall see.

Super Mario Party – 8/10 – Honestly, I've always liked the Mario Party games and this looks, based on what we saw, like the best rendition of it to date. I loved how you can use Switch consoles on the go, how it unlocks new minigames and modes, and how many of the minigames also include motion controls and can be played just with Joycons. I might actually get this one!

Fire Emblem Three Houses – 9/10 – Yep, it's a Fire Emblem game! I mean, I don't dislike the franchise or anything, but I've never really gotten into it for a variety of reasons. Generally speaking, I suck at strategy RPG games (I barely beat Final Fantasy Tactics...Advance!), and the concept of permadeath is a major turnoff for me from the get-go. That said, this looked great, I know a lot of my friends are super into it, and I know I'll be hearing a lot more about it! Can't wait to see more!

Fortnite: Battle Royale – 5/10 – It's Fortnite Battle Royale. All of these Battle royale games are boring to me, but it is free, it is available right now, and it's nice to play it on the go. I am going to pick it up if just to give it a shot, but until I've played it I Really can't tell if I care or not.

Indies – 9/10 – There was a quick little set of three indie titles coming to the switch including Overcooked 2, Killer Queen Black, and Hollow Knight. All three of these looked like their own kind of awesome, and Hollow Knight is available right now! I love indies, I love playing indies on the switch, and all of these brought something fun and new to the switch. Lots of love for these.

Octopath Traveller – 9/10 – I kinda want to give this a lower score because it didn't show us anything new, but this game looks like a whole hell of a lot of fun, it's my most anticipated for this summer, and the more I see the more I like. Plus, we got to see more of it here than in Square enix's conference, further showing how shallow THAT was. Again, nothing new, but a 3D classic style RPG with retro 16 bit looking graphics has me by the tits and I'm quite stoked.

Montage – 9/10 – Much like the indie showcase, Nintendo went super quick through a whole bunch of games coming out for the system within the next year. Many of them are indies, some of them are huge, some of them are small, but none of them were new announcements. The list is as follows:

Starlink: Batle for Atlas
Arena of Valor
Minecraft
Sushi Striker
Mario + Rabbods Donkey Kong Adventure
Pixark
Just Dance 2019
Dragonball Fighter Z
Splatoon 2 Octo Expansion
Captain Toad Treasure Tracker
Crash Bandicoot: N-Sane Trilogy
Ninjala
Carcasonne
Fifa 18
Fif1 19
ARK Survival Evolved
Wasteland 2
Paladins (Also available today)
Fallout Shelter
Dark souls Remastered
SNK Heroines
Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate
Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus
The World Ends with you
Megaman 11
Mario Tennis Aces

Like I said, some of them are big deals, some of them are ports, some are indies, and some are available today. Nobody will say that the Switch doesn't give you options! But this was brisk in order to showcase the next and final reveal in Nintendo's toolbox.

Super Smash Bros. Ultimate – 12/10 – This is me breaking my own rules. I know I do a 10 point scale, but Smash Bros gave me so much of everything I wanted to hear that I don't care. This is the #1 game for me this E3 (And there were many great games shown) by a wide margin, and outside of a story mode I don't think I could have asked for more. I'm especially fond of how cheeky they were in the presentation. Right at the beginning of the Smash Bros reveal, they made a joke saying 'we all know about Smash Bros, it's a game where you smash characters!', then put 'the end' on a black screen, only to amend it by saying 'just kidding' before going on to talk about the characters in the game.

For starters, the game is called Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, and its primary claim to fame is that every single fighter from previous Smash Bros games are returning. Every. Single. One. Ice climbers? They're back. Solid Snake? He's back. Pokemon Trainer with Squirtle and Venusaur? All back with Charizard to boot. Sonic and Ryu and Cloud and Bayonetta and Pac-Man and every other third party character? They're all back. Every clone of every character returns, every variant on every character returns, and we even got some new characters revealed (More on that in a bit.) Yes, they did this in a cheeky, sort of trollish way as well, acting like they were only going to reveal a couple entrants only to just keep going and going and going and showing EVERYONE before clarifying it really is everyone.

Furthermore, the Gamecube adapter from the WiiU era is confirmed to return (which makes me happy because I have one and four Gamecube Controllers to utilize it), eight player mode is back again, and almost everything is confirmed to be more crisp, more refined, and better for both casual and competitive play. Smash Balls and Ultimate Smash attacks have all been altered or refined to be faster and more intense so they don't take up so much time, many characters have modifications on their skills (such as Link's bombs now being remote controlled/detonated like in Breath of the Wild), and it seems that virtually every stage from prior Smash Bros games are being included.

Talk about Smash Bros Ultimate, indeed!

Beyond that, we didn't get as much in terms of new fighters so far. Sakurai even said in the package 'we put so much effort into ensuring you had the biggest roster ever that we hoped you wouldn't expect even more; that said, we still added a few.' The first was of course the Inkling, who was revealed earlier in March but now has more detail about how they work. When they ink you, you take more damage and they do eventually have to refill their ink in much the same way they do in Splatoon. Beyond that, it was made clear that character gauges and details such as 'what item villager has in his pocket' are all going to hover near your score and damage percentage.

One thing that was pointed out was that some characters are what we call 'echo' characters. These are the clones like Falco, Lucina, Dark Pit, and now Princess Daisy (who is a clone of Princess Peach with different stats and behaviour.) I'm not sure if they get their own character slots or not, but I like this either way. I like that they're acknowledging a difference between completely unique characters and clone characters will still making them their own characters.

Still have no idea how this pertains to Ganondorf, though something said in the presentation gave me the impression he may be vastly tweaked.

As an aside, I'm also quite happy to say that, while EVERY character in the game is returning, they are apparently going back to the old way of unveiling characters in that you start with only 12 of the available 64 characters and have to unlock them all through traditional means. I know it's not a big deal to many, but I loved unlocking characters gradually, over time. I fully expect to play a WHOLE LOT of smash come Dec 7th of this year!

Our final character reveal was one for the ages, a character people have been begging for since Melee: Ridley, from the Metroid games! I confess I didn't see much of how they play (most of that was saved for the post show and I had to go get groceries). That said, I think the end of the presentation and everything revealed in Smash Bros so far looks outstanding! The idea of having every character and virtually every stage is awesome! The idea of using joycons or pro controllers or gamecube controller is awesome! The reality of good or great online is encouraging (not displayed in the presentation but implied by the yearly fee on switch online). All the little tweaks, updates, or refinements are well appreciated and will go a long way to making this, at least functionally, the best Smash Bros game.

The only thing it's lacking is a story mode.

I don't even care that we might not have many new characters. I do figure we're gonna get at least 2-3 more, but right now I'm happy knowing we still get ones like Bayonetta, Cloud, and Snake. I am very happy with Nintendo's E3 overall; my only real complaint was that we didn't see more about Metroid Prime 4, Bayonetta 3, or the online/virtual console replacement. Still, Smash is my game of the show!

The game is giving me a bit of a Dragon Force vibe.

Nope, a lot of the time wasted on Smash, no new multiplaform, average annoucements

4/10 from me.

I'm not into Smash and none of the other games interested me (aside from maybe Fire Emblem), so the Direct was really boring to me, if I had to rate it I'd give it a 4/10.

Arena of Valor is salted for a fall release, does that mean we can expect the Switch to launch in China soon ?

Do people forget that Breath of the Wild was the only game Nintendo brought to E3 2016 and many people said they 'won' E3 that year? Again, quality over quantity; that is why I hold Sony and Nintendo in such high regard despite Microsoft's colossal wave of new games and reveals. 

I do think Microsoft had the show of the year (Strange since they're the only of the 3 console makers I don't much care for), but that doesn't mean Sony and Nintendo didn't also come out swinging. Again, it's a comparison of quantity vs quality, and I think the three were very similar overall in the end. 

4/10

Retro Studios game?
Metroid Prime 4?
Yoshi?
and Fire Emblem in 2019...

SSBU, though great, it's not enough.

People need to stop focusing on what wasn't there and start focusing on what was. I swear, y'all don't actually like games, you just like bitching about games.