Nerd Rage - Update
Have Your Cake and Eat It Too

Friday
June 8th, 2012

Those who were sick of the Avengers story arc can rejoice in a non-sequitur this week. And (spoiler alert) next week.

Don't forget to check out my most recent comic for Dorkly!

This year's E3 was not particularly exciting (which worked well for me, considering a new Metroid reveal would have made this week's comic a lot less funny). Microsoft reminded us, once again, that they make Halo and showed off Smart Glass. Sony demoed a book and showed of their clone of Super Smash Bros. Nintendo tried to prove they're catching up, by integrating online access and social networking, then showed us Nintendo Land, Nintendo Land, and more Nintendo Land.

I have little hope for Sony's Playstation All-Stars Battle Royale. With only six characters known, Sony's big reveal fell short with me by introducing one character absolutely everyone expected (Nathan Drake) and one from a third party (Bioshock's Big Daddy), leaving me wondering if even Sony feels confident enough in their catalog of recognizable characters. More insulting in their step-by-step replication of the Smash bros. formula is that the game's Youtube trailer was initially only tagged with three Nintendo-related tags.

Nintendo, on the other hand, demonstrates that they're not sure how to handle E3. On one hand they want to cater to the 'core' gamers. These are the people that kept them alive during the GameCube years. They're pushing out a mid-generation console with updated graphic power and a greater online presence. They then proceed to spend most of their conference explaining simplistic minigames from the makers of Wii Play. The closest we got to a non-casual announcement was Pikmin 3 (which looks great). Almost everything else from Nintendo has already been shown. They got through four difference conferences before someone thought to mention Fire Emblem: Awakening would get a US release.