[thatmariolover]

In honest truth, Nintendo's press conference was very disheartening for me. I am hoping they have some more stuff up their sleeves or I'll be a rather disappointed fan. Nintendo took the industry by storm this generation but they can only ride that hype wave for so long and once the momentum dies it's gonna come down to the games (which to this point, haven't been stellar save for a few titles).

There have been some good games, but all in all, only a few that really stand out. Many of Nintendo's Wii tuned sequels have been hugely gimmicky. I liked Wario Ware, it was fun, but it ignored standard play style and only focused on the new controller – whereas a combination would have been more difficult, diverse, and ultimately rewarding. It also shared a problem with Mario Party: The different play-styles weren't fun. The mini-games themselves weren't bad, but they lacked diversity, and ultimately contributed to games that felt stale far more quickly than their predecessors.

On the other hand, Nintendo has Metroid, Mario, Smash Bros, and Mario Kart on the way, which should guarantee at least a steady stream of hardware/software sales. But if there isn't something planned for soon after, we're gonna hit a long three quarter waiting period until the games showcased at next E3 are released. Which leads me to my next gripe: E3.

Where does Nintendo get off showing Wii Fit as their star title – not showing Smash Bros in even a video demo – let alone a playable format? Certainly Wii Fit is a novel concept, but all the same, it's not going to hit the Mainstream the same way Wii Sports did. It's cool, it's interesting, and ultimately probably should have been done. But making it the star of Nintendo's showing at E3 was a move that leaves me with questions to the motives. Did they not realize it wasn't going to hit the mainstream crowd? Or did they really just have nothing better to show? Neither answer bodes well for Nintendo's future in the coming few years.

I guess it just becomes wait and see. As for the PS3, Sony is just silly. They continue bad mouthing the competition and talking about the PS3 as if it were the hottest gadget on the market – when their sales were bad to start with and have steadily declined since launch day. Pride and arrogance do nothing to endear people to a brand name – it simply makes their smug fanboys smugger regardless of reality.

Their SDK issues are nothing new. God of War looking better than first generation PS2 titles isn't really something to talk up. It underscores how poorly the dev tools Sony provided their programmers with were designed. And it begs the question 'why didn't they do better this time around'. They seem to have failed to recognize that hardware without the proper tools to make software is worthless. And until developer libraries are fleshed out and distributed properly it's going to be an ongoing issue.

Bah, I've said enough. It's late and I'm exhausted.