As we near the summer, gamers start to froth at the mouth at the approaching E3 convention. Every game developer puts their best foot forward and shows off what they have coming this year and what's in development for the future.

As a life-long Nintendo fan, their E3 presentations have been hit-or-miss. During the Wii days, many E3's were filled with waggle games aimed at casual gamers. Who can forget the atrocious presentation of Wii Music, where grown adults stood on stage in front of thousands of people and farted around on Wii controllers as if they were musical instruments?

With the runaway success of the Switch, Nintendo fans were hyped up for this E3. As Reggie would say "my body is ready." The Switch is doing exceptionally well and we're now in the second year of this console's life cycle. The big games in Nintendo's other franchises will surely start popping up soon, right?

No. This conference was a rollercoaster of elation followed by frustration and eventually, fanboy rage. I was planning to do a highlights recap today, but I think I'll save that for tomorrow and use today to vent my frustration.

A good start

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The presentation started out very promising, with an unannounced mech game that looked like they threw Virtual ON and Zone of the Enders in a blender, followed by footage of a new Xenoblade title and then an introduction by Reggie. Next was more info about the two new Pokemon games coming later this year, a new Mario Party announcement and wonderful looking new Fire Emblem title. It was going great!

But that was the peak of the show.

After a couple of big third party announcements that were heavily rumored (Fortnite and Dragon Ball Fighters Z), they moved over to talking about the new Smash Bros. game. And that was it.

Roughly half of the presentation was dedicated to Smash Bros., which in a nutshell is Smash Bros. for Wii U with all the DLC from that game plus every fighter who's appeared in the past. Just two new characters will be added, the Inklings from Splatoon (which we knew about) and the big reveal was Ridley from Metroid. Not only did they mention every single fighter, but they went into detail on changes to each fighter, new stages, etc.

After the Ridley reveal, the presentation was over.

Urge to kill...rising...

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This should have been Nintendo at its best, showing fan favorite games that were in development or more details on stuff they announced a year ago. Headed into their second year, the system should really be hitting its stride.

Where was Metroid Prime 4, Bayonetta 3 and Yoshi? What do we have to do to get a new Animal Crossing, Pikmin, F-Zero or Paper Mario? Where's that full-blown Pokemon game? How about AAA third party support? I was really hoping for a Fallout game (especially after the multiple other ports from Bethesda and the fact that Fallout Shelter landed on the Switch eShop a couple of days ago).

Smash-fatigue

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I love me some Smash Bros., but what we're getting is basically a port of the game I was playing four years ago on the Wii U with some added older content. This would have been an absolutely amazing Nintendo Direct, but when it took up half of their E3 presentation it started to feel like Nintendo really didn't have anything else to fill the time with.

They have to do a better job of pleasing their fans and E3 is not the time to do something like this. You started out brilliantly and what would have been a fanboy-pleasing reveal went over like a fart in church after sitting through 20 minutes of incremental Smash Bros. updates.

In conclusion

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While this is far from the dark days of the Wii presentations, this was a tremendous letdown. With such a massive library of beloved franchises, there should be far more in development at Nintendo than what they showed us. Nintendo fans are the most loyal and passionate group of gamers in the industry and we will buy more games if you develop more games. The disappointment is palpable, after doing the rounds on various gaming news outlets.

You've got to do better than this Nintendo. You have momentum on your side, but presentations like today is how you screw it up.

Thanks for reading. As always, upvotes, resteems and comments are appreciated!

_{^{Cover Image Sources: Masters Men and Logok}}