Overshadowed at E3, Nintendo Plays It As Safe As Possible

Super Mario 3D World for Wii U. Image courtesy Nintendo

LOS ANGELES — Were you looking for big news from Nintendo at this year’s E3? Well, that princess is in another castle.

Nintendo’s message at this year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo would seem to be that the company is playing it as safe as possible. It’s rushing to have new entries in the Super Mario, Legend of Zelda and Mario Kart series on shelves as quickly as possible, but showing nothing radically different than what’s worked in the past. It showed off its new projects in a Nintendo Direct live-streaming video, forgoing the traditional press conference, this morning.

Super Mario 3D World is the next game from the team that did the brilliant Super Mario Galaxy games, but it isn’t one — it’s another four-player riff on Mario, something that’s already been explored on Wii U. While I do appreciate that Nintendo has finally added Princess Peach into the cast of playable characters, did we need another four-player game in place of a traditional single-player adventure?

Likewise, if you were hoping that Retro Studios would be reinventing another Nintendo franchise the way it did Metroid Prime, or (gasp!) creating a totally new one, what it’s actually doing is a direct, identical-looking sequel to Donkey Kong Country Returns.

Mario Kart 8 is Mario Kart, again — a huge seller on Wii and Nintendo 3DS but nothing you haven’t played before.

Nintendo did show a new trailer of X, the new RPG from the creator of Xenoblade Chronicles, but we don’t know if this will be playable on the show floor. It is scheduled to ship in 2014, alongside a new version of the Super Smash Bros. fighting game series.

With Microsoft and Sony lobbing giant announcements of exclusive games and features for their pricey, flashy next-generation consoles Xbox One and PlayStation 4, news of these new machines is dominating the show here at E3. Low sales of Wii U and relative lack of interest from third-party software publishers means that Nintendo was going to have a hard time standing out at this year’s show.

Instead it seems to be putting the emphasis on games that have sold very well for it in the past, to try to paint the picture of Wii U as a sleeping tiger: It may not have games now, but in 2013 and 2014 it will have must-have software.

The question is, must Wii U owners have what are effectively the same games they’ve just recently enjoyed on Wii and Nintendo 3DS, not so very long ago? When does that well run dry?