The Joy-Con Segment
Look, there’s no getting around this. Of all the stuff shown at the Nintendo Switch conference, the Joy-Con stuff was easily the worst of the worst. Just when you think Nintendo had won folks over with the Switch stuff, they up and reveal that motion controls are being added via the Joy-Con. Yes, contain your excitement.
It’d be one thing if it was a simple statement, but they spent about 10 minutes on it. You’d best believe that none of it was all that engaging. Not the stuff about the glass and feeling the weight of the ice cubes, not the sizzle reel for the 1, 2, Switch. And most definitely not the presentation of their motion heavy fighter, Arms (yes, that’s its real title). One understands that Nintendo is the only one really still committed to motion controls, but even so, that just wasn’t fun to watch. Like, at all. On the “plus” side (maybe), they’re detachable, so you can play with them while lying down on your couch. Something that they conveyed with Yoshiaki Koizumi just lying down on a couch, which can’t be good for your arms.
1-2-Switch! and Arms
And speaking of 1-2 Switch, what the heck happened with that? If nothing else, it certainly had one of the weirdest openings to a game trailer in recent memory. Given the opening showed two cowboys facing off against each other in a duel, you could probably think that this was going to be some long awaited Call of Juarez sequel. Or heck, maybe even Red Steel 3, if you were feeling particularly risky.
But no, the duel instead turns out to be a selling point for the Joy-Con-focused game. Which, whatever, a cowboy duel is an alright way to get that across. But then the trailer closes off with a montage of people in silly color coded outfits (what is it with Nintendo and pastel?) performing actions with the Joy-Cons, like swordfighting, dancing, magic, and all sorts of stuff. If you can imagine what an old Wii commercial would be if it was filmed inside the set of an Old Navy, you wouldn’t be too far off the mark. Both in terms of how it looks and how dumb it looked.
Arms, meanwhile, was a thing that happened. Nintendo can do fighting games, as Pokken and the Smash Bros. series have shown us. And it’s likely that Arms will be some sort of fun. But man, that trailer just didn’t get things off on a good note; from the announcement of it being Joy-Con heavy to the little girl transforming her arms, it didn’t land with the oomph they were hoping to. Then again, looking like Mr. Fantastic’s tweaked out son likely didn’t help its odds, either.
No More Heroes Comes to the Nintendo Switch, Gets Lost in Translation
In the last third of the Nintendo Switch conference, Grasshopper’s Suda51 stepped on stage to speak. Older gamers may know him best as the man behind games like Killer7, Shadow of the Damned, and more importantly, No More Heroes. During his bit, Suda revealed that No More Heroes 3 was in development, but they had yet to decide on the title. He also went into a little bit about another game he’s working on that he hopes will be good for indie developers. That all sounds pretty cool, right? Well, it would’ve sounded cool if you actually knew what was being said.
Whether by fault of Suda or the translator, the latter just couldn’t keep up with what the famed designer was saying. The translator would just be very silent while Suda was speaking, like he was trying to catch his breath, and that certainly didn’t help. There was a very brief moment where the translator was only a few seconds behind Suda, but then he just lost the plot and it got to the point where he was still talking, even as Suda was walking off the stage. Talk about awkward.
This… Very Strange Pose
As expected, Splatoon 2 made an appearance during the Nintendo Switch announcement. The whole squid vs. kid war is still going on, natch, and there’s plenty of new weapons and maps that players will get to go at when the game comes out in the summer. But it’s hard to think about that when this whole picture up above is going on.
After the trailer plays, producer Hisashi Nogami came on stage to explain the cool hotness that’s coming to Splatoon 2. During his presentation, he makes some poses with the two real life replicas of a pair of submachine pistols new to the game called the Splat-doolies (which may be a play off some word, who knows). They get increasingly weirder to watch, with the winner being him throwing his arms out while his head is aimed downward and his body gets into a semi-dab position. It’s supposed to reflect the squid above, but even so, it’s one of those things that would make more logical sense if he were wearing a squid costume instead of regular clothes. He could also be trying to turn his body into the number ‘2,’ but that doesn’t come across well either, if true.
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