E3: Nintendo rules the show
If any one company is ruling the show, it's Nintendo. The final GameCube controller was on display at the show, and it has three shoulder buttons. (In a previous article, I described playing Rogue Squadron with an earlier version of the controller that had four shoulder buttons.)
Nintendo showed video footage of Super Smash Bros. Melee--the sequel to one of the most good-hearted fighting games ever made. Like the original Super Smash Bros., this is a bloodless fighting game with violence of a truly cartoon nature. The combatants in this case include Mario, Donkey Kong, Kirby, Pokemon, Princess Peach and many other classic Nintendo characters. Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of Mario, Donkey Kong, Zelda and more, got the loudest applause of the day when he demonstrated Luigi's Mansion and Pikmin.
Shigeru Miyamoto personally showed the very Ghostbusters-esque Luigi's Mansions, and Pikmin, a Lemmings-like game that combines strategy and reflexes. Greeted like a deity with applause and shouting from the audience, Miyamoto was clearly more enthusiastic about Pikmin than Luigi's Mansion. Rumor has it that he has been much more involved in the creation of Pikmin.
While Nintendo did not announce price or inventories for the Nov. 5 launch of GameCube, Nintendo executives demonstrated a clear grasp of what they need to do to succeed. Judging by the audience's enthusiastic response, Nintendo clearly won the crowd.
But Nintendo was not the only company to demonstrate a clear grasp of industry workings. Though they came off as defensive, Sony's executives also showed that they understood what they needed to do. As has been the case in past years, Sony Computer Entertainment president and COO Kazuo Hirai started the show off with a speech about the state of the video game industry and how Sony was leading it. As always, he backed his information up with numbers taken from such unimpeachable sources as the NPD Group. Hirai's predictions of uninterrupted industry dominance may be up for debate, but he backs his analysis of the present quite well.
He was followed, however, by senior vice president Jack Tretton, who was tasked with trying to show that everything has been, is, and always will be rosy for PlayStation 2.
Claiming that past accusations about poor software sales, programming problems and the overall lack of good games were "fiction," Tretton tried to set the record straight by totally ignoring it.
He did this by stating that there were loads of great games for PlayStation 2, then listing several popular original PlayStation titles such as Tomb Raider and Resident Evil.
Not only was Tretton unable to prove the fallacy of these charges against PlayStation 2, he was somewhat rebuffed when Resident Evil creator Shinji Mikami came up to discuss his latest game, The Devil May Cry. During his remarks, Mikami commented on the difficulty of working with PlayStation 2, then turned around and complimented the system for its power.