I know I said that my last blog was my final word on 2024's ersatz E3, but as they say at these conferences, I do have one more thing. It's widely observed that not having to present at E3 has been a boon for many publishers; they don't get drowned out in the clamour of trailers and keynotes, but not every developer can break from the pack. The creators in the Wholesome Direct or Black Voices in Gaming need the lights and sirens of a Summer Game Fest to get us gawking at their geegaws because their lone reach doesn't go that far. Nintendo can perform in the afterglow of the main show because they are a household name and can command the presence that comes with that acclaim. Despite that stature, the calibre of the Nintendo Directs has been all over the shop. Sometimes, they show up empty-handed. Other times, they shower us with riches. This year, we caught Nintendo on a good day.

The June Direct opened on who else but Mario and Luigi, the brothers going full Looney Tunes. If the trailer is to be believed, platforming and minigames are advancing to the forefront of their long-running RPGs. Despite the wooden boards in the logo and the name "Brothership", I wasn't getting nautical vibes from this preview, although I was getting naughty vibes as eagle-eyed viewers will have noticed the mascots' amorous interaction with a flying pig. Brothership's art style is breaking new ground for the series while remaining true to Mario's cartoon roots. Its thin outlines and cell-shading land close to the art on the Mario & Luigi boxes.

It's not an art style that just anyone can pull off as Looney Tunes: Wacky World of Sports shows. There, the borders of the characters alias and thin, and the geometry is a primitive throwback to Wii shovelware. And why did Porky Pig sound so robotic? Funko Fusion also has grainy, dirty textures that cheapen the product it's trying to hawk, and I've always recoiled from the blobby Among Us. It looks like a lower-end Flash game, and its cleansuit astronauts lack all personality. It's not a paucity of graphical power that makes your game look grubby; it's what you do with it. The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords and Metroid: Zero Mission are no spring chickens, and their sprites are gorgeous. Even Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition demonstrates the potential charm of the low-tech with help screens that look just like classic strategy guides and manuals.

Then we have The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom. You could look at the 2D Zeldas like Link to the Past and Link's Awakening (1993) and assume their visual minimalism was meant to be interpretative of a realistic fantasy kingdom as we only have a god's eye view on them, and they can only be realised through 8 or 16-bit graphics. Link's Awakening (2019) and Echoes of Wisdom take the camera down to eye level, use full-fledged 3D meshes, and still simplify their subjects, suggesting the world actually looks like a model town. While player-defined progression and experimental concepts have, up to now, been the sole domain of recent 3D Zeldas, Echoes of Wisdom allows players to hack together solutions even at a Lilliputian scale.

Nintendo's actions are prophetically forward-thinking or firmly rooted in the past with minimal in-between. At its best, their sepia-tinted vision has made them the kings of nostalgia, but at its worst, it's left their services feeling a couple of generations out of date. In an age of PlayStation Plus and Xbox Game Pass, Nintendo strikes back with Switch Online, exploiting a forty-year back catalogue that Sony and Microsoft have no equivalent to. But while Xbox and PlayStation cycle in certified crowd-pleasers each month, the base Switch Online drip feeds players underwhelming new releases. The tempting wares (e.g. Zero Mission, Four Swords) are perched on a high tier that you can only buy access to on a yearly basis. Even if there are only one or two games I want in the Switch Online Expansion Pack, I still have to fork out for the whole twelve months to get access to them. That's remembering that the service has to compete with free emulators and that the rest of the media industry has only been able to dissuade piracy by offering cheap, convenient alternatives to rips.

Surprisingly, Nintendo, which is retro gaming incarnate, currently does better with the more recent ports than the classics of the 80s and 90s. When a modern console or PC game gets shipped to the Switch, the system's handheld nature has a transformative effect on the play. Nintendo's current hardware remains a relatively low-cost podium on which to play games regardless of location, giving them a relaxed, casual feel. When looking at a port like Stray, people will say, "That'll go great on the Switch", when they don't say, "That'll port great to the PS5".

There are also countless carts that deserve to be adapted from the DS and 3DS to Nintendo's current console. Experiences from the DSs can't be fully emulated on a PC because they require a touchscreen, but they also can't be plainly refactored onto a phone or Switch because they must display on more than one screen. For some games, no system but the original can give rise to the experiences we had with them because their mechanics are intrinsically tied to the input and output conduits of their platform. Bowser's Inside Story has scenes written with the assumption that the player would be able to see Bowser's perspective on the one screen and the Mario Bros.' on the other. You cannot replicate the game feel of Metroid Prime: Hunters without the player aiming using the stylus on the lower screen and perceiving the environment through the upper screen.

Yet, for countless games on the 3DS and DS, the upper screen is where the action was happening, and the lower screen was relegated to being a monitor for the map and various menus. So, you can recut those games to fit other platforms by having the monitor filled either by what would have been on the upper screen or the lower screen at any one time. However, that adaptation requires work on the software, and it's legally grey, if not illegal, for anyone but Nintendo to perform that work. Hence, the need for releases like Luigi's Mansion 2 on the Switch: the game where the ghostbusting got a whole lot goofier.

At long last, the console is also receiving Metroid Prime 4: Beyond. Eight years it's been since the announcement of that game. Eight years! We all know Miyamoto's aphorism that a bad game is bad forever, but a delayed game can be good eventually. It gets cited whenever a title flops on launch, but Miyamoto probably didn't say that, and the truth is a little more complicated than that dictum makes it sound, anyway. Many developers do not have the resources to develop a game indefinitely; it has to come out when it has to come out. For those studios that are flushed with cash, they have investors who want to see a return on that investment or at least cut their losses after their capital being suspended in limbo for a while. We'll see the value of Prime 4 when it's finally let out of the cage, but if it is a banger, then it's not just down to Nintendo having the wisdom to delay it but also the surplus capital.

It is likely that we are in the run-up to the Switch 2, and in times past, this transitional period between consoles would see scant significant announcements. But even during the switch between Switches, Nintendo is enduring, aiming for a continuation of their momentum between platforms. For all the areas in which they've felt stuck in the past, in that sense, they've come a long way. Thanks for reading.