All Quiet On The Eastern Front
Nintendo stand is peaceful Yin to Microsoft's chaotic Yang at E3.
In stark contrast to the chaos on the Microsoft stand, the Nintendo booth is quiet, orderly and relaxed. Inevitably, the big crowd-pleaser is the GameCube, new logo and all. There is something about the machine when it is running that, if your faith in gaming ever felt like wavering, will restore your trust. It has been done right. The hardware, petite and functional, sits well with the excellent standards of graphics and gameplay Nintendo is capable of.
First-party Nintendo games in playable form on the Game Cube are: Luigi’s Mansion, Pikmin, Super Smash Brothers: Melee, NBA, WaveRace, Star Wars Rogue, Kameo, Eternal Darkness, and Star Fox.
All games are impressive at every level. Worthy of special note is Miyamoto’s latest offering, Pikmin. Another chance encounter, this time with the legend himself, allowed us to see Miyamoto showing a camera crew how to play the game. Essentially a strategy game, Pikmin follows the story of a cutesy spaceman, crashlanded on a strange planet. You have to locate all the different parts of the ship to escape by catching and training the plant-like creatures, known as Pikmin, and then oversee their activities.
The GameCube controller is as comfortable to handle as you could imagine. At no point do you doubt that it will enable you to play games to the best of your ability. As with Nintendo games of the past, the control methods for all GameCube games on display were highly polished. In fact, once you got over the initial thrill of actually holding one, you barely noticed it was there. The button layout is perfect, with the sticks a delight to use. Luigi’s Mansion is the game that best demonstrates the controller’s refinement. One stick moves Luigi, the other adjusts the camera angle. And it works really well.
Nintendo was eager to show off the working hardware. We were whisked behind the scenes and treated to a demonstration of one of the little discs being put into a console, said console being turned on and a game being played. It was not mentioned that Microsoft’s stand was powered by the Xbox Alpha#2 development kit.
Of the two new contenders to enter the home console arena, it seems that Nintendo’s time-served expertise is starting to show. To really impress a load of pretty sceptical game journalists is no mean feat, but Nintendo managed it with ease. Microsoft has some catching up to do.
First-party Nintendo games in playable form on the Game Cube are: Luigi’s Mansion, Pikmin, Super Smash Brothers: Melee, NBA, WaveRace, Star Wars Rogue, Kameo, Eternal Darkness, and Star Fox.
All games are impressive at every level. Worthy of special note is Miyamoto’s latest offering, Pikmin. Another chance encounter, this time with the legend himself, allowed us to see Miyamoto showing a camera crew how to play the game. Essentially a strategy game, Pikmin follows the story of a cutesy spaceman, crashlanded on a strange planet. You have to locate all the different parts of the ship to escape by catching and training the plant-like creatures, known as Pikmin, and then oversee their activities.
The GameCube controller is as comfortable to handle as you could imagine. At no point do you doubt that it will enable you to play games to the best of your ability. As with Nintendo games of the past, the control methods for all GameCube games on display were highly polished. In fact, once you got over the initial thrill of actually holding one, you barely noticed it was there. The button layout is perfect, with the sticks a delight to use. Luigi’s Mansion is the game that best demonstrates the controller’s refinement. One stick moves Luigi, the other adjusts the camera angle. And it works really well.
Nintendo was eager to show off the working hardware. We were whisked behind the scenes and treated to a demonstration of one of the little discs being put into a console, said console being turned on and a game being played. It was not mentioned that Microsoft’s stand was powered by the Xbox Alpha#2 development kit.
Of the two new contenders to enter the home console arena, it seems that Nintendo’s time-served expertise is starting to show. To really impress a load of pretty sceptical game journalists is no mean feat, but Nintendo managed it with ease. Microsoft has some catching up to do.
Companies:
Microsoft
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