"Winers."

So all is said and done at Nintendo's E3 presser. Here were my thoughts:

Great on the hardware end, below average on software. Animal Crossing was something we all knew about, so that wasn't a big deal. Wii Music is exciting, but the IGN guys are talking it down pretty badly. I disagree with them fundamentally, which deserves a seperate post (which I'll make later this week).

Still, we expected a Kid Icarus game, and maybe some news of something else, anything else. It seems, though, that the AAA games just aren't ready for prime time yet. They are clearly in development, but they are not ready for imminent, 2008 release.

On the hardware front, I thought Nintendo had a great conference. I'm pumped about Motion Plus, and the possibilities it can provide. I'm also excited about the voice chat solution. That's 2 major solutions to issues we'd been discussing on this blog for months and months. I only expected one solution to be unveiled, and that was the storage space problem; so I'm pleasantly surprised that we have two big items coming out on the hardware side.

So, all in all, there is plenty to be happy about. But you wouldn't know it from the internets. My goodness, the forums that I lurk at are foaming at the mouth. It seems the word on the street is:

1. No hardcore games announced, other than Animal Crossing.

That's a legit beef. Let's hope for more such announcements later in the year.

2. Motion Plus is what should have been released a year and a half ago.

This is crap. A company tries totally untested tech, on a console that nobody thinks can sell, so it is understandable that they would be conservative. Now that they have succeeded, they are expanding the capabilities of the console, even when they don't actually have to yet. They could have waited on Wii 2.0 for such changes. I don't buy this gripe, and I think it is hogwash.

All in all, the amount of bile on the net is sickening- let's get a grip, folks. There was plenty of good stuff here, and some of the things you wanted to see were probably just too early in development. That isn't to say Nintendo had a great conference- no, I'd give it about a C. But it simply is not the dismal failure some seem to think it is.