E3: Nintendo and Sony Systems

E3 is over.  While many have suggested that other conventions and media outlets have stolen much of E3’s thunder, the annual gathering of industry giants reconfirmed its relevance this year when Sony and Nintendo chose the venue to announce their next-generation products.

No, there hasn’t been any talk of a Playstation 4, though tension over the recent string of infiltrations into the Playstation Network has almost certainly transformed this year’s spectators into a more hostile audience.  Instead, Sony unveiled their Vita handheld system.  The Vita appears to be a PSP with a different name and although it boasts a slew of impressive features, generally those kinds of bells and whistles prove to be marketing techniques that receive token attention at best after a product’s release.  That isn’t to say that a PSP2 isn’t an intriguing offering as long as Sony actually releases a library of respectable games for it.

Nintendo owned the spotlight, unveiling the Wii U, the successor to the disappointingly mild Wii.  Motion controllers are back, along with a slew of the nifty-sounding features that induce the same skepticism detailed above.  The biggest changes to the new system include apparently native 1080p HD output, and a new incredibly uncomfortable looking controller (nothing new for Nintendo) with a touchscreen in its center.  The touchscreen itself adds an element of possibility to gameplay that we could talk about in excited tones like every news outlet on the web, if we weren’t still aware of the Nintendo DS released years ago.

That being said, the DS was probably one of the best systems, handheld or otherwise, ever released, and this extra screen functionality adds a proven (not revolutionary) dimension to the system which virtually all new titles will be forced to make use of or face heavy criticism.  Is a console sequel to The World Ends With You out of reach?  If you’re up to date with Squenix news, you’ll know that their immediate future will be all about grinding out ‘traditional games’, but as soon as they recover from this self-inflicted wedgie, they and every other developer will likely be scrambling to make creative use of the dual-screen tech.