More Nintendo bullshit
OK, now I'm really pissed. As you guys all know, the Nintendo Media Summit was held two days and the information was all under embargo ... now, it turns out that the embargo has been lifted on third party info, so all the news blogs and sites that were at the event are starting to put out their updates. All good, right? Right?
Alas, no. Here's an update from all-round Nintendo veteran, Matt Casamassina from IGN:
I think everybody’s well aware that Nintendo held a games event in Seattle this week. I got back late, late last night and have since then been playing Mario Party 8 and My Word Coach on Wii and DS so that I can prep future coverage. We were initially embargoed on everything we saw at the event, including third party titles, but Nintendo suddenly said we could publish write-ups and media for the third party stuff, which is why it all went up yesterday. We’re still waiting to roll with the first party stuff. It’s coming soon, but don’t get your hopes up for any megatons. Online press were, very unfortunately, not allowed access to the game you all really want to know about. I cried, but it didn’t help.
On Friday, we will have some good coverage of a non-first party game that you should probably start getting excited about, if you haven’t already. So stay tuned for that.
One can never be too sure, but I think it's pretty damned obvious what he's talking about. What do you think?
[Via Go Nintendo]
3 comments:
Unless tomorrow is shocking, which I'm genuinely sure it won't be, I think this event was a bust.
Thinking back to your earlier post about all the conferences that took place this May, it reminds me that despite all the media and information released, there was largely nothing new, and definitely nothing MegaTON.
So, I think one of two things has happened.
1. Game companies forgot how ravenous we are (Unlikely).
2. Although it's going to be smaller, they're saving the big announcements for E3 regardless.
I think the latter seems more true, especially when we're talking about the big three companies. It just feels right to assume that Sony and Nintendo have cards up their sleeves; Microsoft, on the other hand, I'm absolutely baffled by. They have so many games already announced in their lineup, could there possibly be anything new?
Of all the small conferences (Sega, UBI, Square Enix, (Capcom?), Tecmo, Sony Gamer's Day), I've got to give it up to Square Enix for being the only company really willing to drop massive bombs at their own show. Square's conference was what, I think, all these small shows should be like if we're really moving past E3 as the debut grounds for long lead press.
I'd have to agree with you there. Re-makes or no re-makes, Square definitely knows how to get its fans excited, and in the end, they did have a fair amount of good news to share with those waiting for some major announcements from their end.
Nintendo ... I don't even see the point of this conference. Well, not for the online media anyway. It seems the Big N held this media summit almost exclusively for the print media. I'm convinced the embargo was placed in order to give the different magazines at the event enough time to prepare their editorials.
The same goes for the game Matt C. is talking about (safe to assume it's Metroid by now). It just looks like Nintendo was catering mainly to print media during most of this event ... something which is completely baffling to me. Noble, but baffling.
As for Microsoft ... what else could they possibly announce? More Live video content? A first look at Halo Wars? Sadly, Sony is going to have a lot more to show than MS is. While Microsoft might show off GTAIV and a few other big-name titles, one has to keep in mind that these are coming to the PS3 as well ... as is Bioshock in time (Unofficial blog or not, you do NOT make that big an error for no reason).
Sony, on the other hand ... they'll probably have a plethora of Japanese-created content to show off. More Home features wouldn't be much of a surprise either.
I thought the embargo idea was actually a good idea for these types of events although announcing them when the media walks through the door is a bit fucking dumb.
Whether we get hyped for the actual event or a release of articles a few days later I don't see much difference. But if it means everyone is going to get a few days to mull over and write up their impressions we should get a better quality perspective than slap dash, off the cuff, thoughts and screen shots. Looking at how things got covered I think we did see just that.
Now what I'd like is for Nintendo to be making this a regular quarterly meeting with the press. Perhaps substitute two of those with major shows but if once a quarter the press got invited to see soon to be released titles, together rather than slapping exclusives around we'd again benefit from the lack of impartiality and stop being so damn excited.
After all the only people not blowing these events out of proportion are Nintendo themselves. Perhaps familiarity will lower those expectations back to earth.
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