KoopaTV's Electronic Arts E3 2018 Conference Live Reactions

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - The first E3 press conference of 2018!

This is it. The start of E3 2018! We are starting with what is historically the worst company to get an E3 conference, Electronic Arts. Will the company that is solely responsible for making E3 a multi-calendar-week affair continue their terribleness, or will they pleasantly surprise us?

(Take a wild guess before you read the log. You'll probably be right.) 

We're joined by myself, RawkHawk2010, and Kamek in our first reaction log of E3! (And also the first E3 that we're conducting via Discord.)

Also, check out our super handy-and-dandy KoopaTV E3 Weeks 2018 Schedule here!

E3 Weeks 2018 Schedule!

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - Your hub for everything Electronic Entertainment Expo, 2018!

Welcome to the finest place on the Internet for anyone who wants to follow the events of the Electronic Entertainment Expo, or E3. This is the biggest gaming event of the year. This is where all the gaming publishers go and announce what's coming. Big waves.

KoopaTV's staffers are dedicating our time and energy to bringing you the E3 coverage you deserve — with truth and levity — so you don't have to watch it all yourself. Or, if you do watch it all, you can still read our coverage anyway. We have interesting perspectives. Plus, this is a fantastic historical document.

And so, without further ado, here is the logo we'll have during E3 Weeks 2018:

This year's KoopaTV E3 Weeks logo was made by Ludwig and edited by Rawk.
(Rawk did everything related to Miles Edgeworth.)
Click here for an explanation of the logo.

If you wish to watch all of the action as it unfolds, head to twitch.tv/twitch (all the conferences) and twitch.tv/nintendo (Nintendo Treehouse Live and tournament events). Alternatively, keep it to KoopaTV, since we will be reaction-logging everything! (Except for the semifinals of the Splatoon 2 World Championship, as decided by you guys.)

We're Looking Forward to ACES and ATTORNEYS This E3 2018!

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - Aces Attorneys.

No one has asked me this year what I'm looking forward to for E3 2018. I assure you, that is not because my opinion has devalued in any way. People just assume that everyone's attention will be monopolised on “Super Smash Bros. game for the Nintendo Switch system.”

To that assumption, this website has an...

OBJECTION!

You should not ignore the fact that Mario Tennis Aces will play a decent-sized role in E3 2018 this year, with it featuring in the Nintendo New York store's plans. We loved the demo for Mario Tennis Aces and very much look forward to its release later this month. Since Nintendo went out and said that Mario Tennis Aces is key to the Nintendo Switch's success in the fiscal year between March 2018 and March 2019, then they'll want to promote it a lot at the biggest gaming event of the year.

You know which company's executives also mentioned a series we're excited for, that has a game releasing on the Nintendo Switch in that same fiscal year time period? CAPCOM. The game series? Ace Attorney. Whatever Ace Attorney presence that is coming soon hasn't officially been announced yet. E3 2018 is the perfect time to do that.

So. E3 2018. Tennis Aces and Ace Attorney. We may even get representatives from both in “Super Smash Bros. game for the Nintendo Switch system” with playable Waluigi and any representation of Phoenix Wright.

I will now have the rest of this article comparing Mario Tennis Aces and the Ace Attorney series. Get ready for some puns! And similarities.

Sushi Striker Needs 3DS Controls

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - Switch Sushi Striker isn't satisfactory.

If you don't remember Sushi Striker: The Way of Sushido from last year's E3 2017, that's okay. It was originally announced just for the Nintendo 3DS, but is now coming out on both 3DS and Nintendo Switch on June 8. It's an action-puzzle game where you connect moving plates of sushi on lanes to accumulate the plates so you can throw them at your opponent. When you connect the sushi plates, you're canonically eating the sushi. There's a whole story and a song that goes with the game, but I'm more worried about something fundamental: the controls.

Sorry, Nintendo Switch News application. This is a false choice. One of those control styles is completely nonviable.

Two weeks ago, Nintendo released a demo of Sushi Striker: The Way of Sushido on the Nintendo eShop. I downloaded it on the Nintendo Switch, and found using the control stick for a game that is clearly meant for touch screens to be torturous, though I got to the end of the demo and wanted to keep playing since the demo ended on a cliffhanger. A shame about those controls, since the game seems to be otherwise charming. Oh well, I thought. Let's go download the 3DS demo and try that.

But there is no 3DS demo. It's a Switch-only demo. Why is there a demo only for the console that the game is an inferior experience on? Could it be because of this:

Don't Judge a Game by Its Art: Pokémon Quest Is Even WORSE Than It Looks

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - Let's finish talking about this crap game really quick.

The very first, and only, words I've written about Pokémon Quest is that it looks hideous and looks blocky, and that its art style sucks. All of that was a visceral reaction to its art style. But people, including myself, make a point about how — as Nintendo fans, we do not, or should not — judge games just by their graphics.

Point taken. So I downloaded Pokémon Quest on my Nintendo Switch and played the game. It's even worse than it looks. It turns out that it's really stretching the definition of an interactive experience.

Censored cursing is pretty much my reaction to the game.

Any comparison between Pokémon Rumble and Pokémon Quest needs to take a very important difference into account. Yes, both games involve sub-standard graphical styles. Both involve Pokémon going through maps with enemy waves and two moves. Both de-emphasise hanging onto individual Pokémon and getting rid of weak ones to acquire resources.

But only Pokémon Quest has automatic gameplay. Everything in Pokémon Rumble is controlled by you. ...Pokémon Quest is not.

Mario Tennis Aces Pre-Launch Online Tournament — Very Convincing Experience!

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - Mario Tennis Aces has been promoted from meme to real purchase contender.

Once upon a time (a little over a month ago), Nintendo described Mario Tennis Aces as a “key” and “major” title in their presentation overlooking the fiscal year from March 2018 to March 2019. I thought it was such a lame claim that I didn't even mention Mario Tennis Aces in the article.

From June 1 to June 3, the Nintendo Switch hosted a Mario Tennis Aces online tournament. It was sort of like a Splatoon Global Testfire or ARMS Global Testpunch, but much more engaging for reasons I'll discuss later in this article. This was the public's first experience with Mario Tennis Aces, and hey, it was free, so we all tried that. And it was... amazing. Two weeks ago I wrote that developer Camelot needed to rebuild their credibility. I say they have.

KoopaTV's May 2018 Review Newsletter

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - KoopaTV's May was awesome, even if it felt very short-lived.

May. Very fast month. Now it's June. That's E3 month. The Electronic Entertainment Expo (that's what E3 stands for, folks!) is the single biggest gaming industry event every year. As a website that talks about said industry every day, it's the month with the most eyeballs on our site.

And yet, this newsletter is about the month of MAY. To KoopaTV, May is more than just “that month that precedes June.” May is an important month for KoopaTV, and we hope that we showed that off by our diverse and awesome range of articles.

Top Five Recommended KoopaTV Articles of May 2018

Top five time. All of KoopaTV's articles are worth reading, and I think the staff outdid ourselves with the excellent content this May. I hope you agree. Check out these five examples of greatness, in chronological order:

The Koopa Bros. Have Been Compromised By Nintendo Labo

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - There aren't bad bananas in every bunch, but for this bunch? Yeah. Bad.

Remember the Koopa Bros.? They starred in Paper Mario. ...I also wrote about the Koopa Bros. just last week, so yeah, you better remember them. I compared them favourably to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, who now have the distinction of being the subject of an article five weeks in a row. Can we get rid of these guys?

...Can we also get rid of the Koopa Bros.? KoopaTV has been investigating the incident where “TROJAN BOWSER”, posing as King Bowser Koopa, declared the end of KoopaTV in favour of a new site, LaboTV. We concluded that the Nintendo Labo itself was behind this corrosive activity — anything made of cardboard is susceptible to the Labo's control.

The best way to avoid having your constructed cardboard turn rogue is to avoid constructing cardboard to begin with. But why did TROJAN BOWSER exist at all? Well, through our investigations, we've found out that the Koopa Bros. created the cardboard TROJAN BOWSER — in a completely unauthorised action.

The Koopa Bros. even lied to the enemy about King Bowser's opinion on TROJAN BOWSER.
(He never saw it, so he never loved it. Also, I don't trust double exclamation points.)

Pokémon 2018 Conference: Pokémon Quest, Pokémon: Let's Go, and the 2019 Future...

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - Thoughts on everything Pokémon, going back decades.

Last night, The Pokémon Company had a really important press conference about videogames that we are to expect from the Pokémon franchise this year and next. Here is the full conference, on video, with an English voiceover:

(Here is the official written summary if you don't want to watch the whole thing, though some things I write about only come from the full video.)

The central narrative here is what Pokémon Company Tsunekazu Ishihara says at the beginning: Pokémon GO has apparently been downloaded over 800 million times. Try to wrap your mind around that enormous number. It absolutely dwarfs the number of people who have interacted with any other Pokémon medium, be it the games, manga, cards, anime, whatever. That's crazy, but also very unfortunate. I'll get into why throughout this article, which is handily divided into sections!

Star Wars Fatigue vs. Super Mario Fatigue

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - Fatigue is real.

Back in the early Wii U days, Nintendo scholars were floating around the idea of “Mario fatigue.” That's the idea that Nintendo was releasing too many Super Mario platformers in a short amount of time. Spin-offs were one thing (and the GameCube notably had many of those in a short period of time), but platformers were supposed to be standard-setting events that influenced spin-offs to come. Big platformer release, then spin-offs to maintain the momentum, then another big platformer. That changed in the late 2000s and early 2010s. Especially with all the so-called “New” series of platformers (four in all — not even counting New Super Luigi U) along with two Super Mario Galaxy games, Super Mario 3D Land, and Super Mario 3D World. Eight games in as many years. (2006 to 2013.)

People tracked the fatigue by noting that franchise sales were decreasing over time, as people steadily got fed Mario platformer after Mario platformer. The originality of the game design and artistic assets was taking a hit. The fatigue didn't go away until Nintendo took a break and then released something completely different, with Super Mario Odyssey on the Nintendo Switch. Now it's the best-selling game on the Switch.

Look how CONDENSED that purple box is.
(Timeline creation credit: Wikipedia.)

That brings me to the other half of the article title: Star Wars.