Nintendo knows the Wii U is a sales disaster.  The 3ds was not nearly as successful as the DS but still did well. They already have announced that they are working on something new with their NX project but are saying nothing about it and nothing has leaked.  Meaning Nintendo is operating under the best of circumstances. No expectations.

They opened the direct with the new reimagined Starfox Zero.  They’ve added a precision targeting mode using the gamepad. There are a ton of modes with the Arwing. It looks pretty. Its Starfox. There were no surprises because its been forever since I played Starfox and I’m happy to jump back in

Then they showed a bunch of 3DS co-op games like Legend of Zelda: Triforce Heroes which is like 4 Swords or Minish Cap but with depth. There was a port of Hyrule Warriors called Legends for 3DS. Metroid Prime Federation Forge is a 4 player co-op shooter thing and they are fine for quick little 3DS things. There was also Fire Emblem Fates which is an RPG . Never played it but its pretty and judging by all the amiibos and Fire emblem characters in Smash its pretty popular.   Zelda is this fall, Metroid, Hyrule and Fire Emblem are spring 2016.

Animal Crossing has two games coming out.  One called Happy Home Designer for 3DS and looks like you are designing building for other characters in the game.  The other game is Amiibo Festival and looks like a great way to sell Amiibos but is cut and paste Mario Party. On top of that they showed off Mario and Luigi; Paper Jam where the crashed the Paper Mario games into the regular Mario universe.  They showed a number of mechanics including multiple paper Marios, him sliding through rocks and other cool stuff that would happen with a paper character in the real world.

Next was Yoshi’s Wooly World and it looks as cute as ever.  Love the mechanic of the yarn balls and unraveling some secrets. Also that Plushy amiibo! With all the collectables it will be tough to get that 100% when it comes out on October 16

Finally Super Mario Maker. They showed it off in the Nintendo World championship but really went into the background of the roots of making a Mario level on grid paper to showing the tools in Mario Maker and how crazy they can get.  8-bit Mario amiibo was nearly as good as the Yoshi and then they have a little book with demo levels.  It has the potential to be amazing but user generated content tends to be let down by the users.  But its an incredible achievement. And I could listen to Miyamoto talk about the thought process behind Mario levels for days