And for reference, here are my reviews of 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010. This year I’m adding the stipulation that I won’t factor in multiplatform showings, since as impressive as Modern Warfare 3 and BioShock Infinite looked, that has no bearing on the relative fortunes of the consoles on which they were demonstrated.

So, in chronological order…

Microsoft

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

Last year, I wasn’t happy with the first look at real-life Kinect stuff, but I gave it a pass because I was confident that Microsoft knows its market – the people who made the Xbox a success where other ventures had failed. Now, I’m not so sure. How many times during that conference was something that looked interesting unveiled, only for someone to come out and sacrifice their dignity by squatting, hopping, waving and – shudder – fist-bumping in front of thousands of people? Ryse (formerly Codename Kingdoms), which was last year positioned as something new from Crytek for the Xbox core audience has suddenly become an on-rails Kinect game. Fable? An on-rails Kinect game. Ditto Star Wars, Sesame Street… and I have to say I’m nervous after seeing the Master Chief floating through an exploding ship in a fashion not far removed from what a bunch of avatars were doing in Disneyland Adventures not long before.

I’m probably just being paranoid on that one. There’s no way that Microsoft would risk a valuable and popular franchise with that kind of nonsense, is there? Wait… what was that Fable game again?

Back in my territory, Gears 3 looks good, but it’s Gears 3. It’s not going to blow any minds after anyone who’s interested has already played the beta, if not the two previous games, and let’s not forget that this is the second E3 for a game that was originally going to have been long out by now. It’s not new.

So with Halo 4 only present in CG form and a remake of the first Halo hardly likely to win over anyone, I guess it falls to Forza 4, then. In fairness it did look gorgeous, with nary an embarrassing Kinect demo in sight, and after Gran Turismo dropped the ball there’s a big opportunity for Microsoft and Turn 10 to nab that ‘real driving simulator’ label. Not that it matters to me, though. As I’ve said many times in the past, I couldn’t care less about driving simulators and need my virtual driving heavily diluted with arcade action. Bring back Bizarre Creations and Project Gotham, I say.

D

Sony

Sony’s offering was better than Microsoft’s, sure, but that doesn’t mean it’s any easier to sound excited. On the PS3 front, putting aside re-releases and Move games, I make it Uncharted 3, Ruin, Sly Cooper: Thieves In Time and Starhawk. The former and latter are looking excellent and I loved their respective predecessors, but we already knew about them. The others? Meh. I’m sure they’ll be perfectly good but I can take them or leave them.

Coupled with Microsoft’s damp squib, it seriously seems like this generation is running on fumes. Whenever the PS4 and next Xbox turn up, we don’t appear to be in danger of having another PS2, still receiving significant games after the release of its successor.

But of course, the big deal was the first E3 for what was formerly known as the NGP: PlayStation Vita. Strange name, but it makes a break from the PSP and it’s of secondary importance to what is an impressive piece of hardware. The graphics it’s pushing look superb, and the cloud functionality brings the niche connectivity features between the PS3 and PSP into a realm where they might actually get used, as long as its utility isn’t going to be predicated on buying two versions of the same game.

It’s said, however, that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, and that’s exactly what Sony is doing with the Vita. Even as someone who likes the PSP and still buys games for it, and with the 3DS not so far setting the world alight, it’s an extremely powerful handheld that’s hosting pocket versions of big-console games, and it didn’t work last time. Looking at Uncharted: Golden Abyss, we’ve even got the banner franchise being farmed out to a minor first-party studio. I’d like to be proven wrong, and I’d like to be able to play it for more than three hours without charging, but I’m not expecting either prediction to go my way.

Based purely on the fact that Sony’s conference wasn’t entirely focused on utter shite, it gets bumped up two grades. Then gets one taken away for not featuring The Last Guardian.

C

Nintendo

If big hopes were on Nintendo with the knowledge that it was to unveil new hardware, they were only enhanced by the other platform holders’ failure. And like many people, I came away disappointed here as well.

First, the other stuff, though. It generally takes a lot for Nintendo to get me excited because I’m a bit bored of another Mario Kart, another 2D Mario, and so on. And don’t get me started on bloody Smash Bros. I’m not yet burned out on Star Fox and I’ll always love Zelda – especially when I’m getting a free one for my under-utilised DSi – so I’ll give them those two.

To be honest, I’m still digesting the Wii U and wondering what to think. I’m generally positive, which may surprise some, even if some subsequent revelations have dampened its gloss somewhat, but we’re going on the press conference, and that was disappointing. I don’t know anyone who didn’t leave with questions, including whether or not it was even a standalone console. It was a failure of communication and, to be honest, the aforementioned disclosures have left me with questions over how much of the omitted information was deliberate. Time will have to tell because it’s certainly not coming this year, but it’ll be nice to have the option of playing Nintendo games alongside half-decent third-party offerings. Until the new Xbox also comes out in late 2012 and restores the console power status quo, of course.

Sadly, the announcement that I’m most looking forward to trading for my hard-earned currency is the Zelda symphony CD. That makes it extremely underwhelming, but that’s one more new announcement that I’m excited about than the other two, so Nintendo comes out on top by default.

C+

This has to be the most disappointing E3 in years. The three conferences were average at absolute best and I struggle to think of one new announcement that interests me. Also, gone seems to be the pleasure in finding obscure new announcements hidden away in the nooks of the gaming news sites, because there aren’t any – maybe we’re finally seeing the impact of every studio that doesn’t make nothing but million-sellers closing down. Running on fumes doesn’t even begin to describe this generation from the looks of things.

So without further ado, in chronological order…

Microsoft

To be honest, I got exactly what I expected from Microsoft. We all knew that there was going to be a huge focus on Natal Kinect and that was borne out. It’s undeniably technically impressive, but the lineup doesn’t interest me in the slightest so far. My antipathy towards the Wii is no real secret, and so it’s going to take something special, likely from an established developer known for great ‘normal’ games, but for the time being I’m happy to be an observer. I can see people who are in the intended audience being really impressed by it.

If we’re talking stuff outside hardcore games, ESPN was the most impressive thing. It’s almost certainly not coming here, but it’s potentially the definitive way to watch sports, and it’s included in an existing Xbox Live subscription. I’m a football fan, and having a library of classic matches as well as HD streaming live stuff with all those community features would be fantastic. Imagine getting a similar thing with the BBC iPlayer, for example.

As for the real games, there weren’t really any surprises for the most part, but what I saw impressed me. Gears 3 looked like Gears 3, and Halo: Reach really looked like a proper next-gen Halo game. Crytek is apparently making a God of War game as well, and MGS: Rising looked decent, albeit like it’s reviving something that should now be finished with. That interests me still, as even if it’s part of a genre that I don’t often get on with, those cutting mechanics look incredibly cool. Could be some real potential there.

Echoes of Sega’s E3 1995 Saturn announcement with the unveiling of the new machine, which perhaps isn’t the kind of memories to be dredging up, but you can’t deny the effectiveness of showing off the reduced size of your redesign by having it on stage inside the old one the whole time. It’s been much-needed on the technical side for a while, and I’ll certainly be tempted to upgrade at the next price drop. I’m liking the look of it, actually.

But the overall impression was underwhelming. Halo: Reach was the only game that really got me excited, and that’s… well, Halo. A Halo game that was announced over a year ago and that most of us have already played, in fact. I’m writing this section on Monday night before either of the other two conferences so I could be proven completely wrong here, but I expect Nintendo and Sony to blow away the paltry number of new announcements to appeal to gamers, and they’ll almost certainly be exclusives, which Call of Duty and Metal Gear Solid aren’t. There was a lot of flash there for really not that many new games for 2010 and 2011.

So a fairly unimpressive line-up of new games with some intriguing but unproven technology means that this conference scores a…

D

Nintendo

Low expectations have become the norm for Nintendo’s annual E3 showing, but I’m happy to say that this year’s offering was a pleasant surprise. Maybe there’s less lustre on some of Nintendo’s well-worn franchises – I’m surprisingly nonplussed about new Zelda games nowadays – but new announcements like the beautiful-looking Kirby’s Epic Yarn and the potentially great Donkey Kong Country Returns – that looks to have enough going for it to elevate it above DKC’s status as the red-headed stepchild of Nintendo platformers – left me with a positive impression of Nintendo’s upcoming slate for the first time in ages.

Previously announced games like Metroid: Other M and the new Golden Sun looked decent too, and some of those are coming out pretty imminently. With nothing as horribly embarrassing as the Wii Music announcement, even on the casual end of the scale – Miyamoto talking like he was in Wayne’s World 2 came close, admittedly – there’s very little to whip gamers into a fanboy rage about. Maybe it’s just the way that Microsoft hoovered up all that negative energy yesterday, or maybe Nintendo threw its base a bone by showing games with genuine universal appeal. Even if it’s too much to hope for that we’ll see a permanent return to the Nintendo of old, there’s plenty of reason for optimism there.

I should probably expand on Zelda rather than glossing over probably the biggest software announcement. Putting aside the technical issues during the demonstration, there was a dizzying number of nifty ideas on display in a short period of time – the usual Zelda drip feed of new abilities will be entirely necessary – and I really liked the art style, somewhere between the relative realism of Twilight Princess and Ocarina of Time and the cel-shaded look of Wind Waker and Phantom Hourglass. I haven’t gone near a Zelda since Link’s Wii debut, but this will almost certainly change that.

And then there was the 3DS. Hardly a surprise and really impossible to make any judgement about without seeing it and the effectiveness of its primary gimmick, I’m nonetheless certainly on board. It seems like a proper hardware upgrade rather than the stopgap that’s been the DSi – I’m really regretting spending my money on that now – and there seems to be extremely strong software support and great potential applications with 3D movies and imagery. It’s pulling in names and developers that haven’t been associated with the DS, it’s got Ocarina of Time, and the fanboys can finally shut up about Kid Icarus. Also, with versions of MGS3 and Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, it’s surely the definitive system for stealth games, because it doesn’t get better than those two. Whenever demo kiosks start showing up I’ll be right down there to have a look. On current hype levels it could be the first Nintendo machine that I buy on day one since the original DS, and the first that hasn’t disappointed me early on since the GBC.

Nintendo left me really optimistic about its future, which is something that I haven’t been able to say for a while. It’s not going to make my Wii my number one system, but I’m definitely going to be hooking it back up soon. This conference gets a…

A

Sony

Sony’s was an odd one. By far the longest of the conferences and with a sizeable list of games, also easily topping Microsoft’s showing for hardcore gamers, there wasn’t all that much to get excited about unless you’re investing in a 3D TV. Killzone 3 looked like Killzone, but that comparison is not as much of a compliment as it was when similarly applied to Halo in my Microsoft roundup. inFamous also returned after a pre-E3 unveiling of its sequel by somehow becoming even more bland. All it lacked was Resistance 3 to complete the list of unlikeable Sony franchises that get me grinding my teeth with passive-aggressive dislike.

Even so, out of the HD twins, this was by far the superior conference. We had EA showing off some staggering-looking new games – Microsoft might have got the sales coup with exclusive Call of Duty content, but Medal of Honor is what I want to play more – and the Valve announcement was actually, in my opinion, one of the bigger ones of the show. Not that Portal 2 is coming because that wouldn’t have surprised me anyway, but that Steamworks and features like Steam Cloud were on the way: those are features that aren’t possible on a system as locked down as the 360, and if they work with the PC/Mac Steam client – Steam Play with the PS3 is surely too much to ask, but I’d love to be proven wrong – we could be a serious step towards the one console future, with Microsoft’s system firmly on the outside looking in.

Oh, and it showed the Top Gear Test Track with the Stig. Win.

Of course, Sony had its own motion-control solution, and it’s an utterly shameless design rip-off. Nothing on it that I wouldn’t prefer to play with a controller, and it’s not even as technically impressive as Kinect. It has buttons, you say? Nothing’s stopping developers from letting us use a controller while using Kinect, and a 360 controller doesn’t look like a sex toy. And that Sorcery game really needs to link up with EA and the Harry Potter licence.

I still liked a significant chunk of what I saw, so it’s just a shame that it was padded out with innumerable montages and unlikeable skits, some of which were up there (down there?) with All I Want For Xmas is a PSP, and a suspiciously enthusiastic crowd – it kind of lost me when a promotion with Coca-Cola was greeted with whoops and cheers – because what’s there was quite good. Chop half an hour out of it and let the games speak for themselves and you’ve got a very effective show with a lot less twattishness.

Twisted Metal was the big surprise, and although it didn’t make up for the notable absence of last year’s ‘one more thing’ The Last Guardian, I’m a big fan of that series and I’m looking forward to the PS3 one immensely. The on-stage presentation could have done with a bit more polish, perhaps, but it’s looking massive and is bound to be brilliant online. Time to seek out a US copy of Twisted Metal Black to put me in the mood, methinks.

Even so, I see more PS3 games that I want to play in the future than 360 games, so I’m giving this one a…

B-

It’s a pleasant surprise to be able to laud Nintendo’s E3 offering for once, and I hope that it heralds a long-term return to form. It feels so strange after all these years…

The first was Microsoft, which started us off with a strong showing. We knew some of what was going to be there, but there were no complete leaks like last year’s NXE unveiling, and most of what we knew was in name only. It’s fairly normal at this point to go into E3 without much knowledge of what we’ll be playing on our 360s at the end of the year, and we can now see a strong line-up taking shape: Halo 3: ODST, Left 4 Dead 2, Crackdown 2, Forza 3, and the re-emergence of a fantastic-looking Splinter Cell: Conviction, which has got me all hot and bothered for the series again. Modern Warfare 2′s footage wasn’t as mind-blowing as COD4′s from two years ago, but my preorder’s in.

The headlines will undoubtedly be grabbed by two unveilings, though. The first is Metal Gear Solid: Rising, which is a huge PR coup for Microsoft but isn’t a mainline Metal Gear and so isn’t quite the shock of last year’s FFXIII reveal; still, I like MGS4′s Raiden, so colour me interested. Secondly, we’ve got Project Natal, which I don’t expect to work nearly as well as the video suggested, but if it does it’s certainly an incredible technical achievement. Expect much talk about that over the coming months.

Plus Microsoft got the fucking Beatles to show up. God knows how much that cost…

Criticisms? As a closet fan of the Halo novels I’d like to have seen more than a teaser of Halo: Reach, but I understand that ODST is the one that they want you to care about for now. But mainly, where was Rare? The token Killer Instinct and Blast Corps rumours of course didn’t come true, but no new Perfect Dark? Not even another Viva Piñata? Hello?

But that aside, Microsoft did what it had to do with aplomb. The 360 has a great selection of games for this year and we now know that stuff like Alan Wake is finally coming in 2010, and MS is even showing signs of making a serious attempt at coming out from the bald space marine niche where it’s been happy to exist. This one gets a solid A.

Nintendo had simultaneously the most and the least to prove going into E3, sitting comfortably at the top of the sales charts but also leaving much of its traditional audience – or at least the ones who can’t convince themselves that Smash Bros is a good game – underwhelmed, exemplified by last year’s showing.

Super Mario Galaxy 2, Team Ninja’s Metroid, and Golden Sun DS. That pretty much summed up what we got that I’m interested in, and I really am gagging for a go on Metroid. It’s better than last year’s and the first two are undoubtedly AAA titles, although it still had a depressing emphasis on games that our demographic probably doesn’t care about. No great DSiWare content? No Virtual Console for DSi? Nothing entirely new for the hardcore audience? Instead, we get something to monitor your pulse and more Wii Fit.

I can’t in good conscience slate a conference that unveiled both a proper new Mario and Metroid, so I’m going to give this one a B-.

Sony‘s was a show of two halves for me. It started off with Uncharted 2, which looks spectacular, and if it’s nearly as good as the first game – there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be – it’ll be a certain purchase. MAG didn’t demonstrate particularly well because it’s a bit slow and complicated for this context, and I’m not convinced that the headset-free PSN is the best place for such a co-op game, but I love my multiplayer shooters and I’m intrigued.

It’s good to see renewed support for the PSP, even if I won’t be buying a PSP Go, and maybe this commitment from Sony coupled with reduced development costs will see a renaissance in the system. I hope so, because I’m a fan.

Final Fantasy XIV was a surprise, to say the least, but I’d love to hear the difference in cheers between when it was announced and when everyone saw the little ‘Online’ under the title. Not the megaton announcement that XIII was last year, and the slight disappointment was compounded by what came next. The tech demo for the Wii Remote waggle wand lost some of its impact coming after Microsoft’s controller-free controls and a further demonstration of Wii Motion Plus and just went on for far too long, particularly when there wasn’t actually a game to come with it. The same goes for ModNation Racers, which wasn’t even that impressive and seemed to last for an eternity – I wanted to kill myself when he promised to create a track “in less than five minutes”. I was reminded of the endless demonstration of Gran Turismo HD from the infamous E3 2005 showing.

It ended very strongly with Gran Turismo 5, which I don’t really care about as I’m not exactly a fan of realistic racers, and the holy duo of The Last Guardian and God of War III. It goes without saying that both of those are must-haves, and I’m just disappointed that it looks like we’ll have to wait until 2010 for both of them.

Much like the Microsoft one it showed a host of great games, and it only really suffered from the slack middle section. That doesn’t stop it getting an A as well, though.

Overall, then, a far better show than last year’s, and fans of all platforms will have come away with something worthwhile even if this year’s show has pretty much confirmed motion controls as the way of the future. And hey, no sales graphs either. Gaming needs to make a song and dance about itself like this once in a while, so let’s enjoy the rest of the show.

Until next year…

What should be worrying for fans of more traditional games on Nintendo platforms, however, is how Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars appears to have flopped massively, selling 89,000 units against analysts’ predictions of anywhere from 200,000 to several million. If a game with a score of 94 on Metacritic and, oh yeah, a title containing the little-known words Grand Theft Auto can sell that badly, it doesn’t bode well for more mature titles on the platform. As much as I love my Ouendan and Phoenix Wright, I’m only human and would like to deal some heroin on my lunch break when that itch needs scratching.

Some blame piracy, and anecdotally I know of a lot of people who downloaded it, but R4 carts can’t be that prevalent. The fact is that Nintendo hasn’t been what it used to be for a lot of fans, myself included, since the disappointment of the GameCube, and I know many for whom the great library on the DS is the only thing keeping Nintendo from being written off as a lost cause. If that dries up completely you can see why Nintendo domination is a scary thought for some.

I’m not one of those who’s ready to cut Nintendo adrift, because I still see flashes of brilliance in games like Twilight Princess and Metroid Prime 3 to make me forgive Wii Music or Wii Play, but if decent adult games aren’t going to do anything on the Nintendo platforms I think it’s time to admit that, as some have suspected since the GameCube, Nintendo machines are for Nintendo games. The Wii is a great secondary console to play that odd gem that won’t show up anywhere else, but I think most hardcore gamers will agree when I say that the lion’s share of modern gaming will be done on the HD options.

And if you own Nintendo’s consoles and haven’t bought MadWorld or Chinatown Wars, congratulations. You’ve forfeited the right to complain when all Nintendo gives you at E3 is crushing disappointment.

At the time of writing my profile reckons I’ve been playing for around seven and a half hours, and that’s almost entirely been over the long weekend, a quick dabble with the demo when it was getting a lot of positive buzz aside. To my shame I brushed it off then, so consider this post my atonement.

I absolutely adore this game. It’s typical of the best indie games in the way that it’s built fun gameplay around a simple, strong central concept, and everything else from the sharp, detailed graphics with bags of personality to the jaunty, Elfman-esque soundtrack (free download here) has a couple of really great pieces. Even the writing, largely coming through the unseen ‘Sign Writer’, is often clever and loaded with in-jokes.

One moment that stuck with me was the beginning of the fourth world, the Information Superhighway. Whereas all previous levels had been similarly themed, here things are thrown into the green and black digital world, and even the gameplay changes to match the new design. New mechanics like the ability to ‘infect’ pieces to give them different properties and the use of gravity to curve shots around a planetoid are a complete switch from the basic bridge and tower building that made up the previous three worlds. That’s not to say the rest of it isn’t inventive, because it certainly is, but I think it speaks volumes about how much invention is in here that it can be so suddenly switched around.

Now I know how long this has been out so it’s quite likely that people have played it, but I also know what proportion of the players actually paid for it – so much for the ‘we only pirate because of DRM’ story, eh? Trust me: it’s more than worth the $20.

• Microsoft – I wasn’t blown away, to be honest. Seeing live gameplay of Resident Evil 5 was initially my highlight, in the same way that the Call of Duty 4 was a gem in a pile of (mostly) shit last year. Gears 2 and Fable II both look good and are certain purchases that it’s nice to have dates for, but things like avatars do nothing for me and the occasional cool feature and probable gem do not a great conference make. No Alan Wake (the new Duke Nukem Forever?), no big new IP announcements, a new interface that I’m not convinced about. Just the warm feeling from the fact that there was no motion controller announcement… yet.
   
  But then Square dropped the bomb. As last words go, FFXIII on 360 put most of Steve Jobs’ infamous “and one more thing” reveals to shame. Not even a rumbling of this news before the show, which is remarkable in itself, and it dealt a big blow to Sony early on. With the possible exception of Gran Turismo, this has been Sony’s trump card since FFVII in 1997, and it was the one third-party PS3 exclusive that I thought untouchable. Make no mistake; that announcement was huge.
   
  It doesn’t change the fact that the rest of it was relatively lacklustre, but it feels like it was all a ruse to lead up to that. For the biggest E3 megaton – something that I thought was becoming a lost art – since “five hundred and ninety-nine US dollars”, this one gets a…
   
  B 

• Nintendo – If you ever need reason why so many hardcore gamers seem to have abandoned Nintendo to focus on the fight for second place, this is why. Last year’s Wii Fit reveal was a disappointment and in that respect this at least had something that vaguely interests me in Animal Crossing, but it’s still basically the same thing as Nintendo brought out on N64, GameCube, and DS. It might have more online functions, but all I’m going to be thinking about is how much better it could be done on Live and PSN.
   
  Add another mini-game compilation, another peripheral, and, in Wii Music, one of the most pathetic ideas I’ve ever seen (I can’t help but think of the musical chairs game in The Simpsons when Bart was put into the remedial class). Someone summed it up for me on a forum post when they said: “At least now that Nintendo has show that it hates hardcore gamers we won’t have to pretend to like the Wii any more.”
   
  Thanks for the good times back in the day, Nintendo, but I’ll take an insular industry that makes games that I enjoy over this popular tripe.
   
  D- 

• Sony – Sony really didn’t deviate too much from what was largely a successful formula last year. The embarrassing Home jokes were gone, and no baffling cameo from Chewbacca, and we just got games. It deserves credit for making the most entertaining Powerpoint presentation in history. LittleBigPlanet can make anything interesting.
   
  On the games front, Resistance 2 looked good but early, and while stuff like God of War III and MAG sound promising, didn’t Sony learn anything about showing CG trailers a couple of years ago? When your big reveals are CG and your lead game is one that pretty much everyone who cares enough to watch a conference has finished at least once since it came out a month ago, it doesn’t make it look like there’s a lot of content.
   
  C 

This E3 will go down in history for the Final Fantasy XIII announcement, which put the Microsoft conference ahead on entertainment value alone. Other than that, very disappointing in my opinion. No big new game announcements (so far), no proper price drops or anything, and the bitter taste in my mouth that the mainstream press is going to be fawning over Nintendo finding a way to charge you to play air guitar.

Though I’ve been known to, I’m not going to get on that high horse about how it’s not a proper fighting game and the world would be much better off if everyone would master the intricacies of Street Fighter III or Mark of the Wolves. It would, but the point is that Smash Bros is as much a party game and a Nintendo museum as it is a fighting game. It’s all very tongue-in-cheek; a snakes and ladders to Street Fighter’s chess. I’ll just leave that argument there since I’m sure you can find several theses’ worth of fanboys clashing over it.

I have my copy of Brawl, just like I had Melee and the original game before it, and yet the huge appeal still eludes me. Subspace Emissary, the bizarrely titled adventure mode, is a painful slog that’s totally at odds with the classic mode and that had me bored senseless after an hour. I’m not opposed to a story mode in this – indeed, the FMV scenes and the ludicrous contrivances that bring Mario, Sonic, and Solid Snake together in one universe can be pretty brilliant – but the platforming just doesn’t do it for me. How about wrapping the story around the normal fighting engine?

Regardless, the basic fighting has a certain charm, and when played online (when that decides to work – Nintendo WFC makes PSN seem reliable) or in local multiplayer it’s a blast. The arenas also never fail to impress me, from the schizophrenic Wario Ware stage to the quite beautiful [insert 'for a Wii game' disclaimer here] Twilight Princess one, all with their own little idiosyncrasies and gimmicks. Coupled with the fact that the game’s basically one big fan-wank – hundreds of music tracks, even more obscure characters to unlock in the form of trophies and stickers – I can see the appeal, but to me the underlying game is just incredibly overrated.

Still, credit for Nintendo for really going all out with this game. The fact that it allows you to create maps and save screenshots (the above one is mine) and replays to be shared on SD card or – get this – traded online, shows that if they can move on from the friend code rubbish (mine’s 2621-2435-6589, incidentally), Nintendo might not be completely left behind when community features like those in Halo 3 and LittleBigPlanet become commonplace. God knows what they’re going to put in there for the next version. Every Nintendo character ever playable?

Ooh, controversial!

Super Mario Galaxy is a brilliant game, and the best Nintendo game since the almighty Ocarina of Time. It’s a Wii game that feels like that’s what it’s always been. And all without a minigame in sight.

It’s probably best to explain here why it’s not number one. I’ve said in the past that I think Super Mario 64 is almost flawless, and a game that is maybe possibly kind of a bit better (or is it, etc?) should surely then go straight in at the top of the list and all subsequent ones. Well…no. And it’s not you, it’s me.

I just don’t feel it like I used to, and I don’t know how to explain it without sounding really shallow. Mario Galaxy’s story is a bit more prominent than Mario 64′s and the talking stars get on my nerves. The platforming is still as good as ever, basically playing like those suspended play areas that made up the Bowser levels extended to fill an entire game, but the camera hasn’t moved on with the imaginations of the developers and therefore technical issues which were occasional niggles in 1996/97 are now more problematic.

Don’t let my justification of the placement make it sound like I’m entirely down on the game. It just seems that most are putting this at number one almost out of duty because it’s Mario and because Nintendo are the kings of their castle again, and as a result I have to justify my blasphemy. And it’s not because the Wii having almost nothing all year and then stealing in to take its second top spot running would annoy me.

That Mario Galaxy is one of the best games of the year is beyond doubt and, really, the ultimate number is irrelevant. Just knowing that it’s Nintendo’s best in years speak more than any single digit.

Somehow, Corruption is both the best and worst of the Metroid Prime series. It’s the best looking, it has the smoothest difficulty curve, and yes: it has the best controls.

It proves once again that when controls are tweaked with the Wii in mind rather than crowbarred onto the remote that it’s a very capable control system. I couldn’t imagine playing Halo on the Wii remote but at the same time I couldn’t imagine playing Metroid Prime on a 360 controller. It has its place, and that’s fine.

My main complaint is that it’s continued the shift away from what makes a Metroid that was started in Metroid Prime 2 and Hunters, and this one really suffers the most from it. This series is about isolation on a hostile planet, whereas Corruption has an opening that infamously echoes that of the first Halo to an almost plagiaristic extent, and most of the planets will have you running into fellow bounty hunters and receiving communications from the Federation. I’m not the only one to have also noted that these aspects aren’t particularly well done either, making them especially alienating for fans.

Still, these issues are with the story, which is thankfully a largely secondary distraction. The good stuff is just as good, and the token gimmick (the titular corruption of the phazon variety) is better than the annoying Dark Aether guff in Metroid Prime 2. It’s a great sci-fi adventure and, if Retro can get over the temptation to lean too much on the story, leaves me keen to see what they can do with their obvious talent and the best first-person shooting controls on a console.

I think I’m with most gamers when I say that my biggest question regarding this unusual collaboration is what exactly Mario is doping to enable him to match Sonic in a foot race. After having spent an afternoon with the game at the Wii Flat in London, I’m even more confused. Mario was pretty brisk if you held the run button, but when Bowser, Wario, and Eggman can keep up…well…it’s madness!

Once I was over my apoplectic fit and could put aside my inner fanboy, however, I couldn’t stay angry with it. I was too exhausted to…

So I got to visit the Wii flat, and spend a few hours with some other bloggers and the game. The flat is a weird place, hidden down an alley between a pub and a computer shop, where inside you’ll find a collection of LCD TVs, all with Wiis attached. I won’t divulge the exact location for fear of sending a horde of angry parents who can’t find Wiis for Christmas over there, but it’s like some kind of bizarre yet somewhat tastefully-decorated shrine, complete with Wii-themed art everywhere. It’s where I’d imagine some of the more nutty Nintendo fanboys living if they didn’t still live with their parents.

But we’re here to talk about the game, Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games. It’s a schizophrenic game, with different events ranging dramatically in quality and skill requirements and allowing clear favourites to emerge. Some are good enough to enjoy on your own against the computer, some (or most) won’t be enjoyable without drunken friends, and predictably there are some bad apples there that it’s doubtful that you’ll play more than once.

The running events are fairly perfunctory, consisting of little more than thrashing the controllers as fast as you can – incredibly tiring over 400m, I tell you – which can occasionally commit the cardinal sin of not seeming to reflect your actions in the game. At the other extreme you’ve got events like the pole vault and triple jump which require shifting between two or three waggling disciplines, with mixed success. As above, they range in quality and as with the likes of Athlete Kings or International Track and Field they’re really multiplayer games. Single player is just kind of there, on the off-chance you want to wave around like a loon without other people to see you.

Now this might seem contradictory when I’ve just complained about the muddled mixed-discipline events, but I had a much better time with the events that contained a bit more depth. There are split-screen (how quaint) “dream events”, set away from Beijing in the various gaming universes, which play out like Mario Kart races. It’s a nightmare trying to balance wild waggling with avoiding obstacles and firing shells, but it’s as uproarous and unpredictable in multiplayer as its inspiration. I was shit at the trampolining – which has you moving the remote up and down while inputting on-screen button combinations – since I clearly don’t know my Wii buttons well enough, but it was one of the more inventive and successful games.

My favourite, though, was the fencing. It takes in attacks, parries, and feints, which all work well and create a game that actually has some depth. Play against someone of equal skill and matches are close, back-and-forth affairs that more often than not come down to the final point (first to 15), with a clever player always having a chance to get back into it. I could have spent even longer on this mode.

Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games, like most compilations, seems to range dramatically in quality, but overall it’s one of the best compilations on the Wii and should be fun with friends. You’ll probably want to avoid it if you’re out for a deep single player experience, though.

If you want to see more of the event take a look at the following blogs who were also there:

• The Average Gamer
• Binary Joy
• British Gaming Blog
• Nintendic
• Zath

More photos are available here, and you can see an official video (featuring me :/) here.