Nintendo: I don’t understand them, but I like them.

Alex at damnedmachines.com had some interesting things to say about E3 and marketing tripe.

Contrast [Sony and Microsoft’s E3 crap] to the enrapturing Zelda-in-play footage, or any time you’ve ever seen footage of a game being played, unedited. That’s what a game looks like. I wouldn’t care about the Killzone and Gears trailers even if they weren’t fake (which they were). They weren’t video games being demonstrated, they were movie trailers. This was evident just by watching them—no admissions by the companies that it was rendered or whatever were needed. Everyone complained that Nintendo punted on revealing the Revolution but…so did Sony and Microsoft.

The only thing Nintendo punted on was a bunch of marketing hoo-ha, as one commenter put it. And I’m glad for it. They didn’t give a bunch of charts with wildly impossible claims of performance (I’m looking at YOU, Sony.) Nor did they try and demo their games on alpha-version dev kits (I’m looking at YOU, Microsoft.)

Honestly, I don’t understand the mentality of Nintendo or any of those guys over there. There’s some kind of strange Zen soul-searching going on, but dang it, they aren’t pandering, they aren’t funding idiotic MTV specials. I kind of feel like I need to buy their consoles just because they haven’t ever talked down to me. They’re unabashedly and unapologetically GAME DESIGNERS and want people to have FUN with their games. I wish I felt the same way about Sony or Microsoft…