Nintendo Direct E3 2021: A recap of every major announcement
Mario Party Superstars
While I’ve been holding out hope for a Smash Bros party for a long time now, the latest in Nintendo’s Mario Party franchise is a little more familiar than I’d like.
Mario Party Superstars features completely remastered and rebuilt classic boards from older Mario Party games as well as hundreds of remastered mini-games.
One of the cool things about this is that, unlike the previous Mario Party, all these games work with button layouts meaning that this is the first Mario Party playable on the Nintendo Switch Lite which my kids will love as they both have those.
It also features online support allowing you to play with friends or join a stranger’s game which is so much better than playing the computer.
Looks like it’s coming out on Oct 29th.
Metroid 5 – Metroid Dread
After mentioning that they were still hard at work on Metroid Prime 4, Nintendo totally hyped me up by showcasing Metroid 5 – Metroid Dread which comes out later this year!
In a brand new side-scrolling Metroid game, the first in almost two decades, Samus (in an excellent mostly white new suit) fights her way through a mysterious facility while being stalked by robots that look like if Glados from Portal had a baby with Dog from Half-Life.
They made absolutely no hesitation, especially if you watched the Tree House afterwards where they played the game, in showing that these robots (called Emmy) will just absolutely murder you if they catch up to you once.
The game, which will have new Amiibos, features the return of the excellent melee counter move from some of the past games in which you can knock enemies back with a hit and then follow that with a cannon blast.
Metroid 5 is coming out October 8th of this year.
Cruis’n Blast
While not a huge reveal, this Switch exclusive got me hyped. The Cruis’n USA and Cruis’n World games were a blast back in the days of the arcade and Cruis’n USA was one of the first games I got for the Nintendo 64 back in my teen years so it’s nice to see it come back to Nintendo.
This very arcadey racer looks to offer the same sort of gameplay anyone who played the previous games will be instantly familiar with.
The only downside is the game lacks polish. It was not very clean looking graphically but let’s hope that improves a bit by the time it comes out this fall.