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Discussion Did you watch Nintendo's 2008 and/or 2015 E3 presentations in their time? What was your reaction?

ILovethegameAC

ILovethegameAC

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Is well known by now how 2015 and especially 2008 were the worst Nintendo's E3 presentation, hated to this day by a lot of people and I want to know if you watched them live and what did you think?
Personally I didn't watch E3 presentation yet in 2008 so can't comment on that one, but I would have been really dissapointed, but I did watch the 2015 one and that is to this day the most frustrated I have been towards Nintendo personally, since the previous E3 was awesome but I couldn't watch it live so for the 2015 one assuming it was gonna be just as good I just stayed at home that day (I didn't have a smartphone with internet yet either) to watch the event and I just wasted the entire day, since they didn't show anything interesting aside from games we already knew before, the excesive amount of Mario and Zelda games compared to other series began to be a little annoying, and of course the Amiibo Festival and Federation Force announcements were just a disaster. It made me lower my expectations about Nintendo to this very day, and as a bonus I have seen some younger Nintendo fans say that E3 was good because of the "charming puppets" and that's baffling to me.
 
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I thought the 2015 one was decent even if it was nothing mindblowing. 2008 was really bad though, remember my friends and I were in disbelief after the Wii Music guy. (Fun fact: the Wii Music guy later went on to perform at Trump's inaguration.)
 
I didn't mind the 2008 one because I was excited for another Animal Crossing and Wii had a ton of games I loved.

The 2015 E3 showcase made me feel like Nintendo completely lost the plot and lost me as a customer. I didn't come back until later that year when they finally decided to bring DQ7 and 8 to the west and TPHD was announced.
 
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Oh god I hated 2015. I could see they had tried their best to model it on the well received 2014 one, but there was just no content in that presentation, and it was just so bad.

2008 was objectively worse, but I don't actually remember having such a visceral reaction to it. From what I remember I had kinda given up on the Wii by then and just didn't care?
 
I watched 2008 presentation live through IGN streaming IIRC. It was a complete disaster. Hopefully they redeemed themselves with 2009 (that ending with Galaxy 2 and Other M was glorious) and 2010.

Didn’t pay too much attention to 2015 Direct.
 
I don't remember if 2008 was my first or not. But I heavily recall a lot of moments from that e3.

2015 didn't really have games I cared about, but I'd rather sit through that then 2008 again.
 
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2008 was bad in the traditional sense, but i think its one of the more memorable press conferences because of it lmao. its like the konami 2010 or sony 2006; funny in a way only live video game demonstrations can be. the one thing we lost from having live on stage video game pressers is these awkward, fail shows that just dont happen when things are prerecorded and edited.

2015 was just a boring direct, they obviously didnt have much to show, i imagine a lot of stuff had moved to the switch by then. so they padded out the presentation with a lot of the puppet stuff, which was cute, but you could tell they were grasping. that one was just kinda sad to watch lol.
 
james said:
2008 was bad in the traditional sense, but i think its one of the more memorable press conferences because of it lmao. its like the konami 2010 or sony 2006; funny in a way only live video game demonstrations can be. the one thing we lost from having live on stage video game pressers is these awkward, fail shows that just dont happen when things are prerecorded and edited.

2015 was just a boring direct, they obviously didnt have much to show, i imagine a lot of stuff had moved to the switch by then. so they padded out the presentation with a lot of the puppet stuff, which was cute, but you could tell they were grasping. that one was just kinda sad to watch lol.
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The puppet part was mostly the intro, then it barely uses like 30 seconds or so, they padded it out talking waaaay too much about Star Fox Zero, Mario Maker and Woolly World.
 
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2008 I was in full-on Nintendo fanboy defense mode. I told everyone online that they were way downplaying Animal Crossing; a new Wii game is huge, theoretically, if you're an Animal Crossing fan. Something I think a lot of people forget is that 2007-2008 E3 was actually downsized and not as big as the years before or after it. Those weren't big E3 years from any of the big three (though it was when the infamous FF13 360 announcement happened), and the show itself was a lot smaller. "E For All" in late 2007 was actually a bigger convention for like, demoing new games.

2015 was just....disappointing, but fine. It's weird because it was good in its presentation, the Jim Henson Muppets were really impressive, but the whole time you were just waiting for a big announcement that never comes. I didn't hate it though.

The real stinker years were E3 2011 and especially 2012. Nintendo did an awful job unveiling and then showcasing the Wii U. Those probably permanently killed live Nintendo press conferences in front of an audience.
 
2008 was such a huge disappointment. I was excited about a new Animal Crossing in theory but it looked just like Wild World and didn't really seem to offer anything new. As an Animal Crossing fan, City Folk is still to this day the only game in the series I never played.

I'll never forget the utter wash of frustration I felt at the end of the presentation, when Reggie said his "one more thing", the lights got dim, smoke flooded the stage... and it was Wii Music. If you weren't there, you have no idea how massively disappointing it was to see such a mediocre show already cap off with Wii Music. This was kind of the precise moment we all realized Nintendo was basically giving up on the Wii.

2015 was also pretty dismal but in retrospect, Nintendo was in a really bad state back then. I think everyone at the company at the time knew it, as well - Kit and Krysta don't even like talking about E3 2015 because of how painful the experience was.

Although I will say I felt really ashamed to be a Metroid fan in 2015 when I saw how the entire fandom reacted to Federation Force. It wasn't at all what I wanted from a Metroid game but I was just happy to see the brand still alive. Meanwhile there were petitions to get the game cancelled and just a huge fury among the fandom that I wasn't quite grasping at all.
 
2015 was incredibly depressing outside of the puppet stuff.

You could literally feel the disappointment across the fandom when we all realized they were ending the show with that Mario celebration.
 
I watched the E3 2008 I think. All I knew at the time tho was that I was hyped beyond belief for City Folk and Sonic Unleashed which were both coming out that year. 2015 I had to catch the highlights of by watching trailers in a McDonald's parking lot because we didn't have internet at the time that year. The only thing I remember from it was thinking Tri Force Heroes looked kinda bad, and the puppets were weird and lasted too long. Oh also I was hyped for Happy Home Designer and thought Amiibo Festival was a weird idea.
 
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The 2015 one was just a bit of a letdown, but not that surprising as we all knew they were slowly winding down the Wii U for the gen.

I watched the 2008 conference with some friends in a Skype call. It was one of the first conferences I watched fully live (I'd seen others pre-recorded on DVD's or downloads). It was truly awful. The pacing and content of these conferences was much different back then. They were generally slower and bloated with sales statistics or demographics research to appease investors but even for the standards of the time, it was dull. The few announcements they did have felt very safe and expected with the exception of Wii Fit, but it was not an interesting thing to demo at an event like this. That and Wii Music made for some boring, embarrassing stuff. There was a huge outcry that I can remember from people saying they'd abandoned the hardcore at the time and it was easy to see why even if I didn't fully agree. Most of the conference was devoted to casual games that were unknown quantities. It was bewildering to watch and didn't inspire confidence or make you excited to be a Nintendo fan.

One small bit of context that made the conference seem even more disappointing was a pervasive rumour IGN was touting which was discussed a lot in the Nintendo community in the weeks leading up to it. Matt Casamassina, the Nintendo editor at the time, hinted that a Wii reboot of Kid Icarus was expected to appear at E3. Obviously that didn't happen and I think it further added to this perception that Nintendo was ignoring their fans.
 
I really don't remember anyhting about 2008, but 2015 had the announcment of Hyrule warriors for 3DS, Xenoblades Chronciles X and Tokyo Mirage Sessions, so I count that as a good one
 
I remember being really eh towards the 2008 one, I had DS and Wii but DS was by far most of my gaming time at that point and it's library was incredible and just getting better every day so Wii not getting much wasn't a biggie for me.

2015... Yeah I agree it was the most annoyed I'd been at Nintendo, I started questioning whether or not to just move over to PS at that point. Sold my Wii U after it as well as it was obviously dead. 3DS had great games but still not on the DS' level.
 
2015 was a pretty light year, but it definitely wasn't one of Nintendo's worst E3s. Even had Earthbound Beginnings officially localized for the first time.
 
Yes, 2008 was definitely underwhelming, i just remember the sinking feeling i got when i realized the wii music segment was just going to keep going. 2015 was brutal. We all thought we were getting a new wii u animal crossing,
and instead we got amiibo festival. We thought we were getting a metroid game, instead we got federation force
 
The ending of 2008 was one of the most out of body experiences I've ever had as a Nintendo fan. I'm a musician irl, singing and playing instruments, I loved the Wii ____ line of games, and Wii Music was one of the worst looking things I had ever seen. I couldn't process how they managed to fuck it up that bad.
 
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We need some announcement lists for stuff like this because I don’t clearly remember that far back lol. But for fuzzy memories at least I don’t remember 2008 being all that good while 2015 was good enough for me. Someone mentioned above 2015 had Star Fox Zero (which we didn’t know was bad then), Mario Maker, Xenoblade X, and Tokyo Mirage Sessions. That’s an awesome show for me right there. I’ll always remember the puppets fondly too.
 
2015 had more quantity over quality, lots of games but beyond Mario Maker and XCX, nothing was really a standout

That year, the lead up to the Digital Event was pretty fun though

The 3DS Direct that first released in Japan at the end of May, then June 1 was a Mini Direct focusing on 3DS stuff, then Sakurai revealing Ryu and Roy after they were leaked, the lead up of Blast Ball to MP Fed Force & launch of EarthBound Beginnings on Wii U VC
 
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Wasn't around for 2008, but 2015 was pretty bad! Was what made me start to consider not being Nintendo only anymore
 
ermitron2 said:
I really don't remember anyhting about 2008, but 2015 had the announcment of Hyrule warriors for 3DS, Xenoblades Chronciles X and Tokyo Mirage Sessions, so I count that as a good one
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It was just HW 3DS, which leaked like 2 days before anyways, the other ones were just new trailers of already announced games and they didn't really reveal that much, plus the TMS one was barely translated, that was embarassing lmao.
 
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xghost777 said:
We need some announcement lists for stuff like this because I don’t clearly remember that far back lol. But for fuzzy memories at least I don’t remember 2008 being all that good while 2015 was good enough for me. Someone mentioned above 2015 had Star Fox Zero (which we didn’t know was bad then), Mario Maker, Xenoblade X, and Tokyo Mirage Sessions. That’s an awesome show for me right there. I’ll always remember the puppets fondly too.
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The problem is that those games were already announced from at least a year ago with multiple trailers in between (it wasn't like now where Nintendo mostly reveals the games and releases them less than a years after), and they mostly didn't really reveal all that much new stuff there other than Amiibo functionalities, and the actual games that were announced were mostly unexciting or bad reveals.
-Triforce Heroes
-Hyrule Warriors 3DS port
-Paper Jam (probably the best announcement when it wasn't obvious it was using Sticker Star as the PM base)
-Federation Force
-Amiibo Festival
-A very vanilla looking Mario Tennis
-Plus we had the gameplay reveal of Star Fox Zero (we already knew it existed though) which was inmediatly very controversial for being another remake of 64, not even counting the controls.
 
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Yes both.

2008 was dismal. A very tough year to swallow. Probably the closest I felt to other Nintendo fans during the years of Wii; like there was nothing for me, a core Nintendo fan. But there was for Wii, just not from Nintendo.

2015 was heartbreaking. Presentation was top notch, and the tease of Star Fox’s return culminating in the best of the developer interview formats set what would ultimately be the wrong tone for the show. An unimpressive lineup, new game announcements were terrible, and it really made you feel like you were wasting your time watching it. I don’t think 2015 was the worst year ever, there were still some quality games to play, but wow did things feel a little bleak.
 
I've watched every Nintendo E3/direct since 2005 on the same day.

2008 was when i realized something was off with their focus. They weren't targeting me anymore
2015 was ok, but Nintendo had been in a bad place for a few years by that point, but you could see the start of the rebrand and recovery (we got Splatoon, BOTW reveal and Amiibos in 2014). Star Fox Zero though was a huge miss.
 
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Christo750 said:
I don’t think 2015 was the worst year ever, there were still some quality games to play, but wow did things feel a little bleak.
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Yeah, 2015 as an actual year wasn't that bad - Xenoblade X, Mario Maker, Yoshi's Wooly World, Splatoon were all that year, and they were great! Plus of course stuff like Fatal Frame 5, Kirby and the Rainbow Curse, Mario Party 10, which aren't top tier but still reasonably good.

3DS had the New 3DS launch, plus Majora's Mask and Monster Hunter. So in terms of the actual games, this was actually not the worst Nintendo year (overall it was probably the second or third best year of the era), it was certainly far better than the wastelands that were 2012 or 2016, but it was all the other circumstances that year that made things so bleak: Nintendo officially confirmed they would do mobile games, announced a whole new console in NX, pretty much spelling the data knell for Wii U, E3 2015 was absolutely terrible, and then of course, just a few months after that, the worst of it all when Satoru Iwata passed away.

It was a pretty terrible time to be a Nintendo fan all around, but that was not down to the games.
 
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ILovethegameAC said:
The problem is that those games were already announced from at least a year ago with multiple trailers in between (it wasn't like now where Nintendo mostly reveals the games and releases them less than a years after), and they mostly didn't really reveal all that much new stuff there other than Amiibo functionalities, and the actual games that were announced were mostly unexciting or bad reveals.
-Triforce Heroes
-Hyrule Warriors 3DS port
-Paper Jam (probably the best announcement when it wasn't obvious it was using Sticker Star as the PM base)
-Federation Force
-Amiibo Festival
-A very vanilla looking Mario Tennis
-Plus we had the gameplay reveal of Star Fox Zero (we already knew it existed though) which was inmediatly very controversial for being another remake of 64, not even counting the controls.
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Thanks for filling that in. I liked Triforce Heroes a good deal so that’d be another good one for me. Definitely could have been a case of good games, bad show but I don’t think it stands out to me as infamous as its reputation suggests. I will say too though I remember for sure now the Nintendo World Championships was that year which had the incredible Mario Maker showcase. That you could eventually play the levels featured in it eventually was super cool.
 
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2015 was rough but ultimately fine. I had my expectations at rock bottom because they had said Zelda wouldn’t be at the show. I thought Star Fox looked really rough. Xenoblade was a highlight.
 
2015 was the first e3 I saw live (I paid attention to 14 and kinda 13 for Pokemon alone, but live live) so I coped a little + was really hyped for mario maker but I think it felt like a lot of oomph was missing compared to even the stuff that year.

Something often not mentioned these days that I remember thinking at the time is the weird amount of other news around then. Like that month alone we had smash dlc reveals, a nintendo direct micro (not sure much in this would have saved the show tbf), and Earthbound Beginings at the NWC. The latter likely skipped due to being just "we're rereleasing the first Mother game" not being that exciting in Japan (it's certainly semi prestigious, they did give the 2 games a dedicated segment in Feb 22 afterall, but e3 worthy eh) but like I don't get why they couldn't have saved Ryu and Roy for e3 and even been like "by the way Lucas is coming along side these 2", if the minor stuff Sakurai talked about in the actual pres was needed it could have either been a post show thing or treehouse. Speaking of they played as the 3 at the Treehouse mere days after they already released which was... baffling, to say the least.

I think the big death knell was less "not enough big" and more the double whammy of showing an Animal Crossing town then going "Board game!" and showing a generic looking shooter and going "it's Metroid Prime". Both series had fandoms starving for new content at the time (whether justified or not is debatable, compared to what some series deal with now the ravenous desire for AC on Wii U despite New Leaf being only 2.5 years old was a bit silly but I understand it was less a "drought" and more the assumption of an AC on Wii U) and it felt like a carrot on a stick I imagine

Also ending on not even news was silly, but I suppose they had nothing unless they were willing to tease Odyssey but since it wasn't a Wii U game... fair I guess
 
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People went into E3 2015 hoping for Zelda, Animal Crossing, and Metroid. They got all three of those things, but not in the ways that anyone wanted.
Edit: Forgot that BOTW was delayed prior to E3. But hey we still got two Zelda games anyway.
 
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In 2008, the "Dunaway smiles E3", Nintendo showed itself as a company where only casual gamers mattered. It was traumatic, many of us thought that we would never see a certain way of creating video games again.
Luckily it wasn't like that.

2015 was a sadly particular year (but we would have known much later)...
 
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2008 was baaaad.

I remember the three of them being equally disappointing, but Nintendo was the worst. The Wii Fit stuff was its saving grace because of the memes (My body is ready still remains as one of the top Reggie memes) and well Wii Music…

Oof. Not good at all.

2015 was not good, but ultimately understandable because it was clear Nintendo was working on a follow up. They were in a rough place as 3DS was slowing down and the Wii U was acknowledged as a failure. The puppets were awesome though.

And then Iwata’s death happened…
 
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2008 was whatever, I didn’t expect anything when you had all the big single player games in 2007 on top of both Brawl and MKWii during the first half of 2008. I never played Animal Crossing so I didn’t care about the whole thing with Nintendo not having any “hardcore games” during the holidays, to me we got already spoiled and now it was AC’s turn. The backlash for 2008 was some of the childiest shit ever, guarantee the people talking about selling their Wiis didn’t play every single relevant game released back then

2015 was simply a bunch of nothing, Wii U was officially dead, no new games for it besides the ones announced way back. 3DS had some spinoffs no one asked for, it was very bleak. Pretty much nothing until they reveal the NX
 
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E3 2015 has great Miyamoto - Star Fox dev talk, same with Yoshi amiibo and Miyamoto, Tezuka talking about Mario, as well the puppets but that's about it, the games that were there were ugh.
 
2015 was personally disappointing to me particularly because of the way the show tied into Mario Maker and the amiibo costumes - IIRC they’d show Mario grab an amiibo mushroom and turn into a character from a different series, then they’d intro the new game from that series. I’d been dying to play a new mainline Animal Crossing on Wii U so Mario turning into Isabelle only to be thrown into Amiibo Festival immediately afterwards has got to be the biggest roller coaster of emotions I’ve ever experienced watching one of these presentations lol.
 
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I saw both live and 2008 was pretty bad. The only game that got me excited was animal crossing city folk, but as a franchise it was nowhere near the massive hit it is today. It was getting there though. As others have said, 2008 was especially disappointing because it felt like Nintendo had nothing left in the tank coming out soon. The whole “Nintendo abandoned the core audience” thing was total bullshit. What made the 2008 conference terrible for me was the feeling that Nintendo was about to go through another one of their post console launch droughts. I was eager to see what “phase 2” of the Wii was and in 2008 Nintendo didn’t show off anything that instilled hope in them continuing their momentum.

To put into context. From July 2007 to May 2008 Nintendo released Mario Strikers Charged, Metroid Prime 3, Battalion Wars 2, Fire Emblem Radiant Dawn, Super Mario Galaxy, Smash Bros. Brawl, and Mario Kart Wii. As a Nintendo fan, you were eating good.

So E3 2008 rolls around and you’re hearing rumors about Kid Icarus and Punchout and you get.. Wii Music.

2015 wasn’t the best but going into the event I felt like the presentation would tell me if the WiiU was dead or not. And sure enough, the signal was read loud and clear. I was mildly disappointing because I felt Nintendo WiiU turned it around in 2014 (the E3 2014 direct made me buy one at least). So to see them throw in the towel stung a bit.
 
2008 was a real awakening for me. There was already a lot of sentiment that Nintendo was ignoring portions of its audience, but I wanted to believe! This was their chance to show what came next after Smash and Galaxy, and they showed... basically nothing? The most promising games were Animal Crossing and Wii Sports Resort, which didn't exactly challenge the discourse around first party output.

2008 confirmed that the Wii would sit in the corner for most of that generation. 2015? The Wii U really couldn't get worse, so it wasn't nearly as big of a disappointment.
 
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TurtleRock said:
To put into context. From July 2007 to May 2008 Nintendo released Mario Strikers Charged, Metroid Prime 3, Battalion Wars 2, Fire Emblem Radiant Dawn, Super Mario Galaxy, Smash Bros. Brawl, and Mario Kart Wii. As a Nintendo fan, you were eating good.
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I've been watching Nintendo's E3 conferences live since about 2005 or 2006 or so, and 2008 was probably the worst one for the above reason. I was super in to the Wii around launch and it had a great run of games for the core audience, came in to E3 2008 expecting another wave of greatness and got... that. It really was the start of my big lapse of being a Nintendo fan and being more of a Playstation guy from like 2009 straight through to 2017.

2015 was bad but my expectations were already in the toilet (as I was a pretty lapsed Nintendo fan at the time) so it was less disappointing.
 
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Didn't watch 2008. For 2015, I just remember turning to my brother at the end and saying "That wasn't very good." And I really disliked the puppets, that and the dev interviews felt like a poor knockoff of 2014
 
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I skipped the whole Wii/360/PS3 gen for a variety of reasons, so I didn't know about Nintendo's 2008 E3 presentation until much later, from "Worst E3 presentations" retrospectives and stuff like that.

I was back in the game (har har) for the next gen, so E3 2015 was a huge disappointment after the quite excellent E3 presentation from 2014. The absolute worst part, though, was some of the shit some people wrote about Iwata because of it, with cancer jokes and the like being quite common. Utterly dreadful.
 
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Waves of disappointment for 2008. Nintendo were so high on their own supply they thought E3 was the venue to go full Blue Ocean. Everyone remembers Ravi Drums, but the memory of Cammie Dunaway and Shaun White using the Balance Board like a snowboard is seared so heavily into my mind I can actually remember who Cammie fucking Dunaway is. Truly felt like at this point the Wii was something I was gonna have to ride out until their focus shifted back closer to the games I had more interest in. Little did I know what was to follow.

2015 was bad too, but 1) they had other Directs during the year at this point (though during that timeframe I doubt any of them were that good - though I suppose the following one had the Cloud Smash reveal), and 2) the Wii U was such an obvious dud by then that you knew its time was limited. I believe the NX was known at that point as well, so there was the hope/cope they were just shifting things to the next one.

To be clear though, 2015 was bad, but still markedly better than 2008, which, other than a retrospective appreciation of the endless memes from that event, was just awful. Literally the only positive I can remember was City Folk. But tbh, I was more interested in just playing more Wild World since it was portable, which I always preferred for AC. And that was the reaction I remember as well. A muted hype, brought down by just how bad the rest was.
 
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I watched both of these live, yeah. I'm not particularly attached to the company or any narratives so it was just fun being along for the ride on 2008 at least. That shit was funny as hell at the time, and it's even funnier now. We'd be so lucky for Nintendo to grace us with another performance like that. 2015 was just fine tbh, it was kinda boring but there was plenty of stuff already announced and out to not think much of it. I did end up liking a lot of what was shown there so guess that's a win.
 
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I was 13 when nintendo had their 2008 e3 showcase, I was so mad after I hacked my wii as a form of retaliation.

AC city folk was the only good announcement and that ended up being the worst AC game until NH

2015 was meh but not awful
 
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I vaguely remember disliking 2012 more than 2015 even though both were rough.
 
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I gathered all my friends for a giant voice call for the E3 2015 Direct;

It was the only and last time I ever had one of those; ever since then I only watch these alone;
 
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