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It's a quiet Sunday morning in downtown Los Angeles, and while young men and women, some wearing Mario beach towels as capes, queue to be admitted to the Nintendo World Championships fan event - which I later gather from Twitter to be a roaring, feelgood success - a handful of press have been assembled at the back entrance to the Nokia Theater for a different purpose. We're here to get a preview of this morning's Digital Event, to hear from Shigeru Miyamoto about the headlining Wii U game Star Fox Zero, and to play it ourselves.There's no disguising the awkward situation Nintendo finds itself in this year, and Nintendo's American chief Reggie Fils-Aime grabs the bull by the horns (watch out, bull) in the video when he says that we'll hear more about mobile gaming, theme parks and Nintendo's next console, NX, next year. We are in a holding pattern, and the wonderful, misbegotten Wii U is a dead console walking. Nintendo's natural warmth, its relationship with its ardent fans, make it easy for the firm to style it out - as the Championships prove to perfection - but we're here on business, and business is... oh, hey, look, a KK Slider Amiibo!
Perhaps the most telling sign that the company's focus is elsewhere is in the lack of major games from its in-house teams. Star Fox Zero, despite being the star of Nintendo's E3 a long-awaited return for this series of rollicking Saturday-matinee shoot-'em-ups, doesn't quite count. Debuting at last year's E3 as a sort of playable doodle from Miyamoto's sketchpad, in the intervening year it has been realised with efficiency and speed in a collaborative development with Platinum Games.
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