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Today, finally, after two days, six conferences, more announcements than we care to remember and much less sleep than is healthy, E3 actually started and we could start judging it in earnest. There was just one more thing to cover before the doors opened: the Nintendo conference, which was actually two things, spread out with marvellous inefficiency across two hours and an acre of E3 booth that was presumably booked back when NX was still on the agenda and couldn't be refunded.The first was the new Zelda, which suggested that the developers misinterpreted the note about being "the last Wii U game anybody will buy" and created one that'll take months to finish: it's a vast, beautiful and highly ambitious sandbox. It also has a surprising survival focus, which Nintendo cleverly integrated as a conference theme by wowing everybody with the trailer and then cutting to 45 soul-shrivelling minutes of blather about Pokemon Sun and Moon instead.
Things improved still further by cutting to ten minutes of hold music before finally getting to Zelda, which was played using a showfloor demo that timed out every fifteen minutes and in which the player blew himself up after ten minutes' play. This is the sort of glorious ineptitude that makes E3 conferences worth staying up for, and the game itself was excellent: crafting, loot, loadouts and Dark-Souls-but-cuddly-vibe. If you end up buying a Wii U for it, you'd probably get your money's worth, although we can't get past the notion that Breath of the Wild sounds like a Lynx ad campaign for mouthwash.
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