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Nintendo stood out even more than normal at this year's E3, and that's not just because you could have cut Reggie into the new series of Twin Peaks without so much as changing a line of his charming doggerel dialogue. Nintendo's ditched conferences for a while now, relying on short, sharp video presentations that do the job of a conference in half the time, and with no need to brave Downtown traffic. This year, though, there was a stronger sense than normal that Nintendo is operating in a different world to its competitors, and that it's managed to transform its own recent fortunes. The strange place that Reggie addresses us from is success: palpable success. The Switch really has changed everything for Nintendo, and this Nintendo Direct was a chance to understand that.The new machine is confident in the centre of the stage. No 3DS stuff in the show itself at all - that was the preserve of a post-show presentation where Metroid 2 remake Samus Returns was revealed - and did you really miss it? Not even a couple of almost-no-shows - a mini-trailer for Metroid Prime 4 that amounted to a logo, and the acknowledgement that a new Pokemon RPG was under development - could derail things. The Switch works. People want it. So those sizzle reels of people gathering on rooftops to play, gathering in cinematic underpasses, in craft beer bars, no longer seem so ridiculous, because many people watching will have seen these impromptu gatherings, friends hunched around Mario Kart - around Tetris - in their own world by now. Nintendo's dream came true.
If it's learnt a difficult lesson about the Wii U - that it was the perfect inverse of the console everyone would be eager to buy - the crucial message for this Direct is that isn't the only lesson to be learnt from the last generation. The Wii U struggled with games, and so the spine of Nintendo's presentation this E3 is a run of games, one a month, that will carry Switch owners through to the end of the year.
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