Nintendo at E3: A comeback is always just a game away

LOS ANGELES—Most of the games Nintendo announced at E3 this year are due at unspecified dates in 2015. This is bad news for any Wii U owners who were hoping for a flood of games to fill the gap between Mario Kart 8 and the new Smash Bros. game at the end of the year, though the Wii U-exclusive Bayonetta 2 bundle in October may ease the pain for fans of its over-the-top action.

If you want to know how serious Nintendo is about turning the Wii U around, though, remember that every single one of the announcements at its Digital Event was about a new Wii U game. Most of those games won't actually come out until 2015 (which is a whole other problem) but Nintendo's energies are now focused entirely on shoring up the Wii U and building some positive momentum.

The only new 3DS title announced at the show, Code Name S.T.E.A.M., was shown not in the Digital Event but at a small, private developer session halfway through the show. Smash Bros. and the new Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire remakes will carry the 3DS through the end of the year, and third-party support for the system is robust enough that it doesn't need Nintendo's full attention right at the moment.

We've already written about Smash Bros. and Splatoon, the two biggest games at Nintendo's booth, but in the days since the show has started we've also had our hands on many of Nintendo's other exclusive first-party games. None of them merit an entire article all to themselves, but they're all still worth a look—Nintendo might not be the best at connecting its systems together and mustering third-party Wii U support, but its ability to make games that are just plain fun remains unsurpassed.

Yoshi's Woolly World

Yoshi's Woolly World combines elements of Yoshi's Island and Kirby's Epic Yarn.

Credit: Nintendo

I played Woolly World twice while I was at E3. The first time I was on the show floor, running through a single level by myself. I admired the yarn-and-scrapbook art style, which is similar to, but even more precious and detailed than, the version seen in Kirby's Epic Yarn. I enjoyed how the game played, since Yoshi controls just as he does in Yoshi's Island and its various sequels and spiritual successors (you're tossing yarn balls instead of eggs, but whatever), and Yoshi's Island is of course one of the greatest 2D platformers ever made. Woolly World also retains Island's focus on exploration and platforming, in that order. It wasn't difficult, but it was still entertaining and familiar and visually engaging.

The second time I played it was during our official booth appointment, when Gaming Editor Kyle Orland and I got to try out the game's two-player mode. Players one and two control green and red Yoshis, respectively, and while you can cooperate to find all of the game's hidden items you can also eat, jump on, and generally harass each other. Kyle and I seamlessly switched between helping and impeding—one second he'd swallow me up and spit me halfway across the screen, and the next he'd be letting me bounce off of his head to make higher jumps.

It's a little like the multiplayer mode in New Super Mario Bros Wii and Wii U, but much less frustrating. There were fewer hazards like bottomless pits and screen-filling enemies to be pushed into, at least in the demo levels, and many more situations where having multiple players actually made things easier. The fact that the mode is limited to two players instead of four makes things less chaotic, too. When Woolly World arrives in 2015, it should keep veteran Yoshi's Island players happy while also lowering the bar to entry for younger or less experienced players who want to ride shotgun.

Kirby and the Rainbow Curse

Back when the original DS was released in the mid-2000s, it wasn't clear that the system would become the gigantic success it eventually did. Its launch library was a rough collection of ports and touchscreen tech demos, and it looked like an unlikely successor to the popular and justly-beloved Game Boy Advance (Nintendo even said at first that the DS and Game Boy would continue to exist as separate console lines, ensuring that the Game Boy name would remain untarnished if the DS crashed and burned).

It's hard to pinpoint exactly where the critical and financial turnaround began, but for me it started in 2005 with Kirby: Canvas Curse. Rainbow Curse is a direct sequel to that game, and the basic gameplay elements are the same. Rather than controlling Kirby directly with the Gamepad and buttons (and using his traditional flying, eating, and power-copying abilities), players instead must guide him through the levels by drawing lines on the screen with the stylus. Tapping him will speed him up and break through barriers, but the multicolored lines are your only way of changing his direction, and he never stops moving.

The demo played mostly like Canvas Curse, but it does attempt to inject some variety—in one of the three playable levels, for example, Kirby is transformed into a tank and players have to tap enemies and power-ups to shoot them. It's all a very good use of the Wii U GamePad, which all too often feels like an afterthought, even in Nintendo's flagship games.

Kirby also continues to be one of Nintendo's most visually interesting series—this time around the Kirby universe is rendered in clay. The effect is subtle, but it distinguishes the game from both the yarn-style graphics of Epic Yarn and Yoshi's Woolly World and the less-adventurous, more straightforward Mario aesthetic. Rainbow Curse launches in 2015.

Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker

With Captain Toad, Nintendo extracts and expands upon concepts it created for Super Mario 3D Land.

Credit: Nintendo

At some point during my time playing Super Mario 3D World (a game which I am two insanely difficult levels away from completing 100 percent) I thought to myself that I'd love to play a game that was just the special "Captain Toad" levels. All of them took stuff from the main game—enemies, coins, power-ups—but forced you to interact with them using a character who can't jump. Gravity apparently pulls harder on Captain Toad than it does on other characters in this universe.

Based on the floor demo, the game won't just be levels like the ones that occasionally broke up the action in 3D World—post-Galaxy Mario games have thrived on their variety, and Captain Toad will inherit at least a little of that spirit. I played three of the four different levels on display: one would have been right at home in 3D World, but the other two mixed things up. One of the other two was a boss battle of sorts, though rather than fighting the giant lava-dwelling dragon-thing you had to avoid its attacks while climbing to the top of the level. The other was a rail shooter level where players looked at the Wii U GamePad to aim and throw turnips to kill enemies and pick up coins (the TV shows the action from the third-person perspective, while the GamePad uses the first-person).

We don't know how much content this game is going to include, or whether it will be a full $60 retail game or a downloadable title more in the vein of New Super Luigi U. Based on the demo, though, there should be enough here to scratch an itch for Mario fans while also offering up a unique kind of challenge for those worn out by straight 2D and 3D platforming. It's also one of the few new games announced with a release date in 2014, which doesn't hurt.

Mario Maker

Some Mario Maker demo kiosks.

Credit: Andrew Cunningham

Anyone with a halfway decent computer, a little technical knowledge, and a bit of free time could figure out how to hack together their own Mario levels on top of an emulated version of the original Super Mario Bros. for decades now. Better late than never, Nintendo has taken this arcane process and made it an enjoyable, accessible experience with a simple interface in the upcoming Mario Maker.

Building levels in Mario Maker is as simple as dragging the component parts from the top of the GamePad screen onto a grid in the play field below using the stylus. Level builders can scroll left and right across the playfield with the D-pad and even make use of basic functions like undo and erase as well. It's a much friendlier and more straightforward process than most PC-based Mario editing tools—or most video game level editors, period. It also comes packed with some nice Nintendo-style touches of whimsy, such as shaking a green-shelled turtle under your stylus to convert it to a red-shelled turtle.

The E3 demo had a decent selection of familiar level-building blocks from the original Super Mario Bros., including coins, enemies, blocks, pipes, moving platforms, and even a springboard. There's plenty to be done with these simple pieces, but I found myself longing for some more visual and functional variety, such as the gently sloping hills of Super Mario World or the multicolored blocks and backgrounds of Super Mario Bros. 3. Hopefully the final version of the game will include some of these more modern Mario features, not to mention a wider selection of enemies than the extremely limited selection from the first SMB.

Still, it was fun throwing levels together, stacking enemies on top of each other, creating tight tunnels for Mario to navigate, and building coin designs in the sky. (A Nintendo rep warned me sternly that I wasn't allowed to spell words with the coins.) I was also impressed with how simple it was to jump directly into playing a creation at any point.