If you blinked in the month of July you probably missed E3!

This year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo was under a shadow almost immediately after last year’s ended. At first, reports came in that E3 would be cancelled but later word came in that the show would simply be extremely scaled back. At the time this news sounded wonderful, no silly booth babes, companies wouldn’t have to shell out thousands of dollars for booth setups, and publishers would no longer have to entertain cousins of employees who work for GameStop.

Even still, the anticipation for what this year’s E3 show would be like stayed under a cloud of suspicion. Now that the show has come and gone it’s clear the change in format isn’t what made this year lackluster and utterly a failure, but it was the developer’s choice of products to showcase that did.

Since Nintendo blew everyone away last year at E3 they had the most to lose at this year’s expo, and that is certainly what happened. At Nintendo’s press conference not only was it short on new game announcements, it was extremely boring. A lot of Nintendo fans are excited that for once it looks like Nintendo might be back on top of the industry but do we need three or four “YouTube” videos showing us?

Do we need to be told that systems are still selling out everywhere? What we need to know is how Nintendo is going to hold onto what will surely be a well positioned lead at the end of the year and that is something that we did not see at all. Did we get any news on Virtual Console releases, any news on new Wii Channels, any news on how many Wii games will have online components? Did we see any DS games besides Zelda at all, did Nintendo show off the most anticipated game of the year, Smash Bros. Brawl? The answers to all these questions are, “No.”