Fans of game trailers and showcases have been eating well over the last several years. Every month or so, it seems like there’s a new showcase where publishers or console makers or Geoff Keighley take to the internet stage and show off what the best and brightest in the games industry have been cooking up. It’s hard to complain when we’re getting to see so much, but as someone who double-majored in college in yapping and complaining, allow me to flex my degrees.
It’s always nice to see new games, but I’m so sick and tired of seeing the same games dragged out at every showcase to display the power of the newest consoles. Usually, it’s just PlayStation and Xbox who do this consistently, but at last week’s Switch 2 Direct, Nintendo also tried its hand at showing me games I’ve been playing since 2017.
This is a trend that won’t be stopping anytime soon, but I want Nintendo, Playstation, and Xbox to listen and listen good: Stop pretending like all these old games are brand new.
New And Improved – Actually – Old And Improved
Last week’s Nintendo Direct was meant to showcase the power of the Switch 2 and highlight some of the titles that fans can expect to play once the console launches later this summer. In addition to the hardware showcase, the Direct highlighted 34 different titles, from Metroid Prime 4: Beyond to Elden Ring to that hardware gimmick-ey wheelchair basketball game. Of those 34, only 13 of them were games that haven’t been released yet.
I’m not counting Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour as a game. Look me in the eyes and try to tell me that a digital information pamphlet is a game. You can’t.
Nearly one-third of all the games shown (not counting the Nintendo Switch Online Gamecube sizzle reel) you can go out and play right now on hardware that you most likely already own. It’s difficult for me to get truly excited about showcases like these when so much of them are spent flashing trailer after trailer of games I’ve already played for tens if not hundreds of hours.
That said, the first game shown off in one of the sizzle reels was the absolute banger that is Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess, which I know a lot of you skipped last year, so when you get the Switch 2, you better give it a shot.
The Never Before Seen Power Of Playing Games From 2017
I understand why older games are shown in all of these hardware showcases to give people an understanding of what kinds of games they can expect in the future, but sometimes it can feel like the new consoles that companies have spent so much time and money on developing are stuck in the past when that’s all there is.
Take the PS5 Pro, for example. The console is priced incredibly high and doesn’t seem to have a whole lot of features that make it drastically stand out from the base PS5. Something that didn’t help the PS5 Pro’s case was the sizzle reel of games that Sony used to showcase its power. The Last of Us Part 2, Ghost of Tsushima, Death Stranding, God of War: Ragnarok, Spider-Man 2, and Alan Wake 2 are all incredible titles, but the PS5 Pro feels like it was marketed to show me that games I played half a decade ago look slightly better than they did back then. That’s not particularly exciting for anyone to watch.
Xbox has done this as well, like when the Series X and S were gearing up to launch, and we get sizzle reels of games we’ve already played every time the company does a showcase with the inevitable Game Pass slot. While I can’t tell the future, I imagine we’ll be seeing even more trailers for games we’ve all already played when Xbox reveals the handheld device it’s rumored to be launching later this year.
I get that Nintendo had something to prove when showing off the power of the Switch 2 and showing The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is a great way to get people excited since it looks great and now runs at 60 frames per second, but we’ve been seeing trailers for this thing since the Wii U was Nintendo’s flagship console.
When new consoles come out and don’t have much to offer other than playing games that are available elsewhere with a boosted frame rate, I get a little bored. It was cool to try out an Xbox One game on the Xbox Series X, but usually, when this sort of thing happens with new hardware, I pop in, tool around a little bit to see how much better the reflections are, and then close the game.
If I end up getting approved to pre-order the Switch 2, I can’t imagine I’m going to spend significantly more time with Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom after already putting 100 hours into each game. They’re great and worth revisiting, I suppose, but I don’t need a new Switch to do it.
- Brand
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Nintendo
- Operating System
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Proprietary
- Storage
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256GB internal / MicroSD
- Resolution
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1080p (handheld) / 4K (docked)