E3, Day One (3)

"Opening with two handheld games—Nintendo's still keeping its footing," the deputy editor of ElectronicGaming MonthIy murmured to the photographer beside him. "The real show should be coming later."

He guessed right.

The image on the screen changed. The color saturation leapt straight up a level.

Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island.

The entire image used a hand-drawn crayon art style, completely different from any previous Mario game.

Yoshi ran across the screen with little Mario in his mouth, the ground he stepped on leaving colored traces behind, while the clouds and hills in the background had a soft, brushstroke texture.

The audience was quiet for two seconds.

It was not the kind of quiet that came from boredom, but the kind of quiet where the image had seized everyone's attention.

"Is this Super Famicom?" someone asked in a low voice.

Onstage, Shigeru Miyamoto pressed the controller. Yoshi swallowed an enemy, turned it into an egg, then took aim.

And threw.

The egg traced a parabola and smashed into a hidden item inside a distant wall.

"Every stage in Yoshi's Island has hand-drawn drafts by our designers," Shigeru Miyamoto said. "We hope that when players open the game, they feel as if they have stepped into a picture book."

Applause rose.

This time, the response was clearly greater than it had been for the previous games.

Several reporters in the front row began writing densely in their interview notebooks.

Right after that, the live gameplay footage of Super Donkey Kong 2 appeared.

Compared with the first game, the sequel had improved in both scene layering and character animation frames, and the smoothness of the mine-cart stages left a deep impression.

The final game was Super Nintendo Wars.

A turn-based strategy game, with a bright visual style and a rich variety of