What were your highlights from the June 2023 Nintendo Direct? | Team Talk

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In true Nintendo fashion, the Japanese gaming giant waited for all the other games makers to play their cards before doing their own thing, which just so happens to be the now industry standard Nintendo Direct format.

We got news of a new Super Mario game, Super Mario Bros. Wonder, and even a solo Princess Peach game on the horizon, as well as snippets about the DLC expansion for Pokémon Scarlett and Pokémon Violet.

What were your highlights? Let us know on our Discord, but in the meantime here are a few of the things which stuck out for the team.

by Team PTC

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​@pass_controller

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Super Mario Bros. Wonder and Pikmin 1 and 2 | Liam Andrews

I went into this week’s show with the same hope I carry into every Nintendo Direct, a Switch port of The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker HD. I reckon I’d enjoy these events a lot more if Nintendo made it clear at the very beginning that this isn’t going to be announced over the following 40 minutes.

My usual Wind Waker-based disappointment aside, there were a lot of other announcements that got me excited. I never played the original Pikmin games (the GameCube ones), and during the Pikmin 4 footage I was thinking it was a shame that I’ll probably never get to, so the sudden release of Pikmin 1 and Pikmin 2 on the eShop was a very welcome surprise and I’m looking forward to giving these classics a try.

Of all the Mario announcements it was Super Mario Bros. Wonder that really grabbed my attention. I always enjoyed the 2D Mario games and the weird, almost psychedelic vibe of Wonder looks like it could be a lot of fun.

Luigi’s Mansion 2 getting a Switch port was also cool to see, and it gives me hope that the original game will make its way over at some point as it would be great to have the complete trilogy playable on one console.

Pikmin 4, Super Mario RPG and Sonic Mania | James Parry

I've said before that I'm excited for the Pikmin 4 next month and, not to bury the lead, what we saw at the direct was all so much fun.

The ability to go out at night and take the risk of being attacked by extra nasty baddies is a fun and interesting wrinkle to the formula.

The game looks beautiful, the bright colours popping and your cheerful Pikmin friends pottering about in the oversized, giant scale words you get to explore are full of exciting things to discover and mechanics which look simple but are tricky to master.

Elsewhere there was Super Mario RPG, a game that totally passed me by way back when and could be an easy in to the turn-based RPG genre that I'm woefully under-experienced in.

On top of that, we had news of another Sonic game, Sonic Superstars, was revealed. This time it's a new 2.5D experience, letting you charge through the levels as all of the big four, and bringing the series' visual style a little more up to date with a more modern approach, compared the recent, and very popular, Sonic Mania.

It'll be interesting to see if the new expansion for Pokémon will be enough to push it to the top of my "got-to-get-back-to-that" pile. So far it doesn't look as fun as previous add-ons.