You know things may not end well when your lead-off hit title, "Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword," has problems during the live demo. It also doesn't help when your point-man spends so much time trumpeting the praises of a sequel to a poorly-reviewed dance game, which appears to be sloppy seconds compared to Harmonix's "Dance Central" for Xbox 360 and Kinect that was shown the day before. And then what happened to the Vitality Sensor that was such a big part of last year's presentation?

OK, are we still gonna buy "Skyward Sword" next year? Of course. Are we still gonna ignore "Just Dance 2"? Absolutely. And really, did anyone miss the Vitality Sensor? So all that said, how did the new stuff come off? Truthfully, I'm stoked.

Since I use my Wii to entertain a lot, mainly at family gatherings, "Wii Party" actually looks like fun. The "Mario Party" series seems to have evolved into using the Miis, although it'd be nice if players could "invite" Mario and company to play with them, even if just as AI and not player-selectable.

I've already seen some grousing online about Activision taking the reins on a reboot of the superb N64 "GoldenEye 007." But it does appear to pay homage to the rich history of the Bond movies instead of focusing purely on the 1995 film. Plus, playing online is gonna be fun, too.

The "epic" games in the presser, "Epic Mickey" and "Kirby's Epic Yarn" both look spectacular. Mickey will have plenty of in-jokes for Disney fans like myself, and Kirby's graphic style was simply beautiful, while still holding true to the pink puffball's gameplay roots.

Then came the swing for the fences ... Nintendo 3DS. Reggie gave passive mention to its first 3D hardware system, and rightfully so. Virtual Boy was a joke, and it would seem that Nintendo has learned from that mistake, and that was working with what we knew or figured would be true (works without glasses, backwards-compatible to DS/DSi). The new stuff is even more promising.

The plans to allow for 3D movies sound awesome, so either (a) the thing's gonna have tons of onboard memory or (b) it'll allow for huge and fast SD cards. The ability to adjust the 3D-ness of it should help users find a setting they like and limit complaints of eye-strain and such (although not having glasses should help there, too). They spent a great deal of time talking about how it'll be online even when asleep ... all they had to do was call it 3DSConnect24, since it acts just like WiiConnect24 (but that is a lot of digits). Then there's the 3D camera. The last time this got attempted, the camera had 4 lenses and did paper prints, and it didn't look all that good. While you won't be able to print these out (yet), the concept sounds awesome.

All in all, I'm very excited with the 3DS, and so many of the Nintendo properties hitting in the next several months. The first few tweets I'm getting say the 3DS' screen is "stunning," so it's a start. :)