The 3DS launch is a month and a half away, so the launch titles are likely all announced. After all, it takes time to crank out copies of a game, and you never hear of launch dates being pushed up, only back.

So, barring some miracle, this is the current launch line-up for the 3DS:

Street Fighter IV
Dead Or Alive Dimensions
Lego Star Wars III: The Clone Wars
Madden NFL Football
Samurai Warriors Chronicles (actually launches 2 weeks BEFORE the 3DS)
Ridge Racer
The Sims 3
Super Monkey Ball

Notice that there's not a single Nintendo game on this list. What the fuck?

Yeah, Super Monkey Ball is the top contender for game I'll buy. I could potentially buy Samurai Warriors. Not a DOA fan, a Madden fan, or a Sims fan, and I don't know anything about The Clone Wars cartoon, so I don't think I'd enjoy it in Lego form.

I'm not buying Street Fighter IV for a third time. It's just not happening. Unless they added Skullomania as a 3DS exclusive character.

What really irritates me is that Kid Icarus was the big 3DS game trailer at E3 last year, and somehow it's not a launch title. You can't whip the fanboys into a frenzy and then not deliver.

I don't think Nintendo's EVER had a system where they didn't have at least one launch title before. In fact, I'm pretty sure the minimum has been two.

Supposedly Pilotwings and Nintendogs will be launch titles, but as of this morning, Amazon and Gamestop weren't listing them as such. Rayman, Ghost Recon, and Splinter Cell are also supposed to be launch titles.

Yeah, if it's actually shipping, I'd pick up that or Pilotwings.

My list is compiled from the games that Amazon and Gamestop currently have listed with release dates and are definitely shipping. I figure if the two biggest online video game retailers don't have them available, no one will.

Mario Land is going to be on its VC, so that's nice.

Andrew Man wrote:

Going by that logic, I feel you can say the SNES is just a pumped up "NES", GP. This doesn't make me want to cancel my pre-order. I think there will be enough cool and interesting shit on the 3DS to keep me pretty interested til around June when the "serious" games start coming out. Also, I am pretty damn sure Steel Diver is a launch title, which happens to be a first-party product.

There's not going to be a price drop anytime soon, so I figure I might as well get it now.

And GP, this most certainly is a new handheld.

The NES handheld progression is GB, GBC, GBA, DS, 3DS.

DSi does not count.

I really hope they make a Mortal Kombat 3DS. If any fighting game, or game in general, was ever meant to be done in 3D, it's Mortal Kombat.

The DS launch was surprisingly similar. It had:

Asphalt Urban GT (Gameloft)
Feel the Magic: XY/XX (Sega)
Madden NFL 2005 (Electronic Arts)
Mr. Driller: Drill Spirits (Namco)
Ping Pals (THQ)
Ridge Racer DS (Namco)
Spider-Man 2 (Activision)
Sprung (Ubisoft)
Super Mario 64 DS (Nintendo)
The Urbz: Sims in the City (Electronic Arts)
Tiger Woods PGA Tour (Electronic Arts)

So, we had a Sims game, a Ridge Racer game, and a Madden game. I believe there's an Asphalt game coming in the first month or so of the 3DS launch, too. I have no idea what the fuck Asphalt is though.

The DS launch had Mario 64 though, which was some nice fan service, and it's important to have a mascot game present at launch. And got people interested in it, at least a little bit. But yeah, I guess the DS launch was more of a mess than this will be for a number of reasons:

1. The DS arrived at a time when the gaming media was blantantly hostile to Nintendo. Nintendo could have put a $100 bill in every DS box along with the system and reviewers would have complained about how the bills were folded.
2. The GBA was still wildly popular and a bunch of anticipated releases for the GBA had yet to come out.
3. The DS felt like an experiment. The launch had no "HOLY SHIT" titles.
4. Nintendo did nothing to combat the easy "VirtualBoy 2.0 LOLOLOLOL!" jokes that were being made.
5. Nintendo insisted on releasing the handheld device in time for the 2004 holiday season, rather than waiting to get a better launch together.

The first signs that the DS might not be a joke and a complete embarassment came 4 months after launch, when Kirby Canvas Curse was released. With it's simple interface and charming gameplay, Canvas Curse was the first game to truly demonstrate that the stylus could be an integral part of gameplay without feeling clunky and unnecessary.

But the system really hit its stride in October 2005, with the release of three of the most iconic DS titles ever made - Trauma Center: Under The Knife, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, and Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow. Trauma Center and Phoenix Wright would further demonstrate the sort of fun, quirky games that stylus input could result in, while Dawn of Sorrow would show other developers that stylus input didn't have to be a major part of gameplay. And with those three releases, shit got real, and the DS proved itself to be the legit future of Nintendo handhelds and not another expensive failure.

3DS will only have to wait a few months for its first real games, and by the end of summer, it will have an actual game library. So that's cool. But Nintendo is making the same old launch mistakes. March is the launch of the 3DS, but it's also the launch of the highly anticipated Pokemon Black/White, and that will largely overshadow the 3DS launch three weeks later.