I have to admit that, despite myself, I’m really looking forward to Mother 3. Earthbound 2. Whatever you want to call it. Each new bit of info that the villainous Shigesato Itoi doles out to his eager fans is somehow terribly enticing… and I don’t even particularly care for the previous games. Maybe it’s the willful simplicity of the visuals — you can hardly call this the cutting edge of graphics:

…but despite the flat appearance, there’s a lot going on in this screen. The satisfied smirk on the wine-drinking ghost’s face (despite the fact that the wine has clearly passed straight through its spectral guts) is the sort of tiny detail that seems likely to put Mother 3 in its own class.

Unless, of course, these are the bitmap equivalent of those composite “screenshots” that EA likes to assemble in Photoshop to promote its latest callow wares. Since the Mother series has been relegated to the “post-modern” corner of the medium by various chin-strokey journalist types, I wouldn’t put it past Itoi to succumb to the base deceptions of his vile PoMo bedfellow, Hideo Kojima, and promote his new game with a carefully-orchestrated blitz of lies to put Metal Gear Solid 2’s Raiden fake-out to shame.

The again, the six screens revealed so far indicate that there’s something like four different protagonists, so any switcheroo gimmickry could hardly be said to be unexpected.

Eh, whatever. It’s not like Nintendo’s ever going to translate this. (He said, poking a stick into the fanboy nest with deliberate malice.)