The 3DS has some life left in it yet and Nintendo seems to be in no rush to push out their next handheld.

Earlier this week, Nintendo announced they would be showing a Nintendo Direct on September 1st.

After the announcement, everyone’s immediate reaction was that this would be the long-awaited reveal of the NX. Nintendo squelched our anticipation immediately by also announcing that this Direct would focus only on 3DS.

‘We don’t want to hear more about 3DS, Nintendo. You just showed off a bunch of 3DS games at E3 not three months ago. Could you please address the elephant in the room that everyone is talking about? You don’t have to talk about games for it, but will you please end this stubborn secrecy about NX and tell us what it is, since it’s supposed to be coming out in six months?‘

Nintendo’s response:

A comic strip of a Nintendo executive.

*sigh*

I was expecting a rerun of what was shown at E3, with lots of Pokemon, Yokai Watch, and Dragon Quest. Surprisingly, that wasn’t the case, as Nintendo showed off a slew of new games, including A 2-D Pikmin game, a port of Yoshi’s Wooly World, and a port of Super Mario Maker (minus…online level sharing?).

Also included was the next Shin Megami Tensei, Mario Sports Superstars, Mario Party: Star Rush, and best of all, Picross 3D: Round 2, the sequel to the amazing Picross 3D on Nintendo DS.

So this Direct surpassed my low expectations by a wide margin. Almost every game shown was new.

The 3DS just celebrated its fifth birthday this last spring, and it’s heartening to see Nintendo isn’t ready to put it to bed yet – especially with their Super Nintendo Virtual Console just getting going with some of the best games from that system available for it. Some Game Boy Advance games would make it even sweeter.

It’s nice that even though Nintendo has their lips sealed tight about NX, they’re making the wait as pleasant as possible with some impressive new titles coming out in 2016 and 2017.