Mario Tennis Aces - out this June
Mario Tennis Aces – out this June

Today’s Nintendo Direct is going to have one less surprise to reveal, as a Japanese website jumps the gun on at least one of the games.

Yesterday, a new Nintendo Direct livestream was announced and is due to take place at 10pm tonight. And given how little is known about the Switch’s current line-up it seems like it has a good chance of being an important one.

But the only game mentioned by name, as being part of the Direct, is Mario Tennis Aces, which while it looks perfectly fine is not exactly the most anticipated of Switch titles.

The Direct is clearly going to spend quite a bit of time on the game and yet the release date and cover art has already been leaked by a shop website in Japan, confirming an early leak by Amazon.

The game will be out on June 22 in Japan, and while there’s no guarantee it’ll be the same in the UK it probably will. The cover art and new screenshots also confirm the presence of Yoshi, Peach, and Rosalina – as if that was ever in question.

We have very fond memories of Mario Tennis on the N64 but none of the subsequent games have ever quite lived up to the original, so we’re hoping this one will be different. The idea of a proper story mode also sounds promising.

The real question here though is what other games Nintendo is going to talk about. The still unnamed Yoshi game seems fairly certain, but it’s possible that Metroid Prime 4 and the unnamed new Fire Emblem game will be left till E3 in June.

A new Pikmin game has also been hinted at multiple times, but never officially announced. And we know a mainline Pokémon game is coming to Switch, but nothing has ever been shown of it.

A new or remastered Super Smash Bros. also seems an inevitability but it’s impossible to say when Nintendo will actually announce it. Unless something else gets leaked in the next 12 hours.

For some reason it's only a singular 'ace' in Japan
For some reason it’s only a singular ‘ace’ in Japan

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