The 3DS, despite being a higher-end piece of hardware than the DS -- and, yes, bearing a much higher-end price -- still bears the same resistive touchscreen technology as its seven-year-old forebear. Why would Nintendo opt for older touchscreen technology, eliminating the possibility of multitouch and forcing the use of a stylus?

3DS hardware producer Hideki Konno told Joystiq it's because of that seven-year-old DS screen. "Really, it's all about the backwards compatibility," he said during an E3 interview. "We have to play DS games on this and we want to make sure they work."

Konno said that Nintendo didn't think there was currently sufficient technology to both enable a more feature-rich touchscreen and accurately emulate the touch interface of the legacy DS. "Now that technology may come out sometime in the future, but when we were making our decision on what kind of touchscreen to implement," he said, "that was one of the deciding factors."

That, of course, doesn't explain at all why the Wii U uses the same vintage touchscreen technology. Unless the Wii U is secretly capable of emulating DS games! We're totally onto you, Nintendo.*

*We're probably not actually onto you.

I didn't see a Facebook game on the E3 show floor that I would consider passing along to you, honored readers, whose time I value more than my own -- with one noteworthy exception. Dungeons and Dragons: Heroes of Neverwinter represents a project which fans of its tabletop predecessor have been pulling for for a good, long time: An actual adaptation of the game's 4th Edition, complete with dungeon tiles, character progression and the move/minor/standard turn layout.

It is, of course, a simplified version of the robust RPG -- most of the series' constituent features are represented in some form or another, but in a limited capacity. Still, even with this one conceit, Heroes of Neverwinter looks like one of the beefiest titles on the platform; not to mention a dungeoneer's dream come true.

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Nintendo's E3 roster was so cavernous, and so quietly announced, that we still have at least one more new game to mention: Dragon Quest Monsters Joker 2. Almost completely imperceptible in Nintendo's booth except for the piped-in Dragon Quest theme, the DS role-playing spinoff will draw near to North American stores on August 28.

Joker 2 has players taming wild Dragon Quest beasts and training them in turn-based battles. It has over 300 of the series' signature critters, and can even obtain monsters via Tag Mode with Dragon Quest VI and IX!

Speaking of other Dragon Quest games, Nintendo is really serious about this Dragon Quest thing, huh? It published Dragon Quest IX last year, then VI early this year -- and Dragon Quest characters are in both Mario Sports Mix and Fortune Street (also announced at this E3). We never expected to see any Western publisher care this much about Dragon Quest, much less Nintendo.

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The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword is the Zelda game I wanted on Wii five years ago, when the console launched. I don't mean that to say it's not good, because I sure had a great time playing it. I mean that to say that the "Wiimote as a sword" gameplay in Twilight Princess was gesture-based and awful, whereas Skyward Sword features excellent, near one-to-one control thanks to the required Wii MotionPlus.

I lift the Wiimote, and Link lifts his sword. I slash diagonally, and he slashes with me, imperfections and all. In fact, aside from some seriously rough graphical edges -- literally! jaggies ahoy! -- The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword is exactly the right Zelda game for Nintendo's soon-to-be-succeeded Wii console and it's oft-misused controller.

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SSX is a series that inspires fond memories in a lot of gamers, but those memories might be older than you think. The last entry in the series, a Wii exclusive called SSX Blur, came out five years ago, and SSX 3, the one-mountain classic, hit stores just two years shy of a decade ago. So EA's new version, with the back-to-basics title SSX, has the task of not only updating the series for the current generation of consoles, but also reminding gamers just what they enjoyed so much about SSX in the first place.

Based on my hands-on demo session at E3, it seems like things are progressing well. There are still quite a few questions about how the game will turn out -- EA showed off just one example of each of the game's three play types, and what we saw was far from a final version. But there's a solid plan for the game, and some interesting choices are already evident.

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The Wii Rhythm Heaven game was, without a doubt, one of the most delightful experiences I've had in the last week, in exactly the ways I knew it would be as soon as I saw the first screenshots. It turns out there is a formula for Rhythm Heaven games, and as long as the Rhythm Heaven team makes a Rhythm Heaven game using that Rhythm Heaven formula, the result will be something wonderful.

Rhythm Heaven.

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Despite Warhammer 40K: Kill Team's dubious lot in life to be a digitally distributed tie-in for the upcoming Warhammer 40K: Space Marine release, the game actually stands on its own as a competent twin-stick shooter. It feels like a game that could be much more if THQ wanted it to be.

My hands-on E3 demo of the game began by selecting my space marine and clan. The options included ranged fighters like the Sternguard Veteran and Techmarine, while the melee classes included the Vanguard Veteran and Librarian. You'll be able to swap out weapons and equip your soldier with classic 40K items of death like the chainsword and power sword -- speaking of which, to obtain the power sword in Space Marine, the game needs to see you've completed one level of Kill Team.

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While checking out Orcs Must Die! at E3 this week, we spoke with lead designer Ian Fischer and inquired about the game's planned launch window. The current plan is to launch on Steam and Xbox Live Arcade initially sometime this summer.

"It'll be launching on XBLA and Steam initially, then other platforms after that," he explained. "We haven't talked about price point yet, but we're looking to launch it sometime this summer -- July, at least, is what we're looking at right now."

Keep it locked for our preview, which should be live on the site here soon.

Update: Orcs Must Die!'s community coordinator, Duncan Stanley, emailed me to say that Ian was mistaken when he gave me the initial July window. The game will likely launch in late August or early September, he says.

You're at E3 2011 and you've got 90 minutes to burn, what you gonna do? Go planking. That's what subject Aaron Orcino and photographer Jon Racasa decided to do at the mega convention on a whim one afternoon.

Head on over to the E3 planking Tumbler to check out a man lying on his face in over 40+ shots all over the convention.

[Thanks Vlad C. and Vlad M.]

Hey, thanks to everyone who could stop by for Joystiq's reader meet-up. To celebrate, we'll be providing free articles about E3 all weekend. Yup, in appreciation for your showing up, we're providing the digital download of articles at no extra cost. The same great coverage you enjoyed all week continues through the weekend.

What's everyone playing?

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Deadiest Warrior has a long history of surprising me at trade shows by being much, much better than any licensed downloadable game has a right to be. That trend wasn't bucked at this year's Electronics Entertainment Expo, where the newly rebranded publisher 345 Games -- not to be confused with 343 Industries or 505 Games, mind you -- showed off Pipeworks' second stab at the combatative franchise, Deadliest Warrior: Legends.

The title appears to bring a number of intriguing, necessary additions to the core one-on-one combat system, possibly bringing it into parity with deeper entries in the genre. However, the aspect which provided me with my annual jolt of surprise didn't involve dismembered, anachronistic soldiers: It involved the game's new strategic game mode, "Generals."

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I managed to snatch a few minutes with Silent Hill series producer Tomm Hulett at E3 this year. The convention played host to an uncharacteristically large amount of Silent Hill news. Between Silent Hill: Downpour, Silent Hill Collection and Silent Hill: Book of Memories, series fans are in for an embarrassment of riches. As a responsible journalist however, there was only one choice for my first question: Why Korn?

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It's hard to define Orcs Must Die!. On paper, it's a marriage of the Tower Defense and the action-RPG genres -- but the influence of one doesn't trump the other; it doesn't feel dominated by either one of those two genres. Robot Entertainment has expertly blended the two genres together to create something new: a panic-infused experience where the player is constantly under duress.

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It doesn't take long looking at screens or video from BioShock Infinite for you to realize it looks like nothing else on the market. We talked with lead artist Shawn Robertson about how the game's unique aesthetic evolved.

When you were building the world, what were some of your aesthetic influences? For me, I kept flashing back to Main Street at Disney World, you know, when you first walk in?

Good call, that's the period, that Gilded Age of America, the early 1900s when everybody's so full of hope and optimism. We didn't start there, it's definitely a journey. When we started, when we had the idea of a city in the sky, we were looking a lot at Art Nouveau, and Art Nouveau is kind of a dark, goth movement of the time, swirlies, very organic. The first few maps we built might as well have been Rapture. We brought the clouds in, it was dark and stormy, the clouds had a greenish tinge to them, it was very claustrophobic. Then we started pushing the clouds out.

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E3 2011 is doner than done ... it's donerer. We've got a reader meetup going on now in downtown Los Angeles, and it'd be awesome if you could join us.

We've also got developer folks here with games. Be part of the first members of the public to play Dance Central 2 and check out the magic of Retro City Rampage, along with others. Again, it's for the 21+ crowd (sorry! we know it's wrong!), so come drop by, we'll be here until 9:00PM.

Head past the break for the entire list of games and details of the event location. Looking forward to meeting you. XOXO, Joystiq.

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Mario Kart 3D has more improvements in store than just hanggliders bolted to the backs of all the cars. It currently features eight-player local wireless racing, and, if everything goes as planned, it'll feature eight-player online as well.

Joystiq asked Mario Kart 3D producer Hideki Konno if the kart racer would feature online play, and he responded "Of course!" Though the current online configuration isn't quite set, "our goal right now is to have the same number of players for both local wireless and multiplayer over wi-fi." The bottleneck at the moment is making sure the game can handle smooth 60FPS frame rate with eight players in both online and offline, 2D and 3D.

We've got another marginal detail about Silent Hill: Book of Memories for you. During an E3 showing of downloadable splatterfest Bloodrayne: Betrayal, WayForward designer and director Sean Velasco briefly discussed the company's expanding slate of games -- which now includes a new Silent Hill game for PlayStation Vita.

Velasco didn't divulge much, only describing Book of Memories as a "left-field" part of the prolific developer's upcoming lineup. A "left-field" multiplayer Silent Hill game? Scariest licensed baseball game ever.

Cryptic and Atari's upcoming relaunch of the Neverwinter Nights franchise is a multiplayer online game with infinite content. I'm still trying to wrap my mind around what this means -- and I think its creators are, too.

The infinite-ness is provided by the Foundry system, a returning (and far more refined) feature which Cryptic implemented in one of its other flagship MMOs, Star Trek Online. Rather than patching in the campaign-crafting tools after launch, however, Cryptic is making the Foundry the keystone of the Neverwinter experience -- an appropriate callback to Nights' UGC-centric success.

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For as many games as we physically play at E3, we hear as many ambitious, high-concept pitches for games that are still quite a ways out. One presentation at Trion Worlds for the upcoming Defiance is about as ambitious as they come. Ready? Deep breath:

Defiance is an MMORPG/third-person shooter set to launch simultaneously on PS3, PC and 360 that's being created in conjunction with the SyFy network which will develop and launch a TV series of the same name, the events of which will bleed into the game and vice versa.

...Yeah, it's a mouthful.

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