Poor Nintendo.  They tried so hard and did such a great job of presenting the WiiU today, showing off new features and making some excellent surprise revelations, but sometimes timing just works against you no matter how carefully you prepare.  Sandlot’s Famitsu announcement of Earth Defense Force 4 doesn’t seem intentionally timed to take the wind out of Nintendo’s sails, seeing as it actually hit the day before, but when news this great lands, good intentions just don’t matter.  There’s a new Earth Defense Force coming out, by the developer that created the series and knows what makes it awesome, and it’s going to take more than a major series of revelations from one of the biggest gaming companies in the world to divert attention from that.

For those that aren’t aware — Earth Defense Force 2017 is a must-have for the 360. It’s desperately in need of a budget and the achievements are a joke, but it’s some of the best insane destructive free-roaming run & gun action you can find anywhere. A single giant ant is running along a skyscraper?  Sink a rocket into the building and watch it crumble into pieces, causing untold millions of dollars in property damage to take out a single pesky enemy.  Take out one of the giant Hector robots and the explosion rocks the screen while fire tears across the sky.  Uncountable dozens of ants, spiders, and giant robots advance on your position while giant enemy carriers fly in to drop more, in the midst of a cityscape that’s getting utterly decimated as the ridiculous amount of firepower you and the enemy are flinging at each other tears the world to pieces.   Earth Defense Force is pure action gaming at its finest, and the six year wait since the last one has only served to make the promise of More even harder to wait for.  Bring it!

Of course, it might have been an easier wait if Sandlot’s Nintendo-published fantasy action game Zangeki no Reginleiv had seen any kind of English release.  Maybe the announcement wasn’t such a coincidence after all.