The Nintendo Wii U is Great Thread

[SiN]

Concerning the Wah Wah, I thought it was pretty nice when it premiered in New Supes Mario Broes, but haven't encountered it since. So, can't say if it grates.

Same here. What I love though, is how the Goombas hop in sync with the "wah wah".

[miffy495]

Concerning the Wah Wah, I thought it was pretty nice when it premiered in New Supes Mario Broes, but haven't encountered it since. So, can't say if it grates. Will say that maybe once I played with the Wii U it'll convince me too! But I haven't yet, so! I'll just keep playing Pushmo and Crashmo on my 3DS!

Crashmo has some really crazy hard puzzles, even though the game insists that the difficulty is only three stars. Three plus five, more like.

Yeah, I'm totally stuck on #79 right now. No fucking clue what to do from there.

[Thrik]

I guess it's just one of things you love or hate. It wasn't so bad with the DS version because the speakers were relatively low-fidelity, but on the big screen it just sounds really bad IMO. Also I think it sounds kind of retarded in general.

I want a Wii U but it does seem NSMB is just about the only game worth bothering with, apart from the entertainment Nintendo Land may bring. I'd so love to play DKC Returns and the Mario Galaxys if they were ported in HD though. So god damn much.

[BigJKO]

Yes, if/when Nintendo announces HD remakes of GameCube/Wii games I will buy this thing in an instant.

Also, they could just announce a new Yoshi's Island. I'd be all over that shit.

[shammack]

Same here. What I love though, is how the Goombas hop in sync with the "wah wah".

I'm the opposite. I love the "wah wah" because it's hilarious, but I hate that all the enemies pause to dance to it because it throws off my timing.

[darthbator]

I kind of enjoy the wah wah simply for how ridiculous people feel it is.

[Thrik]

I'm a bit bummed in the gob that they've seemingly removed the whole Donkey Kong Country series from the Wii virtual console. I'm guessing it's so they can re-release them on the incoming Wii U virtual console, but as with all Nintendo consoles things seem to move at a ludicrously slow rate at first and there's nothing on the release schedule about them.

I'm also disappointed that Nintendo missed a huge opportunity by not implementing better compatibility with Wii games. It'd be so trivial for them to flip a switch that makes games run at a higher resolution just like Dolphin does, even if it does introduce a slight softness to sprites and such. I'd rather have that than jaggies all over the place, which when upscaled to large HDTV size look just as bad as they did on the Wii. I've seen games like Mario Galaxy and DKC: Returns running in actual 720p and they look great. Even if they didn't do that, at the very least some simple anti-aliasing would make the upscaling look tremendously better.

This particularly irritates me because there're numerous Wii games I want to try — especially DKC: Returns which seems to be a great nostalgia trip for series fans — but it just feels so weak having to put up with these jaggies in otherwise beautiful games. I can only hope Nintendo either re-release these to run in HD or improve the virtual console, but I'm not holding my breath for either to be honest.

[SiN]

I'm also disappointed that Nintendo missed a huge opportunity by not implementing better compatibility with Wii games.

If the past is any indication, the reason is because Nintendo doesn't do software emulation for back-compat, it's supported at the hardware level. So when your Wii U switches to "Wii mode", the console actually underclocks the CPU and GPU, switches off RAM modules, etc to match the exact specs of the Wii. As a result, almost every game works perfectly. The downside, as you've pointed out, is that you can't actually enhance or change how it works.

This is how they've always done things. With Wii-to-Gamecube BC, you couldn't access the Wii's storage, and you couldn't use the Wii remote or bring up the Home menu.

Also worth noting:

I've seen games like Mario Galaxy and DKC: Returns running in actual 720p and they look great

Emphasis on "look". I'm willing to bet that while the Dolphin emulator looks great, and works pretty well, it's not up to Nintendo's shipping standard. Emulation is tough business.

[Thrik]

Yeah I mean in some ways the robustness of the compatibility is great, but on the other hand it does feel like Nintendo has a goldmine of older releases that people are pretty much dying to fork out for if only it were actually available. Things like MGS: Twin Snakes will most likely never make it outside of the GameCube's level of fidelity despite the fact that they'd look at least as good as the recent MGS HD re-releases with as little as a higher resolution and anti-aliasing.

I'm sure thorough testing of each game would be required to ensure nothing has gone awry, but I really hope Nintendo at some point comes up with a way of getting these older games running in HD and AA. That or re-release them as is popular with the 360 and PS3 these days. But part of me suspects Nintendo will do neither, and that's really sad.

[Sno]

The way Wii U is booting out into a separate Wii shell is insane, you even have to use the original WiiShop to buy Wii stuff.

Compare that to how the 3DS pools in all the DSi-ware stuff with the new 3DS eShop, and boots DS/DSi games from the 3DS' usual front end.

I mean, all of these systems use hardware-based backwards compatibility, so that's not an excuse for what the Wii U is doing.

[SiN]

@Thrik: doing HD remakes is a lot easier from a technical perspective. The game doesn't need to be emulated, it can just be recompiled for the new platform. I'd say that's more likely to happen than the Wii U's BC getting HD support.

@Sno: Agreed, from what I've heard it sounds pretty terrible. Anything before the game is booted up can be improved. But once that game starts, there's not much that can be changed.

[syntheticgerbil]

Plus the regular Wii boots up Gamecube as normal, the only issue being that you just can't exit out nicely with the Wiimote with the home button.

[tegan]

The worst thing about Gamecube compatibility on the Wii is that you can't use the Gamecube controller to navigate the Wii menu and get to your game even though there's no discernible reason as to why you can't. In fact, I was kind of secretly hoping that now that everybody's Wiimotes are synced to their Wii Us, Nintendo would quietly patch in a "boot straight to disc instead of home menu" option into the Wii OS.

[darthbator]

Does anyone here have one of these? The videos I've seen of the menu system and OS are a DISASTER. The UX seems to be totally horrid, there doesn't seem to be a jump to home button and everything is SUPER slow...

[Frenetic Pony]

Meh, give me Windwaker 1080p 3d at 60fps and I'd purchase it. Oooh.

Nintendo COULD do a number of things to make me interested. Most of them involve making their first party games good again and not utter shite like they've been with the Wii. I still play Mario Party 5, Mario Power Tennis, and Mario Kart 64 with my siblings. Those things are great, but the simple fact is their first party games of late have been shit. Mario X and Zelda and Metroid and etc. have all become games I probably wouldn't even play if they were free. And I really wonder if they're even capable of making good games anymore.

And by good, I mean actually appealing beyond their seemingly eternally loyal fanbase that seems the equivalent of the hardcore Star Wars fanbase, the kind of people that would buy things no matter what. Not to judge the taste of such people, but to point out that there others not in this category that might be interested if there were merits beyond having "Mario" in the title.

[Thrik]

Whoever was responsible for Mario Galaxy should be put in charge of any and all first-party games. For me that fucker manages to balance out all the first-party mediocrity on the Wii by itself.

[tegan]

Does anyone here have one of these? The videos I've seen of the menu system and OS are a DISASTER. The UX seems to be totally horrid, there doesn't seem to be a jump to home button and everything is SUPER slow...

I have one! The OS isn't particularly good, no, but there is a jump to home button of sort. The home button on the gamepad opens a mini-menu that provides you with anything that the system can launch simultaneously with a game (web browser, Miiverse, friends list, controller sync options, etc), along with a big button that lets you close your current software. It's not as elegant as it could be, but it adds an extra step at most to anything you might want to do. The biggest failing of the OS is in friends management. It makes up for having actual userIDs instead of friend codes through two tremendously stupid ideas:

1) you have to "set up" your friends list before you can do anything online. Set up consists of answering two extremely basic yes or no questions. This isn't alluded to anywhere in the actual console setup, and any attempt at online activity before setting up this just gives you a prompt saying that the friends list needs to be set up first. And where is this friends list set up? It's not on the main menu, but in the menu that pops up whenever you press the home button, designated as one icon in a row of icons that is otherwise identical to the row at the bottom of the main menu.

2) there are two completely separate way to add someone to your friends list, but only one gives them any sort of notification that you want to add them as a friend. There is absolutely no reason to ever use the alternative.

Oh, and while we're at it, the dimensions of your screen have to be designated by the software you're running and not by the main OS. So to put it another way: I had to change the settings in both the eshop and in Miiverse to keep the image from stretching outside of the borders of my TV... but the main menu/Warawara Plaza does get stretched, because there's no option to change the default screen boundaries for the system itself.

I feel like I'm being too harsh on it, though. The good news is that this time the system can actually be patched, so they do have the opportunity to fix these problems later on down the road (and as an added bonus this means that nobody will ever have to mail a copy of their Metroid: Other M save data to Japan ever again). Besides that, Nintendo Land is an amazing proof of concept game, and we know that the system will eventually be home to Pikmin 3 multiplayer. For right now, I'm satisfied with what I got.

Incidentally, my Nintendo Netword ID is UnitNumberFive if anyone else gets a console and feels like adding me.

[Thrik]

In other news, I just updated my Wii firmware for the first time in like four years and it's pretty much exactly the same. I hope Nintendo actually makes use of its updating mechanism this time around to fix things like the HDMI not using the full colour gamut and other annoyances.

[Sno]

Meh, give me Windwaker 1080p 3d at 60fps and I'd purchase it. Oooh.

They should go back and complete the dungeons that were cut from the game too.

Instant best game ever.

[Roderick]

It absolutely would be, but I doubt they'll ever spend the effort. MAYBE once the next handheld is out and Windwaker gets the '3D' upgrade. Until that time, they'll spend their energy on making new Zeldas.

But Windwaker with the scrapped 40% of content (which was almost finished, which is the kicker!), would be amazing to a huge degree.

[BigJKO]

I wonder if the people who complained about the art style back then still think it looks weird, cartoony and wouldn't buy an HD version.. Did anyone here on this board not like the art style back then?

[Lu]

I think a large part of why people hated the look was because of their

. I remember the announcement trailer. I was at a friends place and I was loading it up on his 56k modem and as it slowly buffered. I went "I don't get it. That can't be it." and my friend, a total playstation fiend, next to me laughing his ass off yelling "Stupid kiddy shit".

We were like 15.

But I grew up a little and love the way it looks. Said friend actually only started playing the Legend of Zelda in recent years and I think Wind Waker is his favorite in the series. True story.

[Sno]

I wonder if the people who complained about the art style back then still think it looks weird, cartoony and wouldn't buy an HD version.. Did anyone here on this board not like the art style back then?

I don't remember feeling particularly strong one way or the other about it. I thought Ocarina and Majora were really ugly games and that the Wind Waker style seemed more in tune with earlier games like LTTP and Link's Awakening.

Once i played it and saw it in motion, i fell completely in love with it. If it wasn't for the big problems that game has on the back half, the giant barren gameplay wasteland that we would eventually learn was the product of a ton of cut content, it would easily be my favorite game in the series.

Twilight Princess is debatably a more consistently entertaining game, but it always kind of came across to me as the most pandering Zelda game, it seemed like such a direct result of a vocal minority being not so into the Wind Waker aesthetic.

Additionally, i just realized that i want the inevitable Majora remake to use that Wind Waker aesthetic, that would be a perfect match of tone and art. (Majora essentially being a dark fairy tale and all.)

[syntheticgerbil]

I wonder if the people who complained about the art style back then still think it looks weird, cartoony and wouldn't buy an HD version.. Did anyone here on this board not like the art style back then?

It felt like we were the only ones on the internet who celebrated it. Then eventually everyone came around.

[Frenetic Pony]

Quit Twilight Princess about 5 hours in. "I'm playing a padded out version of Ocarina of Time, except I don't like the art style or music and there's no exploration or charm."

It was one of those games that, in retrospect, I'd rather have just kept the money for. Windwaker on the other hand was full of exploration and great music and such. I had no idea 40% of it was cut at the last minute (though I'm not surprised, Video Games). I'd be doubly interested if it came with that stuff.

And I'm glad Miyamoto is working on the next Zelda though, so at least it has a chance. And I have hopes for Pikmin 3 as well. Guess we'll see as the year goes on.