Wii Games

A new patent, reported on by Nintendo Life, shows one idea Nintendo has for their upcoming Wii U console, in which you can drag a person from the main screen to the touch screen.  The patent illustrations show a stick figure on the TV, under attack by aliens, being dragged by the Wii remote into the safe confines of the Wii U remote touch screen.

It's a cute idea, although I'm not sure how well it would work.  It just looks like a pain to have to set your Wii U remote up on a table so you can do this.  But the idea of the touch screen as a sort of box you can drag things into is an interesting one.

The important thing, though, is it shows how the Wii remote can interact with the TV and the Wii U remote in interesting ways.

In an interview with Gamespot, Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford unequivocally stated that the best-looking version of Gearbox's upcoming Aliens: Colonial Marines will be on the Wii.  He also declared that the Wii U controller is  the "best controller I've ever had from Nintendo for a hardcore first-person shooter."

While there has been a lot of debate on how powerful the Wii U will be, and whether it can be considered a next-gen console at all, Pitchford says it is clearly next-gen, and says that, since "the Wii U is a more powerful machine, [if]  you've got the disposable income ... maybe that's something you want to look at for this game."

Pitchford is also excited by the Wii U touchscreen, which can be used in the game as a motion sensor, and, since it's a motion sensitive controller, will allow you to sweep the room.  In multiplayer you can use it to check the leaderboard.

Pitchford clearly had more to say about the Wii U, but noted, "it's up to Nintendo to talk about their system and they haven't revealed all of their details yet."  In terms of online play, all he said was that if the Wii U didn't offer offer proper online play they wouldn't have been comfortable putting so much effort into the Wii U version of the game.

The game itself looks pretty cool; I'm excited to see what Gearbox has come up with.

via Examiner.com

IGN just polled 62,000 of its readers on their attitudes towards the next generation of consoles.  The good news for Nintendo is that of gamers who use their Wii regularly, 68% are interested in buying a Wii U, just about the same percentage seen with 360 and PS3 gamers.  On the down side, far few gamers overall are interested in the upcoming console.

Overall, gamers show less enthusiasm for the Wii U than for the expected successors to the other home consoles; while almost two thirds are interested in buying a PS4 (63%) and an Xbox 720 (60%), only 40% are interested in buying a Wii U.

In more bad news for Nintendo, when gamers were asked what they wanted from their next console, the majority said a "major graphics update" (72%) while only slightly more than a third said "innovative controllers." (37%)  Other things that beat innovation were "more media connectivity" (44%) and "streaming digital games" (40%).

IGN's readers tend to be core gamers, so the poll doesn't reveal what's in the minds of the many casual and first-time gamers who bought a Wii.  But it bodes ill for Nintendo's plans to win over core gamers, who tend to have a low opinion of the Wii and gesture gaming, and who focus a lot on graphics.

On the other hand, those polled are basing their enthusiasm for the PS4 and Xbox 720 on pure speculation, since at this point no one knows much about what features they will have or how much they might cost.  If Nintendo makes a good case for the Wii U at E3 in June then these numbers cold change.  But clearly Nintendo has their work cut out for them with the core gamers.

It's tough being that one critic who doesn't like the game everyone else in the world loves.  You feel like you're through the looking glass.  I don't know why people love the games I call the 10 Most Overrated Wii Games of all Time, but I know they won't love me for dissing them.

Someone on NeoGAF noticed that Amazon.com has listed a few Wii U games at $49.99, leading to speculation that publishers may choose to sell Wii U games at a lower price than PS3/360 games.  Nintendo is offering no comment.

This probably doesn't mean anything.  Some NeoGaf commenters say that Amazon pre-listed PS Vita games at a lower price than they eventually retailed at (although I suppose if you pre-order now you would get the Amazon price).  But if Nintendo has somehow convinced publishers to sell their games more cheaply on the Wii U than the other consoles it would definitely encourage gamers to buy the console when it ships.

I don't know what put it into my head, but I decided to sit down and list all the Wii games for which you have to have something more than a Wii controller.  I came up with 9 controller peripherals.  Oddly enough, almost half of them come from Activision, that apparently just love making gamers buy special controllers to play their games.  Check out my list of 9 Fancy-Schmancy Controllers and the Wii Games That Need Them.

Nintendo has announced June 10 as the U.S. release date for their Wii port of the Game Cube title Pikmin 2 selling for $19.99 as part of their budget series, Nintendo Selects.  While they're at it, the publisher is adding a few more titles to Nintendo Selects;  Super Smash Bros. Brawl and Donkey Kong Country Returns for $29.95, and Mario Power Tennis, another Game Cube game Nintendo brought to the Wii a few years back, for $19.99.

We still don't know much about Nintendo's online plans for the Wii U, but if Wii U Daily's source is right, then the upcoming console will, like the 360 and PS3,  have cloud storage for save games and player profiles.  Players with an account on the new Nintendo Network will have 512 MB of online storage.  The system has been set up by Mozy, a company that offers a PC backup service.

There is no word yet on whether Nintendo Network will be a free service or whether, like Xbox Live, it will charge a subscription fee.

Since Nintendo has previously dragged its feet on online gaming, this is a good indication that this time around they are working to keep up.

U.K. retailer Play.com has a number of Wii U titles listed on its site; no pricing info, just a "notify me" field for your email.  Most of the games are ones we're all familiar with, such as Batman: Arkham City, Darksider's II, and Metro: Last Night, but they also have a page for Luigi's Mansion 2, a game Nintendo has yet to announce.

As with the recent list of games purported to be in a British Blockbuster's database, there is no way of knowing whether the company knows something we don't or whether some store employer just wishfully created a page for it.  Note that Luigi's Mansion 2 is not on the Blockbuster list, so the two companies don't seem to be getting their information from the same place.

Adding a little more to the continual, largely anonymous debate on how powerful the Wii U will be, NeoGaf has a quote from an Italian claiming to be a Crytek beta tester who says the company successfully ported one level of Crysis 3 to the Wii U just to see how it would run (Crytek has said they are not bringing the game to the Wii U).

The anonymous tester claims it ran very well indeed, with a frame rate of 30-35, less pop-up than the Xbox/PS3 versions (due to more RAM), and lighting and particle effects equal to the PC version on its highest settings.  They had it running in 720p resolution, although the programmers believed it might be possible to run the game in 1080p if there had been an option to turn off the controller's touch screen, which apparently sucks up a lot of power.  The touch screen can run the game in 480p (which is the resolution the current Wii runs at).

Are we back to the possibility that the Wii U will be somewhat more powerful than the 360 and PS3 after all?  We still have to wait until E3 to find out for sure.

via WiiUGo