The Wii U Lowdown - Part 2

And yes, I've written far more than the 10,000 word limit...again....

[size=+1]The Wii U Lowdown[/size]
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The weirdest thing about this is that I am genuinely excited for this. I thought I'd grown bitter and resentful of Nintendo after the Wii failed to deliver on everything promised. The games never came. Any that did deliver were part of a thin trickle of titles that truly made me sit up and listen. Everything else didn't grab me well enough. I believe it's because no developer except Nintendo themselves had any idea of what to do with the Wii Remote. The good games that used it interestingly tended to be made by them and them alone. Skyward Sword, Twilight Princess, Wario Ware: Smooth Moves, Wii Sports. Apparently, Red Steel made an effort but didn't quite pull the sword fighting thing off as well as it could have. There wasn't much in the way of actual, full games to play. Just a wave of party, mini-game collection things or shovelware.

This, on the other hand, seems to be safer if you ask me. The duel-screen thing has been tried and succeeded with the DS. Developers could get away with using the two screen thing as much as they needed or liked and the touch-screen thing made for a handy short-cut past the buttons to give the player direct control of certain bits and bobs. It seems the same principles and lessons can be applied to the Wii U. Developers seemed to understand and be able to work well with the DS, in all it's slightly pointless resurrections, bringing out some rather splendid stuff like Sonic Rush, Professor Laton, Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass, yadda-yadda.

But the duel-screen thing never seemed to throw developers outside of Nintendo for a loop. They could pick it up and go "Huh, a Game Boy Advanced with more display space and a direct way of controlling things. Sweet!". The Wii Remote seemed to be something baffling and limiting as it wasn't able to map 1-to-1 movement for a long while. Random shaking was the best that could be done. Heck, I remember even Nintendo themselves saying that Motion Control was a dead end.

Then we've got the whole 'Nintendo Strategy' too. It used to be that Nintendo released more and more powerful stuff to be able to play more and more visually impressive games. Now, starting with the N64, Nintendo are pulling back on the reigns and playing things differently to their rivals in Microsoft and Sony. The Playstation and The Xbox both boast power and graphical grunt, increasing with each new upgrade. Nintendo want their consoles to be, well, bizarre compared to the others. The analogue stick, the motion controls, even a heart rate monitor - if only in concept - has been presented as an idea for peripherals. Nintendo side-swipe their rivals by trying to offer something new and weird, but clever rather than try and wrestle the big boys in a show of strength.

It's also why the last few consoles have been relatively cheep too. Nintendo have only just made an HD console because the price of those components, most likely rather decent ones too, has only just come down to a reasonable price. They can sell that hardware on at something far more competitive than the behemoths of the market like the Playstation 3 and the Xbox 360. But there's costs to the hastiness of Sony and Microsoft. The PS3 had to drastically drop it's price after a while too when it didn't sell well enough early on in the console's life. The Xbox 360 practically cooked itself with it's own hardware.

Nintendo has the benefit of time. They can learn from the mistakes of the other two consoles and use it to benefit the Wii U.

But it's not all hardware, despite me yammering on for so long on it. The Wii U seems to be trying to be a proper game's console this time. It seems as though it can actually deliver a proper gaming experience with decent third party support. The library of games for the Wii wasn't fantastic as it seemed as though most new companies never got past the 'testing stage'. They made some tech demos then packaged them as a party game. The Wii U has already got the likes of Assassins Creed III and Batman: Arkham City within the ranks of it's launch titles from the get go, which is fantastic! Two of the most talked about games of the year are getting a go on the Wii U. Nintendo only needs to keep bringing the big names to the white or black box to keep us interested. We Wii users have felt a little left out in this generation, what with things like Dishonoured being released as we play the latest Rabbids game.

It feels like the focus is on being a computer game console again. The Wii was meant to get everyone playing but once the magic of Wii Sports left us, we seemed to get little left to tempt us back. The Wii U seems like it might be able to conjure something up to keep us coming back to our consoles for more. I'm not talking about streaming TV and films from the internet, because that's a stupid endeavour when you can get a TV capable of doing that for you without anything but an internet connection. No, Nintendo seems to be trying to get games you'd want to play from people other than themselves. I am genuinely excited by the prospect of playing Assassins Creed III on my Wii U. I've finished Arkham City already, but I'd give the Armoured Edition a go, definitely! Rayman Legends needed only to be a re-make of Origins and I'd have been happy. Nintendo Land sounds great. I'm genuinely curious about what ever the hell is going to happen in Game and Wario.

The fact that I appear to care about what comes out on a Nintendo console is what I'm happiest about. I'll have to see what I can do about getting my own little white box and I hope the information here helps you do the same, if your planning to do the same. I think the only question left now is what these things are like to live with.