Batman Arkham City was a complete mess on PC? Wha-?
I thought it was a terrific port.
It still had GFWL though.
psst… xliveless
My TV has had a couple of bright spots for the past week that are really getting on my nerves. A quick search on AVS Forum says I may be looking at a 600 dollar repair. Boo. So now I’m sick of looking at the damn thing. Fortunately, I can play Mario on the new controller from up to 2 rooms away. Wii U success story!
Yes, of course I do. Do you? Kids want to play games. They don’t sit there worrying about which controller is the coolest, or complain that a touchscreen is resistive instead of capacitive, or worry that the DS isn’t a retina display. They just want to play the games. And in the case of the Wii U, I’ve seen kids play the Rayman Legends demo, where one kid didn’t want to use the “cooler” touchscreen controller, because she was the one who had to cut the ropes and raise platforms and all that. She just wanted to play the game.
That’s true, but there’s also the addition of the gyroscope, and the “augmented reality” aspect that is possible with the touchscreen controller. Plus, the DS is largely a single-player device, and I think there’s a lot that can be explored with having a DS-style interface in a multiplayer game.
See, I see it as just the opposite: I think there are plenty of asymmetrical multiplayer gameplay options that can be explored with hardcore games. Take the multiplayer in ZombiU, for example: One person plays the survivor, and one person controls the zombies, using the touchpad to assign waypoints, set up patrols, and track down the survivor. So the survivor is playing a first-person shooter, while the zombie controller is basically playing an RTS. I think that’s a much cooler gameplay idea that could appeal to the hardcore gamer.
That’s true, but there’s also the addition of the gyroscope, and the “augmented reality” aspect that is possible with the touchscreen controller.
Vita and 3DS have gyroscopes and touchscreens and AR games. They’re rubbish. The ability to “scan” rooms by holding up the Wii-U gamepad is a marginal UI improvement over pressing a button on a gamepad and switching to scan mode, but that’s all it is.
See, I see it as just the opposite: I think there are plenty of asymmetrical multiplayer gameplay options that can be explored with hardcore games.
There are opportunities, I’d agree, but I just don’t see it happening much. Not least because, unfortunately, bitter experience shows that non-Nintendo hardcore games don’t sell on modern Nintendo platforms. Also, there’s been plenty of opportunity for asymmetric multiplayer on PC (eg Spy Party, Left 4 Dead) for decades, and yet it’s still not very common.
Asymetric gameplay also make sense when you mix people of different ages and skills.
Like… with Mario Galaxy you have the second player collecting crystals and helping doing double jumps. Being helpfull with the double jumps need a lot of skill (or you could be actually kiling the other player or interfering his gameplay), while collecting crystals is a shallow activity that anyone can do. In a coop game you would have two Marios on screen, but maybe asymetric makes more sense because a dad will have different skill and interest than his childrens, and having different size slots where people would fit, maybe is better?
What I really I am saying here is that If you hate asymetric gameplay you are a horrible person and you hate Mario Galaxy.
I’m not sure I agree with the logic that the Vita and 3DS have gyroscopes and touchscreens and AR games and they suck, therefore any devices with gyroscopes and touchscreens and AR games will suck. Ignoring the idea of AR games, the idea of using a gamepad to scan around a 360-degree 3D virtual room is pretty damn cool. But again, it will obviously all depend on the implementation.
Something doesn’t need to be common to be good. Historically, Nintendo platforms have had odd control schemes or been underpowered (i.e. non-HD) compared to other platforms, so hopefully the Wii U will avoid a lot of those problems. Everyone laughed at the DS when it came out too, so I think it’s a little early to judge whether the Wii U will pan out in the long term. I am cautiously optimistic.
Exactly.
Help me out because I’ve not seen this… Will I have to give up my old wii games on the wii-u, or am I just losing the capability to play GC games? (I have a launch wii). Will my VC titles carry over?
You’ll have to say good-bye to your Gamecube games, but the stuff you’ve downloaded to your Wii is supposedly transferrable to the Wii U with an SD card.
I haven’t tried this yet, as I’m still busy mourning the loss of Beach Spikers and Rogue Squadron.
-Tom
As I understand it, it’s more a question of dropping the GC controller ports and memory card slots than difficulty emulating (IIRC, the WiiU uses a similar architecture to the Wii, which was basically the same as the GC). So, I’d expect a lot of GC games to come out on virtual console if you really need a Beach Spikers fix.
It seems like there are enough Wiis and GameCubes out there so you can play GameCube games for the next several decades. At this point I would get so little for a used GameCube, I’d rather just keep it around. Plus it’s so cute!
Also a good point. I think I have two in my house right now.
Or, Dolphin.
But if you want official emulation, GC games are going to available on virtual console at some point.
And the transfer is a no-go for me, so now everything’s locked on my Wii. I had a game that somehow got corrupted on my Wii. I couldn’t delete it, I couldn’t download it again, I couldn’t transfer it, I couldn’t launch it. Whenever I tried to interact with it, my Wii just froze. I spent far too long trying to resolve the problem, since it was a really good game. Swords and Soldiers. But in the end, I resigned myself to being unable to play that game. Which sucked, but everything else seemed to work fine.
And now, after puzzling out the torturous process of transferring content from the Wii to the Wii U, everything freezes on my Wii, and I’m left with a message to “see my operator’s manual”. Which is about as helpful as telling me to consult a Tibetan guru. Thanks, Nintendo! My Wii content, which includes some saved and downloaded games, seems entirely shut off from my Wii U…
-Tom
You are not the first journalist to whom this has happened. I saw on Ars Technica that their games editor had the exact same thing happen.
Even beyond GFWL the DX11 implementation was just plain broken at release and I’m not positive it’s been totally fixed to this day.
Anyway, I managed to pick up a U this evening. First impressions are that the controller is really nice. It looks like it would be too big and unwieldy, but it just feels natural holding it and I can already tell there won’t be any hand cramping like with the PS3 controller. I’m also digging that it’s linked to my television and I can pull up my Nexflix, Hulu or other programming right from the controller.
The machine and the controller seem really well made and in my limited time with the touch pad it’s nice and responsive. I grabbed SMB U and ZombiU and I’ll post comments when I get a chance to play them. Overall my only issue thus far is that the updating is slow, considering my connection speed what should have taken a few minutes looks like it will be an hour or so to complete. Hopefully it’s just this launch update that takes this long, I’m used to slow updates with the PS3 but this is far worse.
Just curious, are game saves that are not transferable to a card able to be transferred to the Wii U?
Yes, they are supposedly transferable, but as Tom (and Kyle Orland) has pointed out, a corrupted file can halt the process completely, leaving your system license untransferred. And if the license isn’t transferred, even your SD card saves won’t work on the new device.
It seems like Nintendo really didn’t think through this process very well. That, and interrupting the system update can brick your console. There’s no excuse for sloppy programming like that.
I can’t understand why they attach games to devices and not accounts. How silly is it that you have to physically transfer the games over when they know exactly what you have purchased on the Wii Shop.