Wii U – Launch Misconceptions

Impressions 2 Minutes

This is a quick post, because I’m playing the shit out of my Wii U right now and don’t have any spare energy to write. There’s an overwhelming amount of fun stuff to do and Nano Assault Neo blew half my face off. Anyway, paid journalists were also overwhelmed and fucked up a lot of things in a sweaty panic, causing mass confusion in the Miiverse. Here’s a few things to set straight!

Misconception – Truth

Update takes 4 hours – Update takes 1 hour (took me 45 minutes on third-world Australian internet)
Update is 5GB – Update is 1GB
Update is mandatory – Update can be skipped, downloaded in background
Black Ops 2 is worst version – Black Ops 2 is best version (controls AND graphics, one opportunistic blocky shadow screenshot can fuck right off, all versions can look bad if you try hard enough)
Third Party ports are a broken mess – Except the ones Digital Foundry DIDN’T put under the knife (Sonic, Just Dance 4, Assassins Creed 3, Trine 2, Tekken, Fifa)
The GamePad isn’t a thing – The GamePad is a thing and the entire reason to buy the console
You can’t use Component Cables – You can, I tested the same ones I use with Wii and they work, exact same image quality
ZombiU is too hard – ZombiU is appropriately hard and it’s OK to die once in a while
ZombiU is a bad action game – Oops, this is correct
Mario U is just another Mario game – Mario U is another Mario game
Both players need to add each other to be friends – You can send invites just like PS3 and X360 (in much friendlier fashion on the Miiverse)

That’s all for now, Wii U is awesome and so are Nintendo fans. I’m LOVING all the activity on the Miiverse, there’s a lot of happy vibes and people are putting effort into their drawings and messages. The screenshot function seems a bit wonky though, and I wish there was a way to access the Miiverse on PC just so I could copy and paste some pictures; two things hopefully fixed in an update. The Miiverse does the unthinkable and provides the world with a positive and creative social network, a place where everyone is equal and every GAME is equal. Your opinion of Funky Barn is irrelevant unless there’s a ticked box indicating you’ve played it!

I’m more impressed with Wii U than I was with the original Wii 6 years ago, and that was a lot. I have the GamePad here at my desk, browsing the Miiverse while the TV is off in the other room while Mario U is paused. The freedom is liberating.

Published by Grubdog

Published

19 thoughts on “Wii U – Launch Misconceptions”

  1. I’m sure if the Wii U gets a bunch of FPS games, has the machine break down due to shoddy design, or has their network hacked into and down for a month, journos will love the system and call it a must buy.

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    1. At this moment, those bunch of FPS games have made an already saturated market. The arcade FPS shooters of yesteryear are now dead, though Blops II shows some major promise despite the fact it suffers from the same god damn problems the other CoDs since 2006 have had (you sometimes can’t tell enemies from friendlies and STOP HOLDING MY FUCKING HAND). ZombiU doesn’t exactly count as an FPS because its a first-person survival horror (a’la Resident Evil 1 and 2 on the PS1), but durp its bad because its not like COD.

      (deskslam)

      Oh well, I am very happy with my WiiU; Miiverse is fantastic and getting “yeahs” feels so good, as is the internet browser (I love watching YouTube vids on it since the YouTube app is sucky). Also props to Treyarch for remembering to put POINTER CONTROLS into Blops II. That Wii porting experience came in handy.

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      1. I guess the tidal wave of FPS is because of the “westernization” of the industry this gen. We need more Japanese flavoured games. Big, spiky hair, swords, emo kids trying to save the world. I’m hoping the JRPG genre comes back in a big way this gen like it was in gen 6 (PS2 was like JRPG heaven). The Wii U should be perfect for those kinds of games.

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  2. I’m glad to see I’m not the only one that realized that Digit Foundry were cherry-picking the Wii U comparisons to make the system look bad. Looks like they’ve been tainted and that’s a shame because they were once trustworthy. I guess negative news about Nintendo gets more hits than positive news. I hope those webpage hits were worth losing your integrity for.

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      1. Not parts, they were cherry-picking which ports they would do comparisons on. They only did Blops2, Batman and ME3, pointing out at which points the Wii U version would have frame rate drops compared to the 360/PS3, draw distances etc. In the end they determined that the 360 had the best performance. It seems the Wii U’s frame rate starts to drop when there are a lot of enemies on screen.

        It should’ve been obvious that 360 would have the best performance because the 360 is the developer system of choice, they’re very familiar with its hardware architecture and those games were most likely developed for 360 and ported to the PS3/Wii U. Also the Wii U version of ME3 was developed by a small Australian studio with limited resources and only started development early this year as opposed to the other two that were in development for at least a year, maybe two.

        They didn’t do comparisons between games that were confirmed by other sources to perform better on Wii U than the others like Tekken, AC3 and others. What I took from the articles is that Wii U right out of the gate is performing at levels equal to, and sometimes surpassing, the 360/PS3 with rushed ports. It took the 360/PS3 years to get to this point. So I’m not worried about the Wii U at all. It can only get better from here.

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      2. Well there’s nothing actually wrong with Black Ops 2. The article itself only mentions framerate as a hiccup (it drops to a terribly low 26 FPS once or twice in the single player campaign, call the fucking tech police) yet concludes it as the worst version based on that ONE THING despite doing every other thing better. That’s literally the only thing they could find.

        One BIG thing the Wii U version does better is having no screen tearing whatsoever. It’s the ONLY version without screen tearing. It also has the least input lag (the Xbox 360 controller is TERRIBLE for input lag), which the guy confuses for framerate. I don’t know how PS3 has got a free pass all these years and suddently Wii U is being picked apart like a carcass.

        “The COD experience fails to impress on Nintendo’s new hardware”

        I mean seriously. The game runs fucking great and is impressing a lot of people (who have played other versions). Unprofessional troll bait. These are the same guys who said Playstation Vita was a serious threat to Wii U’s concept.

        The bigger thing is they just plain didn’t talk about the games where Wii U comes out a clear winner. They wouldn’t have run the Black Ops 2 article at all if they didn’t find that one circumstantial framerate dip to its performance.

        “Oh yeah, it’s locked at 60FPS in multiplayer, but nobody cares about that right?”

        Whatever.

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  3. Re: The Updates.

    Yes, it can be downloaded in the background… but there’s NOTHING INDICATING THAT. You start up the system, it wants to connect online, asks for your info, then starts downloading. It can be skipped/downloaded later, but they sure don’t make it intuitive to do so. I call this one a draw – great that it’s not mandatory and can be downloaded in the background. Sucks that they didn’t really implement this well.

    I don’t know how long it took mine to update… I literally fell asleep during the process and woke up the next morning. I know it took over an hour, but the fact that it *was* launch night in the US probably had a lot to do with the slow speeds. I’ll give Nintendo a pass on that one.

    What I won’t give Nintendo a pass on is the horrible Wii to Wii U transfer thing. I have to redownload all of my Wii downloads? WTF is this? According to my activity log, I spent over 12 hours in the Wii Shop on launch day. That 12 hours was redownloading all my stuff. Did I *have* to do it, all at once, right then? No. But it was going to have to be done at some point and the method Nintendo used is just flat unreasonable.

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    1. Seriously? WiiWare and VC games are tiny, I don’t see the big deal unless you had 100 games to download individually. I wonder what the reason is, surely if it unlocks the games on your account, the data should be able to transfer over just like a download?

      I haven’t done the Wii transfer yet though so I’m sorry I missed that. Probably wont be playing a Wii game for a while, Wii U games are too good.

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      1. Yeah, I see where you are coming from Bob. But think about it, would you rather have no transferring ability at launch? Also note the eShop on the WiiU is a massively different beast then the Wii Shop Channel and Nintendo probably has to do some emulation trickery to make sure everything is running smooth.

        Other then that, its not like I had to redownload a ton of games back onto my SD card since there wasn’t much I was intent on replaying (besides the DKC games minus #1, the Castlevania titles and Ninja Gaiden). …On well, wait for a WiiU update where the games get put onto the eShop.

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    2. I would wanna whine about the transfer but….I was able to transfer files I couldn’t even copy to an SD card (namely, any Wii game that used the WFC). And since I had to transfer files from 2 Wii consoles and no save files were overwritten, I’m happy with the process. Nintendo had to make huge steps on an online service, and they’ve been in the right direction for the most part.

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  4. Lets be fair about the 5GB misconception. It came from Lord of Lies Geoff Keighley, who’s only 20% connected to reality. 20% of %GB is 1GB so it was par for Geoff.

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    1. Hah. Yeah but it’s one of those things that spirals out of control. It gets quoted in articles, then you see things like “fucken nintendo” and “Wii U = Dreamcast” in the comments and now everyone wants to tell their friend the latest reason why Nintendo is doomed.

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      1. Dreamcast didn’t last because SEGA didn’t have money. Nintendo has more money then Sony’s game division had. Math is a hard subject for game journalists, though I’m not surprised.

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  5. My Wii to Wii U transfer did run into a snag, where i had to unplug the system then re-plug for what ever reason. Thankfully the Wii U is not made of eggshells, and picked up where it left off when I started the process again. The only title told me it had to re-download was Majora’s Mask, which took a few minutes.

    “You can’t use Component Cables”

    Seriously? if any professional gaming journalism said this as fact, that ‘journalist’ needs to be fired immediately. They got their hands on this weeks before everyone else. They saw the back of the console. What’s this i don’t even….

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  6. First day of internet posting from my new house (while some people were worried about their Wii U pre-order, I was worried about the HOUSE I pre-ordered).

    When I packed up my Wii and Wii U, I taped them together (Megaton Console).

    When I packed up my GameCube, I stacked it on top of my Dreamcast.

    Such is life.

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