gdgt

I don't seem to find points 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 to be problems. It's typical Nintendo PR, but the truth is the company's competitor is anything that occupies a user's free time. Thus being worried about tablet use during TV time or the limitations of one display in a room is reasonable, and these are valid places to strike when designing a new console. Personally, I'd rather see them push back than just roll over when a threat enters the room. So scared? Yes. And Responding. Good.

As for point 7, their acceptance of HD this round is natural. I think we would have been more shocked if it wasn't included, more than we were with Wii's exclusion of it--which was done as the same reason as (part of) point 8: Nintendo's mostly run it's company to make profit. It's rare for them to take a loss on hardware to make up on software.

I'd say point 8 is a little deceptive, though. Let's break it down:

- Yes Wii's paripherals, the ones that are in millions of homes already, are used. God forbid consumers have a good ROI and an easy time transitioning, or the company have an foot in the door to homes. I'm not sure how you mean this will cause "fragmentation." I don't imagine they'll upgrade the Wii Remote for a long while.

- No the CPU and GPU in Wii U aren't the most advanced pieces of technology on the market, but by all accounts are more sophisticated than the CPU/GPU combo in the original Wii. The hope is that by waiting, they'll be able to reap the benefits of cost reduction on a system (at least) on par with it's current generation competition. Do not forget that this is an entirely new console.

- No, Blu-ray is not used. They will be using proprietary media, but there's no reason to indicate that it is "old"er than any other disc media. Nintendo has let leak pieces of information that the proprietary format will have substantial capacity.

- Resistive can be a bitch. But it's cheap and effective. I've never had a problem with the resistive display on my DSlite or DSi, and I don't expect to have any with this one. My expectations of a game controller are different than other devices.

So yeah. There's a big push back from the company--but I can't knock any of it. It all seems entirely reasonable to me and a smart move for a company trying to keep it's grip on the changing landscape of entertainment.

The thing that really disappoints me about them continuing on with resistive touch displays for the Wii-U is that there is so much innovating that can be done if that display allowed for multitouch like capacitive does. That and I do find capacitive touch screens to be more responsive. I've had a few problems with the touch screens on the DS and DS Lite (though small, I must admit).

I think you're just hoping for minecraft support.

at least the name "Wii U" is better than "PlayStation Vita".

If it's as good as they say it is, "possibly" count you in? Let's not hedge or anything, Jon!

You know what else was a horrible name for a console? Wii, but most of us got over it... at this point I'm convinced the name doesn't matter as long as it's not difficult to say.

It's not a mobile gaming experience though. It's the interaction that makes it so special.

Same reason people will sit in a room full of people/TV/ect. and play angry birds on their phone/iPad/ect. They also showed this might be because the TV is "taken over" which would normally be "game over" for any other console.

Yes I am not sold on the controller, but the graphics look great and I would love some zelda hd action.

Nintendo announced awhile ago they are going to release a new console, the Wii U. wii.ign.com­/articles­/116­/1163764p1.html
'Multiple sources tell IGN the console - dubbed Project Cafe - will be "significantly more powerful" than the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, and be backwards compatible with current Wii software.'

I think for the most part, Nintendo is trying to push the idea to developers that Wii U will use Wii-motes for multiplayer games, so you will only need one Wii-U tablet, in theory. All of the multiplayer concepts shown involved one tablet and three Wii-motes.

I'm scared of this as well. Nintendo always seems to have great, and diverse ways of using their hardware with first-party games, but what about all the other game studios? They don't have the best track record with that. We got so many bad Wii games where the use of the remote was nothing more than shaking to perform what would have been a button press.

I agree with you except for one thing. I think Nintendo is trying to push to developers the idea that, in multiplayer games, there should only be one Wii-U tablet and then the other three players will be split screen on the TV with Wii-motes. If you watch any promo video for Wii-U where it's a multiplayer game, that seems to be the setup. I think Nintendo is aware of how expensive these tablets are going to be and they're trying to minimize the impact on consumers so the adoption rate will be higher.

I can see the implications of this setup though. Kind of like back in the Gamecube days when you had the GCN to GBA connection and you could play games like Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles (which I love) and The Legend of Zelda: Four Sword Adventure. These games were great games to play with friends and having that second screen really helped make these games unique... however, with Nintendo seemingly pushing the idea of one screen per system, I don't see games like that coming to fruition again. Though I did recently play Pac-man Vs. for Gamecube and that was a lot of fun. I could see that setup working well with Wii-U simply because it only needed one GBA.

I noticed this as well, they may be trying to get around the expensive controller idea by simply relying on a group of people having one of them and everyone else with standard remotes. The demo videos were based around that. And there are already so many wii remotes out there now, I could see it being a less expensive proposition than we all might think.

Plus, we are still not sure if the console itself is even going to be strong enough tech wise to stream a game (or 2 different versions of the same game) to two separate Wii U controllers... I'm hoping it doesn't end up with a "supports 1 Wii U controller and up to 4 Wii motes" warning on the box.

I don't think a lot of iPhone games will port well to the Wii-U merely for the fact that the Wii-U uses a resistive touch screen, which I'm pretty sure means no multitouch... I think that alone will break a lot of iPhone games.