The Video Game Thread

[AdmiralKird]

It's not going to be titanically expensive. That touch screen is not going to be as nice as you would imagine. Remember the microphone they put into the Wiimote? Complete POS, worse than even the worst 1980's cell phones. It's going to have about a third the resolution of a new iphone. Okay maybe not that bad, maybe 800x480 if we're lucky. Probably LCD ghosting galore.

[TimeForGuinness]

They've solved the "I have to take a dump" problem with gaming...just take controller with you.

[robbotis]

Was that Nintendo's "groundbreaking" announcement?
Where's the next gen platform?
Where's HD and Zelda and...

[JackofDiamonds]

Was that Nintendo's "groundbreaking" announcement?
Where's the next gen platform?
Where's HD and Zelda and...

The new console is HD and there's a new Zelda.

[Michael]

With the Wiimote it truly felt like Nintendo was doing something groundbreaking. Now it just seems like they're following trends with the 3DS (3D movies) and WiiU (iPad).

In other news, Portal 2 is awesome but it doesn't completely recapture the magic of the first game. The concept wasn't as mind blowing the 2nd time around.

[Maclowery]

What a terrible, terrible name for a system. The Wii was already pretty stupid.

I agree that it doesn't sound ground-breaking at all. If anything, looks confusing. I don't want to look down at the controller while I'm playing a game on my TV. And if the controller has enough processing power to play games on it, then I think 150 might even be low. Do they really want to design 4 player games using four of those things? Or are we supposed to each own one, and bring it over to our friends' homes to play on theirs?

Meh.

[Michael]

I'm still going to buy it. I'm a sucker for Nintendo consoles.

[JackofDiamonds]

I'm still going to buy it. I'm a sucker for Nintendo consoles.

I was just going to say that.

[clevername]

Was that Nintendo's "groundbreaking" announcement?
Where's the next gen platform?
Where's HD and Zelda and...

The new console is HD and there's a new Zelda.

FWIW, the main Zelda game they showed, Skyward Sword, is going to be a Wii game. The Zelda footage shown during the WiiU presentation was just a tech demo and not an actual game. In fact, all the 3rd party games shown during that presentation (Darksiders 2, Ghost Recon, etc.) were apparently just footage of the 360 and ps3 versions of those games because none of them are actually running on the WiiU console yet (at least enough to present). At this point we really don't know what games will look like on the system, though Nintendo is promising all 1st part games will be 1080p.

[Felix The Cat]

I agree that it doesn't sound ground-breaking at all. If anything, looks confusing. I don't want to look down at the controller while I'm playing a game on my TV. And if the controller has enough processing power to play games on it, then I think 150 might even be low. Do they really want to design 4 player games using four of those things? Or are we supposed to each own one, and bring it over to our friends' homes to play on theirs?

The controller doesn't have a processor AFAIK; the console still does all the work - the idea is just to stream the game from the console to the controller's screen without lag. It's not even confirmed that multiple WiiU tablets can function simultaneously since the console may or may not have the power to output to 2, 3, 4 different screens at once without lag. Notice how the demoes shown only have one tablet working with Wiimotes for other players.

It's still in the early phases since it's not slated for release until mid-late 2012 so maybe they can get it to work by then. They're also not saying it's going to work with the console in a different room as the controller so I'd temper the expectations of playing it on the john (unless you intend to place the WiiU in the bathroom lol).