Nintendo it seems at least don't appear to be considering the idea of focusing on 3D in the Wii's successor. Some other visual or control based hook will likely be added to give the Wii's successor the same sort of viral appeal Nintendo is trying to give the 3DS with its glasses-less 3D screen. The only idea I can think of that they could add that would give a similar experience as 3D without depending on consumers buying an expensive new TV is through head tracking VR displays through the same sort of camera technology already used in the DS, 3DS, and Wii remote. The problem is that it would be a very personal experience as only one individual at a time could benefit from the effect.

All of the wii controllers and the gamecube controller will be able to be used. As for games, they might put gamecube games on virtual consoles or the store.they will have for sure, wii games.

GameCube controllers are out a long with GameCube backwards compatibility. The Wii U is merely backwards compatible with Wii. This mostly is because the ports for GameCube controllers and memory cards has been removed.

From everything we've heard in my opinion this is what I see Nintendo's online service basically being. First there would be some basic infrastructure and a Wii U account (it could still use friend codes or something equivalent to tell you the truth). Then each publisher would have individual services such as Origin or Steam. Hopefully this is all set up where you don't have to use multiple accounts for different games, but that is a possibility.

I do believe that the patent for the Wii U tablet controller confirms that the tablet controllers will use a rechargeable battery. They could likely use the same battery as the 3DS cutting cost while still having a relatively log battery live since the tablets are mostly dump terminals.

correct they have stated that they will not invest heavily on the ps4 as they did on the ps3 but please stop saying sony isnt finacially stable  because thats just incorrect.

nintendo could have sold twice as many wii's and im pretty sure they still wouldnt even come close to sony's revenue

dont be a fanboy as its pretty likely the ps4 will be stronger

Don't be a fool. The PS3 lost Sony so much money they lost all profit they've have had within the console market. Worse many of their other departments aren't doing overly while on their own for a few years. Nintendo is a much bigger company than many realize. They've made profit off of the Wii since the beginning likewise with the DS. Nintendo hardware has made Nintendo billions of dollars while Sony has lost billions and only recently to my knowledge began making a profit. The razor edge model is dead at least to the extremes of the PS3. The Vita is Sony's future attitude toward hardware going forward. Low R&D using mature technology while taking advantage of developments in hardware. Really I wouldn't be surprised with Sony taking a lower cost direction with PS4 depending on the result of the Vita.

I'd rather see someone at Nintendo finally bring the gameplay of Donkey Kong Country into the third dimension. I enjoyed Donkey Kong 64, but I wouldn't call it the ideal transition from a side scrolling platformer to a third person platformer. I'm relatively positive this would be good challenge for Retro and if done right it could easily give Nintendo a third heavy hitter. The tp's idea itself wouldn't be bad as a downloadable game for the Wii U or a full game for the 3DS.

Every last leaked photo is fake. The Nintendo logo was wrong of the first few leaked images and many of the others have obvious features that give them away as being fake. Manufacturing of this console only recently started leaked photos should be of the developer kit not prototypes, which would be secretly held at Nintendo. If any of you have ever seen a photo of a early Nintendo dev kit you'll understand that usually these devices are very crude. The early DS dev kits where made out of two butchered GBA's with a Super Nintendo controller. The current Nintendo Cafe/Stream dev kits are likely butchered PC's.

Edit: I believe I've already stated this somewhere on this blog, but anyway these fake photo leaks are created using a Windows 7 software box with fake connections. They could even used photoshop to create the majority of image. They are fake and not worth noting Nintendo would be on these rumors quicker than flies to garbage would an actual photo leak.

If you read my last post about the leaks (the one in which I leaked an image myself), you'd know that these are supposed to be pictures of a developer unit with no working disc drive. So that slot you see isn't really a slot for anything.

They're not real Feld0. You shouldn't get your hopes up regarding images from a console that has only recently been in production, or potentially isn't in production yet. If you've ever seen an early Nintendo dev kit you'd understand that these devices don't fit the bill. Early dev kits are crudely built devices in the case of Cafe we're likely talking about a butchered PC.

Improving the fidelity of the Wii Remote will have to wait until Nintendo releases a new remote for the Wii U. The only way really to my knowledge to increase the fidelity of the Wii Remote after Motion + is to replace the camera within the Wii Remote with a higher quality camera. The technology behind the Wii Remote is quite different than that behind PS Move.

Would only 50% more powerful be bad. I think that is good. I don't see the next consoles from Sony or Microsoft to be no more than 75% more powerful. Being that is what the developer is saying only 50% could mean more as developers haven't even tap out the current gens power.

It would be bad for long term third party support. Nintendo would potentially maintain support for the next one to two years it takes PS4 and Xbox Next to release and then they'd potentially lose support depending on Wii U's popularity. Still regardless the success of Wii may lead to Wii U maintaining better support even after Sony and Microsoft's next consoles hit, but Wii U would quickly end up in the same situation as far as support goes depending on what happens even potentially having a shorter lifespan than Wii depending on its popularity. I expect the next Xbox and Playstation to be five times as capable as their current incarnations at least. This would mean lower prices, smaller consoles, and profit earlier than this previous generation if not right away. That's close to the jump earlier rumors placed Wii U. Don't buy into nonsense both Xbox 360 and PS3 have been tapped out as far as raw capability. This is partly a limitation based on RAM, but still even with more RAM you couldn't get much more out of current HD consoles outside the possibility of PS3.

I don't know how they came up with the 50% more powerful figure is basically I don't think its wise to focus on this. For all I know this comes from a report that Nintendo's chipset runs 50% faster like I said or the CPU benchmarks at 350 gflops. At 350 gflops it would only have 50% more processing power than PlayStation 3's cell processor, but around 4x the processing power of Xbox 360's Xenon processor. If the processor is simply a tri or quad core CPU and not some strange architecture like the cell that would also mean roughly four times the general processing capability of current consoles. Then like I said most don't understand tech instead of single precision gflops developers may of given double precision gflops info. A figure of 120 gflops or 144 gflops doesn't look impressive unless you can distinguish whether its single precision gflops or double precision gflops. A figure of 120 gflops or 144 gflops would place Wii U around 50% more powerful than Xbox 360 depending on if you go with the real world benchmark figures or if you use the theoretical figure, but if instead of single precision gflops the figure is double precision gflops those same figures are 2 to 2.5 times as powerful as Xbox 360. An that's merely in double point precision operations we still would have to figure out the single precision gflops of the chip, which could vary greatly based on architecture. As an example Playstation 3's cell at best in real world figures has 15 gflops to a theoretical 17.2 gflops regarding double precision operations compared to the theoretical 230.4 single point precession gflops figure given to same chip.

Wow the PS2 only had a 299Mhz processor? That sure is a big jump. However, I don't think you could expect the Wii U processor being 1,000% more powerful with a 30GHz processor, that technology doesn't even exist

There may never be a 30GHz processor. Current trends are leading to numerous small less expensive cores and architecture redesigns that increase performance without increasing clock speed considerably.

Nintendo won’t be sharing the technical specifications of the Wii U anytime soon. We’ll have to wait for a full teardown when the console releases for the juicy details. But as a very rough guide, an industry analyst shared that “Some of the developers we spoke to indicated to us that the console will have 50% more processing power compared to the PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360.”

That sounds pretty decent to me. Developers are still managing to wring more power out of the current systems, so 50% more power is plenty of room for developers to play with.


http://wiiublog.com/the-wii-u-is-50-more-powerful-than-the-xbox-360-and-ps3/

This isn't anything to really pay attention to. How exactly did they come up with that 50% figure. Most individuals don't understand squat about tech or how to judge how capable one chipset is compared to another. For all we know a few developers told them the Wii U has a 50% faster clock speeds. This was more or less expected in any of the predictions of Wii U's hardware and is in no way an indication of the chipsets raw power, but to the uninformed they may think Wii U is only 50% more powerful because of 50% faster clock speeds.

i hope they go back to cartridge i mean i always thought it was superior to disc i mean cartridges are pretty cheap now and the console could be pretty small without a disc drive

Cartridges have several advantages to disks like the capability for near lack of loading times, co-processors, and extra ram, but I don't think it would be wise to switch back to cartridges. They simply aren't cheap enough yet to have capacities large enough to compete with other options available. One option that may be possible next generation is holographic storage. It removes a considerable amount of the cartridge's advantage regarding loading times with Tapestry Media having transfer rates of 20 MB/s in read write mode and up to 300GB of storage estimated last I can find at 6 to 20 cents per GB. Holographic storage is also compared to other disk formats extremely scratch resistant and a drive should still be able to play Wii and Gamecube games. As a retro bonus Tapestry Media has a cartridge/floppy disk like design. Nintendo had a stake in this technology with a joint patent with Inphase Technology, though all progress has potentially stopped because of recent troubles at Inphase, which now is under new ownership.

i hope they go back to cartridge i mean i always thought it was superior to disc i mean cartridges are pretty cheap now and the console could be pretty small without a disc drive

Cartridges have several advantages to disks like the capability for near lack of loading times, co-processors, and extra ram, but I don't think it would be wise to switch back to cartridges. They simply aren't cheap enough yet to have capacities large enough to compete with other options available. One option that may be possible next generation is holographic storage. It removes a considerable amount of the cartridge's advantage regarding loading times with Tapestry Media having transfer rates of 20 MB/s in read write mode and up to 300GB of storage estimated last I can find at 6 to 20 cents per GB. Holographic storage is also compared to other disk formats extremely scratch resistant and a drive should still be able to play Wii and Gamecube games. As a retro bonus Tapestry Media has a cartridge/floppy disk like design. Nintendo had a stake in this technology with a joint patent with Inphase Technology, though all progress has potentially stopped because of recent troubles at Inphase, which now is under new ownership.

Yeah, I've been wondering when Nintendo will start using holographic storage. I'm not sure if they can get it out cheap enough yet.
It would be awesome if they brought it out next gen.

Tapestry Media as far as the disks are concerned likely are ready even with the latest issues at Inphase Technologies. Imagine a floppy disk about the size of a Gamecube disk with more than three times the storage of a single layer Blu-Ray disk, super fast loading times, and possibly not costing much more than a comparable Blu-Ray disk. A 150GB disk for instance could cost from $9 US to $30 US based on previous estimates. Sounds high, but it could potentially beat Blu-Ray XL at similar capacities as far as price goes. The issue are the drives the Tapestry Media drives last I knew where large and very expensive, but the joint patent between Nintendo and Inphase Technologies points to a miniaturization in the technology. The final issue though is I'm not sure if any real progress has been made because of the financial issues at Inphase.

The likely way the Virtual Console will noticeably change is by included Gamecube games to the preexisting service. I doubt there will be many at launch though merely a few of the more popular games. Outside that something I always thought Nintendo could do with the Virtual Console is offer a monthly subscription to stream access to previous games. It would be smart on Nintendo's part to do so as individuals that may not buy many games from the Virtual Console may very likely be willing to pay $11.99 a month for unlimited access. As far as storage looking at the 3DS the Wii's successor will more than likely have greater internal storage, but I have a feeling willing it will merely be 8 or 16 GBs of flash storage with the option to expand memory storage by SSD cards. At most an option to buy a dedicated external hard drive may be included among the early accessories.

This is very exciting news but why do i feel so skeptical about the wii u?? Maybe crytek could be making the next metroid game?? That would be insane!!!!

I highly doubt Nintendo would hand one of its franchises over to a western developer that they themselves don't own. The second coming is more likely to happen tomorrow than Crytek ever producing a metroid game.

Although I know that (unless something HUGE happened in the industry) Nintendo will never fork over the Metroid license to Crytek...

The prospect makes me tingly inside.

The best thing that could happen for the Metroid franchise is simply for Nintendo to beef-up Retro and hand the franchise back to them. It was the most popular it has ever been in the 3D gens in their hands and its doubtful that anyone else would be able to engage the current fanbase to a higher degree. First I'd rather Retro handle another IP perhaps a full blown Donkey Kong not merely a retro side scroller, but no doubt no one would better revive the Metroid franchise than Retro. Crytek themselves are a poor choice for Metroid anyway. Metroid is so much more than merely a third or first person shooter. Crytek's specialties don't really apply to the creation of a game like Metroid.

From what I gather from Neogaf this rumor from 01net is either completely bogus, an over reaction from some of the earlier dev kits which are known to have several issues, or simply someone not understanding that generally hardware development at this stage is usually clustered and haphazard to begin with. An individual from Neogaf with connection with this issue stated that the latest dev kit fixed the streaming issues with the controllers, so apparently that no longer is an issue.

It was only the third-party games, though; the ones like the bird at the hanami (cherry blossom place), the Zelda one, and any first-party games are the ones ran on the Wii U.

There actually weren't any first party games for the Wii U this E3. Battle Mii, Chase Mii, Super Mario Mii, ext were merely prove of concept demos for the functions of the controller not actual games or prototypes of games in production.

Nintendo's making a profit of $150 off every 3DS sold (and who knows how much off the Wii, which is based on 2001 technology), so I think they might be able to subsidize their next console's costs a little.

Considering how much we can expect the cost of hardware to fall over the next year, I don't think Nintendo would actually have that much trouble making the console powerful enough to support two, if not four tablets, as well as the TV, without driving the cost up exorbitantly high.

This isn't actually true. Nintendo isn't actually making exactly 150 dollars off each 3DS sold. The pure manufacturing costs of the handheld is about 100 or 101 dollars, but other costs come into play. There's the retailers cut, shipping costs, ext that start cutting into that figure. Certainly they are making profit off each 3DS sold and quite a hefty sum at that, but not as much as many believe.

I'm of the opinion the primary reason behind Nintendo only looking into using two utablet controllers so far comes down to a bandwidth issue and not necessarily a CPU or GPU related issue. The technologies that would allow for video streaming to multiple wireless monitors is quite expensive. Not so expensive I don't think Nintendo could allow for four utablet controllers by upgrading its Bluetooth or other wireless technology before launch, but expensive enough that they may consider whether two utablet controllers are enough merely to marginalize costs. Then you have to realize that Nintendo only recently got early developer kits out to the majority of developers within the last month. If the 3DS is anything to go by major changes will occur to the Wii U in response to 3D party developer reactions regarding these early dev kits all of which represents added cost to Nintendo. With 3D party development heavily focused primarily on online multiplayer and the rare co-op whether the number of supported utablets increases depends on if Nintendo is interested in the concept to be honest.

It appears Nintendo is trying to insure that two tablet controllers can be used at one time, but no word on whether they'll use more than two. There are a lot of limitations for this sort of technology, so who knows what makes using more than two tablet controllers impossible right now. For one it could be a bandwidth issue through Bluetooth or ext. Then there is the possibility its a hardware limitation. The GPU can't handle more than three monitors while maintaining the graphical quality Nintendo wants and the full functionality Nintendo intends for the tablet controllers. So to have more tablet controllers playing at once may mean you either lower the graphics of the game or hardly utilize the intended functions of the touchscreen.

USB 3.0 would be a smart move by Nintendo to incorporate. Its not exactly the only option though. Whether or not USB 3.0 or something else needs to be added depends largely from my understanding on the drive's read speed. USB 2.0 may still be useful if the drive's read speed is lower than the bandwidth of the USB 2.0 port.

We already know that the 3DS changed to some degree to better match the wishes of third party devs and a lot of the focus on the Wii U's design is maintaining third party support. After the lack luster start to the 3DS it wouldn't surprise me if devs aren't able to push more with Nintendo regarding the Wii U in comparison. That said Nintendo has some very capable hardware designers. Going on leaks and rumors I do believe it won't suffer from many of the issues that plagued the Wii regarding the core audience and third party developers, at least for the first three years. Then if you add in some of the speculation from IBM's quad channel memory controllers to possibly a system on chip or system in package silicon designs Wii U may end up more impressive than the high end rumors while still using parts equal to rumored PC counterparts. A lot depends on what Microsoft and Sony do next gen, but a lot points to both potentially utilizing a more modest jump in comparison to last gen.

is there any quote from developer or nintendo or even rumors that state this is being built in Wii U? im dying for info on this console.

Unfortunately no there isn't any quote from a developer or Nintendo pointing to IBM quad channel controllers or a system on chip or system in package designs for the Wii U. That is merely speculation from Neogaf the memory controllers coming from IBM's statement that the CPU within the Wii U is related to Watson and the speculation regarding SoC or SoP originates mostly from random statements from IBM with no real relation to Wii U and the size of the console in comparison to the rumors. There was a rumor on Neogaf from supposedly an investor or employee of the company manufacturing the embedded memory for the GPU that the Wii U will use the 28nm manufacturing process, which could point to more impressive GPU than previously thought. It doesn't look like anything concrete will drop regarding the Wii U until next year. Hope still exists that leaks will follow the release of the third gen dev kits, but that could of already happened and we haven't heard anything.

I believe that nintendo has to have one hell of a launch lineup for Wii U to be successful. they have to show the power of the Wii U from day one launch games... they have to make people see with their own two eyes that a new generation has started. they need one hell of an exclusive im talking battlefield 4, cod, or gta. something that is exclusive to Wii U that ps360 cant get.

A better than 3DS launch is already practically guaranteed if for nothing more than third party ports. I don't think Nintendo need many must have launch titles either first party or exclusive third party to have a successful launch. Pikmin 3, perhaps a NSMBs, and one or two other titles would be more than enough along with the ports. What's more important than the launch titles themselves is a steady stream of titles afterwords. The lack of a steady stream of titles after launch is why the 3DS couldn't maintain any momentum at its original price not the lack luster launch software. Most launches are lack luster in selection and quantity.