This will probably be the Wii's last remodel ( excluding color variants and bundles), considering they've cut pretty much every corner they can. The only thoughts I could imagine for another remodel would be to make the console memory smaller, which sounds possible. But not for an entire new remodel, maybe in the really late days of the Wii ( 2014ish?), they downsize the memory.

Nintendo will continue selling the original Wii (in full-size or 'mini' form) until holiday 2013. They'll probably announce final production just after next holiday season this year and kill the console so that they can compete in every market - last-gen and next-gen - against Microsoft and Sony's consoles (assuming they're out next year). Also, after that season, Nintendo will be able to say that the Wii has surpassed the 100,000,000 mark of units sold, assuming they can get another two and a half million out by then. That should be doable because they've been doing about 3-5 million units per year for the past little while.

If you read the wording closely, it says that it's a Canada exclusive through the holidays. Which means that it will be brought to other territories at the beginning of the new year I presume.

Or it means that it won't even be in Canada after the holidays. At which point it'll be worth even more.

The only cradle and stand available are black, unfortunately. I think a white one would even look great with a black GamePad.

(Post deleted - everything I said was inaccurate :S)

In Canada, as well as the US, it is illegal to sell products with any sort of material rating (ESRB, Film Classification Board, etc.) before the street date.

In Canada, fines are anywhere from $15,000 for a single title to $140,000 for multiple offenses if I remember correctly. This applies to movies, games, hardware, etc.

A lot of smaller stores sell games and hardware before street date because this is the only way they can make money. A mom n pop games store might sell 500 copies of Halo 4 two days before launch because once it comes out, everyone will go to EBgames / Wal-Mart / wherever they buy games to get it.

I played about an hour of New Super Mario Bros. U in bed this morning without getting up. Of course, when I wanted to switch to Ninja Gaiden, up I got.

There's also the possibility that any games you buy on eShop become cross-compatible with the Wii U, just like Sony and their Vita Cross-Play, Cross-Buy functionality.

It would be streaming the game from the 3DS, so you'd still need a 3DS to play them.

No, the idea would be that the 3DS Player would be an attachment for the Wii U that you would insert your 3DS game card into, just like the Super Game Boy and Game Boy Player peripherals for SNES and GameCube, respectively. No streaming required.

Why not? Why does Microsoft keep putting out new 360s? Cuz people still buy them. I was at Walmart lookin at the Wii U games and a lady was planning on buying a Wii for her nephew. Just because it's old doesn't mean nobody will buy it, as long as its on the shelf people will buy it. They might just be waiting until it reaches their price range.

You're right, some people will still buy a 3DS, but most of the market will be gone. Unless of course there is a price drop, which isn't out of the question. A $129 3DS is a very enticing proposition.

I actually wrote about all of this in an article almost a year ago, where I theorized that perhaps the door in the Wii U would have a 3DS slot built-in. Take a look:

http://www.eggplante.com/2012/02/06/wii-u-3ds/

I'm thinking 3DS functionality could happen with wireless streaming, as Jakester mentioned. Of course, it would require a Wii U and wouldn't just be a TV out function for the 3DS. Then again, Nintendo might decide to be nice and give us a sort of player attachment. In all likelihood, they could sell the player at a huge margin. A player for $49.99 would easily cost under $5 to make given that all the software and processing power is in the Wii U itself. The player would simply be a 3DS cart card reader. And we all know how cheap it is to make an SDcard reader.

I understand Jakester897, but I'm saying that the person wouldn't need to buy a 3DS to play the game if Nintendo follows tradition with their Game Boy attachments.

It might sound like it would replace someone getting a 3DS, but think about most of the market for a 3DS Player attachment for Wii U: hardcore gamers. Not hardcore in the sense that they're only playing shooters or 300-hour RPGs, but hardcore in the sense that they're gamers, and proud of it. People who buy an attachment to play 3DS games likely already have a stack of 3DS games next to their 3DS.

Of course, don't forget that this peripheral, if it ever comes out, would likely not be out for at least a year and a half, by which point the 3DS will have been out for more than 3 years. Someone who hasn't bought a 3DS at that point certainly isn't going to buy one now, but if they buy a 3DS Player for Wii U, Nintendo might actually have found an additional market!

I did notice something interesting in the wiiu game boxes it has clips for a extra plastic sleeve for aditional discs.

A lot of DVDs and even Xbox games are doing this now. It is cheaper to manufacture one case with the clips and manufacture the extra shelf only when needed than it is to manufacture two entirely different sets of cases. That's probably even more true for the colour of the Wii U cases being a non-standard game case.

It is not the size of the game that is really the issue for making great games, but rather the size of the world.

Smash Bros. will likely fit on a single layer disc, and probably come in around 10-20GB by my estimation. This is because they reuse a lot of graphics, and there is limited area to render. However, with a more open-world game like Zelda, there is a LOT more art required, more audio and speech, and different game mechanics.

Of course, these are estimations, but I'd go ahead and guess that the next Zelda would easily crack the 25GB capacity of the current Wii U disc.

Some great points, Desert Punk, but it's also worth noting that the Wii U will likely feel hindered by its relatively small disc capacity in a few years time. With that said, the laser in the Wii U could probably read dual-layer discs, but whether or not the discs are made is another story.

a 50 GB game...my ISP won't allow that XD

There will undoubtedly be games that will not be available on the eShop. I don't foresee massive titles such as Pikmin 3, the next Zelda, Smash Bros., etc. as downloads.

I'd love to see The Phantom Pain realized as an actual game, but I'm not sure how the footage we saw could tie into a Metal Gear Solid game. Either way, here's our rumour roundup:

http://www.eggplante.com/2012/12/11/the-phantom-pain-rumour-roundup/

Seems about right for them to make a MGSV, 4's been out for a few years now.

True, but I feel like they'll be drowning the market in Metal Gear Solid games over the next few years. We've got MGS Rising: Revengeance, MGS: Ground Zeroes, and now MGS V? That's a whole lot of Kojima.

Hey PotatoHog, this is a games forum but we're all human and willing to talk about whatever will help each other.

I've gone through some tough times as well, losing my closest friend to cancer.

PM me if you'd like to talk in private.

This is a really interesting discussion. A couple of decades ago, Pepsi and Coca-Cola had about the same market share and it didn't seem to be changing for a while. So Pepsi decided they would save a bunch of money and not advertise for a while, thinking people already made their minds up and had their preference set. Well, over the next five to ten years, Coca-Cola's market share grew to nearly 80% or so, and Pepsi has never come all the way back to parity with Coca-Cola.

I think the same thing could happen if Nintendo were to abandon Mario. Sure, Zelda, Donkey Kong, Kirby, and Luigi could hold up the company, and perhaps it would be good to have a break from our favourite little plumber for a while. But without the character at least seemingly in development in a new game, Nintendo could be in for a lot of trouble. That doesn't mean that big-N needs to release a new Mario game every six months, but they can't explicitly say they're not developing any Mario games or people will be up in arms. Of course, they could just leave it for a few years between major releases, but they already do that. It's been years since a major Mario game like Galaxy 2.

I could see GamePad HD coming out in a year or two. It would be a great system upgrade when dual GamePad games become available later this year or in early 2014. Of course, Nintendo's console is already having trouble keeping up with the video end of things as games like Disney Epic Mickey 2: The Power of Two chug along with some major framerate issues. With that said, as developers get smarter with console resources, maybe there is untapped power in the console.

There is truth to his argument.... and yours as well.

Image quality consists of 2 main factors, Well, really just one, they are linked, so one is typically the product of the other, unless you do something silly, which i will use as an example later: resolution, which is what you are talking about, the number of pixels, and ppi, pixels per inch aka pixel size.

You can have a resolution of 4k, but if your pixels are the size of lego blocks, you are getting a lousy picture.

The pixels in the gamepad are much much smaller than those in an hdtv, so despite having less pixels, it still has a comparable image quality, particularly with supersampling (downsizing a much larger picture) giving the appearence of higher resolution.

Although, increasing the resolution within the same physical screen size ALSO increases ppi (makes pixels smaller so you can fit more) for a double whammy of image quality increase.

Which, unfortunately, is impossible for the gamepad without changing the wii u console.

I understand what you're trying to say a bit more now, but I still don't see the merit of it. The first point you made had no mention of changing screen size, which is where the miscommunication might have been.

However, saying that the Wii U is not capable of displaying a higher PPI on it's GamePad without changing the console might not be true. You'd need to change the GamePad, yes, but as I mentioned above, Nintendo hasn't told us about the technology they're using under the hood to stream video to the GamePad. Maybe there is more bandwidth available than they're using or than we know about, and a higher PPI screen - let's say something with a 1708x960 resolution on the same 6" screen instead of the 854x480 one (yes, I know that's a total stretch) - and it would be possible.

gpu isnt the problem, resolution can be increased by simply decreasing scene complexity. The problem is that a larger resolution is still a bigger data size even AFTER its finished and rasterized.

The problem is hardware, specifically the wi-fi out, which is custom made to output a precise packet size, interleaved, at unprecedented speeds (way, WAY faster than a ps3 or 360 controller. Faster than a tv can display the image....) Simply De-interleaving the data can increase report size by 2x, (still not enough for hd) but.... will cripple signal distance to a few feet.

They would need to change the systems wifi out for an hd gamepad.

Again, we don't know if they've already accounted for that packet size in the design of the Wii U. Odds are, they haven't, but it's still possible that the packets they've been sending for the current titles are not using up all the bandwidth that their WiFi protocol is capable of.

theres no reason for it to be HD dumb thread its HD down sampled to 480p+ so your getting effectivly HD anyways and the gamepads screen to pixel count is higher than a lot of HD tvs

Your argument makes no sense. HD provides higher fidelity. If you downsample HD to 480p, yes it might look better than what you would traditionally get as 480p content, but it's still not HD. Not even close. Compare an HD image downsampled to 480p and another that is 1080p or even 720p for that matter. You'll see a world of difference.

Not only is it pointless, its impossible.

The system was designed for a 480p gamepad, not just with fillrate, but in data streaming speed as well. An hd image would not only demand more from the gpu, but the data size being streamed to the gamepad would exponentially increase, and would likely not only need to take more than one report to deliver, increasing lag, but no longer be able to be interleaved decreasing distance from the system.

I wouldn't say it is impossible. Nintendo has designed their streaming protocols from the ground up. We don't know what kind of throughput they get or how much they're using right now. It's smart for them to have designed something that can have its functionality opened up so that, as developers get better with system resources, they have more bandwidth available. Now, Nintendo doesn't typically think that far ahead, I don't think, so I'm not saying it's there, but the fact is that we don't actually know what Nintendo is doing under the hood and how expandable it is.

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You should be able to just go through the level. Worked for me.