Nope. It's just for Wii data.

 

No that is the SD card port, they were referring to plugging in a USB SD card reader which is essentially the same as a USB stick.

 

That should work but it might not be as reliable as a USB stick which should have their own wear leveling.  Also as you point out, a HDD is a LOT cheaper per GB so the only point really is if you already have some SD cards to use or know the can reuse the one you bought for the Wii U later if you upgrade.

Sounds like a good headline to me.

Confirmation the Wii U is easier to code on than Xbox One?

 

Yeah probably not, but it is amusing to see Xbox One getting similar treatment to the Wii U - yet this particular game IS "supposedly" on Wii U.

Can't say I'm impressed with this.  While I never played anything online on Wii, this comes across as a desperate attempt to force the people who did into buying Wii U. 

 

It also mocks the Wii U backwards compatibility.  What good is 100% compatibility if they slowly shut down functionality?  Even Microsoft gave it 4 years before they shut down original Xbox Live, although granted those people WERE paying for it.

 

Still, Nintendo should be trying to come across as BETTER than the competition, not worse.

Yet companies like eurogamer say otherwise.

No, they said that when trying to PORT a game that is completely optimised for Xbox 360/PS3 to Wii U, its hard and expensive.

Its unlikely small indie devs ever pushed those consoles that hard, its certainly unlikely they heavily optimised the engine.

As an example, it should be very easy to port between ALL platforms when using Unity, as the engine developers did the most important work of optimising for each platform. However if your game heavily modified the engine or was optimised for specific consoles over the past 7 years, its going to be very very hard to port to Wii U.

The question is not "is the Wii U more powerful than Xbox 360/PS3" because the answer is clearly yes. The question is can your game be ported to Wii U and actually take advantage of its unique architecture so you are actually tapping that power, in a cost effective manner. So logically for small indie projects the answer is more likely to be yes than for the big developers like the Eurogamer articles are clearly from.

Bottom line, PS4/Xbox One are enough of a jump forwards to temporarily offset the problem of optimisation. Combine that with the fact many games are also ported to PC anyway, so they already have a version of the engine partially optimised for PS4/Xbox One hardware. Even if they don't, they have the PS4, Xbox One AND PC market that benefit from doing so, making it cost effective. The fact that optimising for Wii U benefits ONLY Wii U, is by far its biggest stumbling block and is what those big developers are moaning about.

Perhaps they didn't word it exactly like that but I felt they made it fairly clear they were talking relative to other platforms.  I guess its difficult to judge how other people would interpret it.

Downloaded it earlier but haven't tried it yet.  I also got the Battlefield Beta code today too.

Everywhere else says 30fps for both.

 

That means either Xbox One will run more choppy, the PS4 version will look much much more pretty, or they scale down the graphics on both to make Microsoft happy.

 

I fear its most likely the latter, I just hope it doesn't become a "thing" to scale down PS4 games so they can have platform parity on performance.  Its bad enough some developers are doing this on PC already so it doesn't outclass the  console versions as much as it should.