Banned because I squashed the goomba.

Banned because Piers Morgan is right about everything regarding gun control.

Our Nintendo Network ID is, as you may have guessed: Eggplante

Add us and let's get our game on!

Following Nintendo's trend, we won't see a price drop on Wii U until 2015. The Wii stayed at the original price from November 2006 to September 2009, nearly three full years.

It will also depend on supply and demand. If we have the same shortages with Wii U that we did with Wii, there is no way Nintendo will be cutting the price in the first two years, and it certainly won't be happening within months.

It is very much necessary to remember that Nintendo has had Wii U in development for about three years, if not longer. That includes salaries of a research and development staff for three years, in addition to prototype manufacturing (each prototype can cost anywhere from $2000 to $100,000, believe it or not), design, software development, and testing.

Then there's actually building the Wii U itself and hoping to make some money on it.

It probably won't be able to play GC games because the "family edition" removed support for it. So while I can see them making it even smaller... I don't really see a point. Maybe to save material costs while they ride the death out? :/ It's probably a fake rumour.

That's true. It might also be a surprise with perhaps two GC ports instead of four, and just a single memory card slot. Then again, I might be out to lunch. Of course, it would probably cannibalize their own sales if they made GameCube games available on the Wii U Virtual Console/eShop. Then again, how would we manage with controls? Even the Pro Controller doesn't line up with the GC controller unless you remap all the buttons to be inverse (analog on the top, buttons on the bottom).

Wii Mini is a CANADIAN EXCLUSIVE! http://www.eggplante...-mini-announce/

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.

Don't forget, the Game Boy Micro came out a year after DS when they stopped making GBA games, but that was also a pretty big failure so who knows.

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.

This makes sense and it doesn't. The consoles can only be so much smaller in width because the DVD is a fixed length. The length could be shortened, as well as the height slightly, but there still needs to be enough room for GameCube ports and memory card slots as well, assuming they don't remove those.

The only market I can see for this is the crowd that wants to play GameCube games because they can't do that on their Wii U. Of course, that is a feature that Nintendo could take out of the Wii Mini or whatever it's called.

Given that the console hasn't been announced and the Wii U hasn't been out for more than a few weeks, we just don't see this happening. Then again, more bizarre things have happened before.

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.

The best platinum reward ever for me was still the Club Nintendo Japan reward from 2007's Platinum program. I got me one of these babies on eBay for about a hundred bucks and it's beautiful (and still boxed, of course):

http://www.inside-ga...4/15/28450.html

These might help: http://www.eggplante.../19/kunai-wiiu/

Its actually not the gyro and accelerometer that is the culprit for most of the noise. The stylus as well as the face buttons make a lot of noise when the GamePad is shaken.

Not trolling at all. It'll help by making sure you don't hear it. Just like the user above me said with the sound on, you barely notice anything.

If you guys would like me to stop posting, I have no problem doing that

Like I said, I'm here to be a member.

If Apple had made this, the device would have design tolerances so small, the buttons would be perfect. But then Wii U might cost $549, not $349.

I never sell back my games, so I don't have a problem with digital. If the games are huge, like Smash Bros though, I go retail. Another thing, people say that you don't own the game when you go digital, but you only own a license to play it. Is the company going to take it back from you or something?

They're not going to take it back from you or anything, but the argument is being made about whether or not you will always have access to that game. Let's say Nintendo goes bankrupt or decides to stop offering certain games on its online store. (Get around the fact that those things probably won't happen, but we've seen worse and weirder things happen). If you have paid for a game and are granted a license to use it but Nintendo no longer offers it, you can't redownload it, which means you've effectively lost the money you've paid for it. The same thing would not happen with a physical copy unless it requires a constant internet connection to servers to verify its authenticity, though game companies are moving away from that now anyway.

The same applies to physical retail games and not just digital games.

That's actually not true. No, you don't own the physical assets of course, or every gamer would have a 0.00001% ownership of Modern Warfare 3 or Super Smash Bros. or any other game. But you do own an always playable copy of the game that cost you probably the same price as a digital copy would have.

The biggest thing I'm upset about with digital-only is going to be the lack of collector's edition content. I mean, sure you might pay extra for DLC or a season's pass or something, but what about that cool journal from the game, or statuette, or even that gold Wii Remote? Gone

It probably is illegal & I normally wouldn't have done it, but when I bought my wiiu points card they charged me 12% tax for it. I didn't want to have to pray full tax twice so I changed my region. I still payed 17% tax though when I should've only payed 12%. So if the law wants to get on my case they can suck beans.

Not sure what you mean here since Wii U games that you buy online are not bought with points. Also, if you are talking about Wii games you buy for points, you don't pay tax twice since you pay in points, so if a game is 800 points, you pay 800 points, not 800 *1.12 or whatever your tax rate is. You would have paid tax on the 2000 points you bought, for example, but not twice.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.