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An article was recently published over at The Examiner in which a writer stated that the Wii U “has nothing going for it” besides the touchscreen controller. The article reads like a classic piece of sensationalist troll bait, so I’m not going to link to it directly, but I wanted to take this opportunity to clarify a few misconceptions about the Wii U.
“The touchscreen is the Wii U’s only special feature.”
While the touchscreen controller has certainly been the focus of everything we’ve seen of the Wii U so far, to say it’s the one and only novelty of the system this early on is jumping the gun. Nintendo are intentionally being coy with Wii U information to try and retain interest in the Wii as long as possible. Just because we haven’t seen anything other than the controller doesn’t mean it isn’t there. It’s especially noteworthy that Nintendo have promised us an intuitive online system, among many other things, so it’s safe to say that there’s still a lot left to be learned.
“There are no games in development for the Wii U.”
Yes, the actual list of confirmed Wii U games is rather slim. But weren’t we at the same stage with the 3DS just over a year ago, before its E3 unveiling left us awestruck with a mind-boggling outpour of first- and third-party support? With all the developers’ rave we’ve been hearing lately, I’d honestly be more surprised if we didn’t see a list like that next E3 than if we did. Once again, Nintendo and their partners are holding their Wii U cards close to their chest as their focus for the holidays remains to push as many 3DS and Wii U units as possible.
“The Wii U is ‘slightly’ more powerful than the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.”
We have few facts I can base a response to this one on, but in addition to it once again being too early to judge the Wii U in this respect, basic logic dictates that a CPU or graphics card purchased in 2011 will noticeably outperform a 2006 part in a comparable price range. And honestly, even if the Wii U’s GFlops pale in comparison to Microsoft’s next console, I’ve seen enough of the E3 demos to convince myself that the graphics are beyond “good enough.”
These are just a few of the more prominent pieces of Wii U propaganda going around – there’s a surprising amount of negativity surrounding Nintendo’s next console out there – but you can already see a common theme here: it’s too early to make any judgments yet.
Give Nintendo some time, peace, and let them finish developing it. Iwata himself told us that they aren’t planning to show the console to us in its final form until next E3 and we’ve heard nothing but good things from developers working on games for it.
The Wii U might not turn out to be the greatest video game innovation since the joystick. I will admit that even I’m a little skeptical of it. But trying to talk it down before we’ve even seen what it can really do is nothing less than ridiculous.
View and comment on the full article at Wii U Go
