I know I know... this subject has been beaten like a dead horse. I thought some of the things said was interesting. This dev released a game on Wiiware called flowerworks. They are now planning on releasing a HD version called flowerworks HD: follies adventure on Wii U and here what was said about the game and Wii U power.
On fowerworks HD
"Flowerworks HD" runs at native 1080p, 60fps on the Wii U.
All textures, sound effects and music are now the original assets, at full quality. And there have been other graphical improvements too, like the in-game grass. So it looks and sounds great, especially on a big TV."
On Wii U hardware:
In general its been very smooth and reasonably simple. Most of the work for us has been creating our new Wii U engine "platform", which is based on the Wii version we already had. Personally, I have found the tools, documentation and processes greatly improved from developing for WiiWare. Testing is much easier, and much faster.
The change in the graphics pipelines (primarily supporting vertex shaders) required the most new code. It didn't fit in too well with the existing Flowerworks engine, as most of the game uses procedural geometry (all created in the game layer, not the engine layer). And vertex shaders are optimised for passing static vertices to the GPU. But we got there in the end, and I'm pretty happy with the results.
I should also mention that the hardware is extremely fast: we had Flowerworks running at full HD, 60fps with literally no time spent optimising any of the game or engine code. Zero.
If we do another title, I'm definitely going to try and squeeze as much as possible out of the hardware and see what we can produce. Flowerworks just doesn't push it at all.
There have been a lot of articles about how the Wii U is "underpowered". The way I see it, is you'll have to create a very specific sort of game for it to not work on the Wii U - especially from a gameplay/design perspective. There have been tens, if not hundreds of thousands of games written in the past - and 99.9% would run and play great on the Wii U. If anything, having access to a touch screen is a lot more important than having extra CPU cores or extra RAM.
Whether companies are interested in properly rewriting or porting games to the Wii U that were designed for completely different architectures ... that is another issue entirely. It has nothing to do with the specs of the Wii U.
So basically the Wii U is fine from a hardware/architecture perspective. Ports are what they are PORTS.... of 360 games from different architecture making Wii U look "underpowered". By no means is this guy game pushing Wii U and he stated that... I just cant wait for developers to stop making excuses and push this system and show what Wii U can really do.
