I have also added Kotaku's interview with Miyamoto on why the Wii U can't be propped vertically.
Joystiq - Miyamoto designing a new game, but it'll be a while
Shigeru Miyamoto told me during an E3 interview that he's working on a new game of his own, when his other job of being a very important executive allows it.
"One thing I want to clear up," Miyamoto told Joystiq, "people like to ask me if I want to do a small project with a small team. I do like working with a small team, and I'm working with a number of small teams on a lot of different ideas, but the problem is because of all these different roles that I have to fulfill, it takes me a long time to write the design document." In addition, working with small teams causes design work to take longer, he said, so "maybe this time next year I'll have something ready to show you that perhaps will illustrate that idea."
Miyamoto confirmed directly that he's working on design documents right now. "I have some storyboards that I have to draw before I finish this trip," he added. "It's fun. I use Flipnote Studioto draw my storyboards."
Kotaku - Why the Wii U literally can't stand up
Unlike a Wii, an Xbox 360 or a PlayStation 3, the Wii U console can't stand up.
You can't prop the system up vertically without it falling over. Horizontal is the only option. The new Nintendo console must lie on its belly like a Nintendo Entertainment System or a really lazy house cat
Why?
"I guess we could make a stand," Nintendo's senior game designer, Shigeru Miyamoto, told me yesterday, laughing, "I think maybe it was because we didn't want people to think it was a Wii."
Just paint it another color then, I said, needling him.
His follow-up answer was more of a revelation: "It kind of goes back to our idea of the Wii U itself which is: ‘What is the role of the physical hardware?' And in this particular case we felt that the physical hardware is something that's becoming something that is less and less important from an identity perspective for a game machine.
"So, for example, with even something like Kinect you can have your hardware put away and out of sight and you can wave at the TV and maybe the game will come on or something.
"Similarly with Wii U, when we [considered the question] ‘What is the face of Wii U going to be?', for us the face of Wii U really isn't the console box itself. It's the controller; it's the Wii U GamePad. So just like a set top box is non-descript and tucked away, our feeling was that the Wii U hardware was something that could be tucked away and out of sight.
"The Wii U GamePad is really the face of the system, whereas, with the Wii system, we had really designed it so that that system itself really stood out when you looked at it."
Edited by Cerberuz, 06 June 2012 - 11:59 AM.
