bornsupercharged

Placing blocks is for noobs. That's why I play solo.

I couldn't agree with you more.

Nintendo Land - 90/100. Decent handful of mini-games, can keep a party entertained for hours. Careful not to drop the GamePad though as a lot of the games require it to be passed around. And remember to wipe it down once everyone has left, there will be a ton of germs lol.

New Super Mario Bros. U - 80/100. It's not innovative enough beyond what the Wii version of NSMB brought. The GamePad during "Boost Mode" just lets you tap to add blocks for the other players, oh joy. Nobody REALLY wants to be stuck making blocks, people want to play the characters. They could've done more but didn't.

Scribblenauts Unlimited - 90/100. If you're a Scribblenauts fan, you'll love this game. The GamePad makes playing a lot of fun.

Ben 10 Omniverse - 90/100. My 3yr old son knows the cartoon series and enjoys this game a lot.

sonic and all-stars racing transformed bonus edition - 80/100. My 3yr old son finds this game a bit too hard, the computers are too aggressive and it's really difficult for him to place. I myself find challenges a good thing, and to win you will be challenged a bit. Don't get me wrong, teenagers and above can place 1st with a try or two. But there are levels that are glitched and you can't progress. And multiplayer glitches a lot, even local play. There's a map where if you fall off the parking garage, you'll just fall infinitely and die repeatedly until the other player wins - a bit annoying especially to my son.

Tank! Tank! Tank! - 80/100. If it had manual aiming with the right thumb stick, I'd give this a 85/100. If you could customize or upgrade your tanks, I'd give it a 90/100. But you can't do either, and the campaign levels are repetitive. With that said though, kids really eat this game up and enjoy the multiplayer modes.

Skylanders Giants Starter Kit Wii U - 90/100 so far. I'm about 25% complete, if you factor in the expansions that I had previously bought for the original Skylanders game (keep those expansion pieces, they unlock new levels in Giants as well!) So far the levels do seem longer than the original Skylanders game, which is a huge plus in my opinion. I love the Giants and that they didn't ruin the gameplay, they made certain parts better but retained everything that made the original so great. Highly recommend this game.

Rabbids Land - 80/100. It's got a ton of mini-games, they're easy to pick up on quickly, even for my 3yr old son. He also loves the cartoon humor.

ZombiU - 70/100. This game gets mixed reviews everywhere. It's not a hack 'n slash, it's not a shoot 'em up, it's a survival game. You're given regular human strength, and you find weapons and try to survive. If you've got more than 2 zombies coming at you, you'll likely die. And then you have to go find your former self, hope your former self isnt in a group of zombies, and kill yourself to regain what you had in your bag. Fun for about an hour at a time, but it's a bit depressing and not a game you'll be playing with a group of people because it'll bore the hell out of everyone.

Call of Duty: Black Ops II - 90/100. Love this game on the Wii U, the graphics are great and the gameplay on both the GamePad and the Pro Controller works well. I enjoy playing it on the Wii U just as equally as on my 360 (brother-in-law bought it for 360).

Warriors Orochi 3 Hyper - 90/100. ADDICTING. Love hack 'n slash, and with all the characters you can unlock and play, this game will eat time like crazy. 2 player story mode? Yes please. You can do split screen, OR 1 person gets GamePad and 1 person gets the whole TV. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Then there's the battlegrounds and the multiplayer modes - glad I got this game. One of my favorite Wii U games.

ESPN Sports Connection 60/100 - Unfortunately it's just a tad too hard for my 3yr old son to play right now, I'm sure if he played it nonstop he'd pick it up but it's just a bit too advanced. Feels like I've gotta put forth too much effort to play the games, not really sure why that is. Not sure I'd recommend buying it, but this is really after only 30 minutes of playing it so perhaps I'll play it more playing with an older kid or even another adult.

Transformers - Honestly I have not played this game yet.
Darksiders II - Haven't got to this game either.

So all the negative reviews are dishonest?

Yeah, apparently anything negative is untruthful. I realize we are on a Wii U site, so of course there are going to be fan boys with blinders on that can't see the problems and won't admit there are issues. But outside, in the real world, people are a lot more willing to come to terms with the fact that the Wii U is currently buggy and slow.

It was an embarrassment for me when we hosted Thanksgiving dinner last night. Had about 20 people over, were playing Call of Duty Black Ops 2 with GamePad and the Pro Controller, but the Pro Controller was stuck moving backwards, so I thought "how do you disconnect and reconnect the controller?" Tried the power button on the Pro Controller - nope bad choice, turned the whole console off.

Got back into CoD, this time the Pro Controller worked fine. A few minutes in, EEEEEEEEEEEEEE game froze. Couldn't do anything except pull the power and reboot. Then it played fine for about an hour and we decided to swap over to Nintendo Land. It literally froze 3 times in the next hour.. I was so embarrassed because I wanted to show off the new system and make some believers of people who said the graphics couldn't be as good as the 360's - CoD proved they're at minimum on par, however everyone was quick to point out the 360 never freezes like that. Having a 360, they asked why I didn't just get CoD for the 360 instead... I said I wanted a larger library for my Wii U and they were aware of the freezing and a fix would be rolled out.

Honestly I felt disappointed because 4 freezes on Thanksgiving night is just ridiculous. Sure the graphics are nice and the 5-person game play is fun, but they released a buggy console that's made people say "I'll wait and see what Microsoft and Sony come out with next year." As for the 15-20 second menu loads... everyone couldn't stop making fun of my "next gen" console that's slower than hell.

A little biased tbh, no way it deserves a 9/10 as it stands.

I don't care if Sony fails or not, I'm not buying another console from them.

The only reason Sony got into the console business is because they were developing the CD-ROM addon for Nintendo back in the 90's and Nintendo went with Philips instead... one of Sony's main competitors. But since Sony had already been developing the CD-ROM system, and since they were the ones who provided the audio chipset for Nintendo consoles, they figured they had enough experience and know-how to release their own console, the PlayStation.

If Nintendo hadn't screwed Sony over by breaking their contract, perhaps the N64 would have been CD based and Sony would have never entered the console market. For better or for worse though, things didn't pan out that way and now we've got 3 competing systems.

I feel bad for Nintendo to be in such a situation, but they've always been a lot like Apple, trying to make deals that are one-sided and using proprietary formats and trying too hard to stop piracy instead of opening up and letting the community make addons and bring more functionality to the table.

Back on topic..

The Wii U life cycle won't be cut short by its processor, that's just ridiculous hearsay. The only way the Wii U will "die early" is if they do another N64 mistake and they rely on first party games alone, and they let the competition get the best 3rd party games. I know Nintendo can make some great games, but I want to see some GOOD exclusive 3rd party games, as well as multiplatformers as well. That will be Nintendo's main problem this generation, getting developers and studios to release games on the Wii U. If they can convince them that it'll pay off, and if their licensing agreements offer enough % in the pocket of the developers/studios (again, this goes against Nintendo's history), then the Wii U will last the whole generation. There's not a doubt in my mind that it's powerful enough or innovative enough, hearing negativity about the CPU is just news during a slow news period. Regardless of the CPU, every developer could get every game to run just fine on the Wii U - it might take some tweaking but nothing is impossible. Business boils down to profitability, and if studios can't afford to have a team make a game work on the Wii U then they aren't going to do it. There'd be no point in them wasting their time and money, and development resources, into a system that has worse % return than the other systems. In a nutshell, if Nintendo offers better deals than Sony and MS to studios, then studios have more incentive to get their game out for the Wii U because each sale of the Wii U version is more money in their pocket vs. someone buying it for the 360 or PS3 instead.

As a software engineer I can tell you it's not impossible by any stretch of the imagination, and the decision to not allow us to play Wii games on the GamePad likely comes from a financial and marketing perspective. I can't see any Nintendo engineers being actively against such functionality.. in my experience it's likely not an engineer's/developer's decision, but a decision from executives/higher ups.

Now, as for actually getting it done outside of Nintendo's official stamp... yes it's possible though it depends on if someone, or a group of people, dedicates enough time to hacking into the Wii U system and getting it to support homebrew apps. The system has been out less than a week, I'm sure the Wii U will inevitably get some support from the wii homebrew community. Once there's people who manage to hack into the Wii U, it's only a matter of time before the signal to the GamePad is reverse engineered. Figuring out if it's encrypted, and decrypting the signal and message, may take a while - and that goes without mentioning figuring out how the communication stream works and should be formatted. It's not just presentation layers (video and audio) being sent in a stream wirelessly, there's also the interaction layers (input/output) stream.

To put it a little simpler: hack the Wii U so they can mess with the low level code, figure out how they can load homebrew apps onto the Wii U, decipher the GamePad's signal(s), create a basic homebrew app that can communicate with the GamePad (send and receive data in both directions), and once all that's done they can do something useful such as make the homebrew app read a list of ROM off your SD card and let you load it up play the game directly on your GamePad.

This would be a lot of work for someone outside of Nintendo, and it's not something I envision Nintendo supporting in the near future. Let me rephrase actually - I don't see Nintendo offering the functionality to play Wii games directly on the GamePad anytime soon (if ever), but I can't see any reason Nintendo wouldn't make a Wii U Virtual Console that plays older console's games on the GamePad.

The bad points are very very bad, ohhhhhhhh dear Ninty................

The only real bad point is that the GamePad is like 100% required to use the Wii U, you cant even use eShop without it, and since I dont find it that comfortable extended periods of time, it's a bit disappointing.
The slowness issues, the Wii emulator issues, the glitches, those are all software that they can fix. If they can do their part to fix what's fixable, I can do my part to forgive them for hurting my fingers and I'll learn to live with it (though hopefully someone will make some attachment that makes it easier to hold).

I was the biggest pro-Nintendo fanboy going into the weekend, was super hyped to get my Wii U. I pre-ordered a ton of games and 2 pro controllers, and WANT this to replace my 360 as my main gaming machine. I hated reading negative reviews on the Wii U and told myself it was going to be perfect - but unfortunately it's just not.

But I think perhaps it's missing too much to go up against the competition, and it's performing too slowly compared to current technology.

First, there's no ethernet connection so you're going to have to have WiFi (not an issue at all for me, but I do prefer ethernet to WiFi especially for online multiplayer). Then there's the 3 hours of waiting for the update to go through, with 4 or 5 communication errors making me stop and pick up where it left off. I am at least glad it picked up where it left off though. After that, I came to find out Wii backwards compatibility is nothing more than an emulator. They didn't even try to integrate the Wii U with the Wii emulator, this is very apparent by even looking at how they didn't tie your Miis into the Wii emulator at all. I had to create our family's 3 mii characters, then I went to play some Mario Kart Wii just to test it out (couple quick battle rounds), and our 3 mii characters aren't in the Wii emulator. So I had to create them again... that's annoying. Here's another thing, how do I get OUT of Wii mode?? I try using the GamePad again but it just says it cant communicate with the Wii U... so I have to power off, power back on. Seriously isn't there an easier way of getting back to the Wii U OS and exiting the Wii emulator?

Then there's the slowness of the Wii U - pretty much any menu choice (even going into system settings which shouldn't require any internet connectivity) takes 10-15seconds for me. There's no excuse for it taking so long. To be honest I felt a little ripped off when I realized just how slow it is to go into different menus. It's 2012, I can go through every menu item on my phone instantly. Why can't a brand new video game console load these options just as quick? Heck my 360 does it instantly as well. I realize this is most likely software related, and it's something they should be able to fix - perhaps I should just say "they should fix."

I also have to wait about 60 seconds after it finishes booting up, for it to finally pop up the apps I've downloaded to my 2TB drive.

And while I was playing Scribblenauts Unlimited, the game just decided it was a great time to freeze and I had to unplug the power because holding the power button didn't do carp.

I played with the GamePad for about 5 hours with my son in Nintendo Land, and my fingers started hurting from the curling underneath. I've got regular size hands, not huge gorilla hands, and this is a real problem. I can play with it, but it's just not comfortable enough. Also the joysticks it's like my left thumb keeps running out of space at the bottom and I have to re-position my thumb again every so often. Not every few seconds, but often enough that I'm wondering WHY this is happening.. it never happens on my 360 controller. The battery life could also be quite a bit better.

There's some things I like, such as the eShop. Glad it's up and working day 1. The GamePad itself seems to have a ton of functionality built into it, and the screen looks SHARP, Crisp, I'd even say amazing. I really find it to look THAT good - bravo Nintendo. I also find the Wii U  to be less noisy than my 360 - some people have said its as loud but I've got them running side by side and the Wii U is less noisy. The Wii U has HDMI built in, finally, so that's good, and the GamePad controls my TV just fine. Nintendo Land is pretty fun, with the different levels and team-styles for each game it's actually a lot larger than what I figured, and it's a great bonus for us who bought the Deluxe. Anyone with the basic, I'd still recommend you buy Nintendo Land because it's worth it.

I hope developers make good use of the GamePad, and I hope the Wii U gets some more great games in 6 months time. Truth be told, I'm all-in on the Wii U and I really hope Nintendo is too - despite it feeling like they put in half their chips and said, let's see what happens.

My wii u headset is frik'n wireless so thats not a problem for me

That's honestly what I was thinking, it's 2012 - why is a "missing headphone jack" even being considered a problem? I've been using a wireless ear piece for like 5 years.
PDP already stated their wireless headset works on the Wii U. Forget plugging in guys.. just go wireless and forget about it.

PDP's Afterglow universal wireless headset:
http://www.amazon.co...0/dp/B009CL6LA6

• Universal compatibility on the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Wii U, Wii, PC, and mobile devices
• Powered by the latest Avnera wireless solution, the leader in Hi-Definition Wireless Audio Connectivity, providing a constant and clear connection to your game audio
• Lithium Polymer Battery provides 10 hours of active gaming on a single charge. Play and Charge cable included.
• Three digital audio modes: Pure Audio, Bass Boost, and Immersive Audio
• Retractable noise canceling microphone with active-listening LED indicator and Voice Overlay to ensure effective communication

Here's something interesting, the Game Boy Color was released November 18, 1998 in North America. The Wii U is getting released Nov 18th 2012 in North America. 14 years later

+1 for the Wii U version so you can play it while on the toilet

Yah the way i said that was kindof confusing.But i do agree with your theory i wont be suprised.

If they wanted to retain the privacy aspect that long, random friend codes provide, it's definitely one way of accomplishing it.

I'll be happy with whatever it ends up being so long as I don't have to give out a 12-16 digit random set of numbers that are difficult/a hassle to remember. I'm sure just like Sony and Microsoft copy things from Nintendo, Nintendo looks at how Sony and Microsoft do things and they'll try and go the best route while being slightly different. Nintendo likes to pride itself on being innovative so who knows what hybrid friend code/gamertag system they might have come up with.

The part where you leave out the surrounding texts, and change their words.
Iwata: past systems used friend codes
Reggie: not ready to disclose.

Reggie: http://www.nintendol...t_theyre_better
"but it's not the existing friend code system"

Iwata: http://www.nintendo....21025qa/03.html
" In addition, for our past platforms, users had to exchange a number called a "Friend Code" with each other to build a Friend relationship, where data could be transferred between two specific devices."

I NEVER changed their words - learn to read. While you're learning to read, you'll also discover this thing called "context clues", the links to the pages I and others provided already detailed that it's a friend code system though not exactly the same as what existed prior. I'm not going to quote a whole Q&A session, the excerpts I provided were taken completely in context and I never misconstrued them to mean anything else.

I concur.

Do NOT change what I said in a quote, who taught you manners? That's rude and disrespectful.

What part of Iwata's STATEMENT "We’re not completely getting rid of Friend Codes" makes it sound like he's IMPLYING there are friend codes vs. STATING there are friend codes?
What part of Reggie's STATEMENT "There are friend codes"  sounds like he's IMPLYING vs. STATING?