Greenleaf

I'm spoiled by "Super Mario World". Yes, that's right, the SNES title that is still considered by many to be one of the best video games on any platform ever!

Looking at the new Super Mario, I first felt like: okay, a bunch of mass-produced soulless levels plus high-resolution plasticky graphics. Enough to say you've finished the product, but not enough to say you've created a masterpiece.

Playing through the first few worlds, two things come to mind: first, the levels are boring and the bosses are exactly the same all the time. And I don't like the Yoshi's Island -music and theme. They should have chosen Super Mario World or created something new altogether. The second though was: it keeps getting better and better! And the puzzles like catching the thief are a nice addition.

Multiplayer: fine, but harder than single player, because you constantly bump into your friend. This means you can't play this game with a very young player, because he/she will ruin your game. Games such as Trine you can mostly play fine even if the other player's skills don't match yours. In New Super Mario Bros Wii U, you get very frustated if the other player doesn't have the required skills.

I gave a score of 7, which I think reflects my feeling about the game: nice game, but somewhat bland. Nothing original.

I've found Nintendo Land not to be on par with other games such as New Super Mario Bros U in terms of how much there is to play. Unless you like all of the mini games, there is very little to do. Also, some of the games (Zelda, Metroid Blast for example) are very similar to each other.

We tried this out as multiplayer:
- Mario Chase: completely idiotic game, 1/10
- Ghost mansion: the best multiplayer game in Nintendo Land, 8/10, but only three levels!!! (edit: two more appeared later for no apparent reason)
- Zelda: okay, but too boring and straightforward. Just shooting / waving a sword.

I wouldn't recommend this game as a separate purchase. I got mine in the premium pack. Apart from a few hours of Ghost Mansion, I don't see us playing this useless game at all.

Fact: the big firmware update for Wii U is a 925MB download. I got this number using a UNIX router and the 'netstat -ib' command.

You can make your own calculations from this.

Update size: 926MB!

Edited: the question about update size has been solved, at least for me. I finally got the update applied, after six hours and one break in the download. The Wii U managed the break ok: it just gave an error code and said the internet connection could not be made. Afterward it resumed from where it left off.

I monitored the network bandwidth from my router, and during the six hours it recorder 926 MB downloaded, so not that much after all. The actual download could have been 920MB but that's nitpicking.

There seems to be something slowing down the wif, and that might be caused by the Wii U. On the other hand, the servers could also be overloaded, although Nintendo seems to be using Akamai technologies, which usually provides the best (and fast) service.

This is from Finland, so perhaps my update was smaller than someone else's, or maybe its the same everywhere irregardless of launch date. Our launch date was the same as in UK and Europe.