I think it's sustained transfer speeds and powered drives don't idle as quickly which, I guess, would do nasty things to the access and load times. But that's my guess and not official.
Technically speaking, it is easy for an operating system to determine what type of disk it is looking at, based on the information provided by the device's built-in registers. Different drivers are used for each type, too, since they need to be handled in different ways for reads/writes.
my wife and i picked up a wii u last night, along with new super mario bros. u. and we are loving the system. i thought i'd hate the tablet pad, but its really grown on me. what's more, i love all the social networking the thing can do. i can talk to others playing mario u online as i'm playing it. you can leave messages in the game, all sorts of neat stuff. also, i love being able to play the game on just the tablet, if my wife wants to watch tv on the big screen in the living room.
I'm really interested in that ZombiU or whatever game but it's hard to justify getting a system for one game. I'm trying to remember though, I may have done that for Res 4 on the GameCube but I think it was $99 bucks at the time.
I played NintendoLand with 3 other people over the weekend. That was quite a bit of fun, although I'm not gonna pay $350 for it.
My Wii U was delivered last Thursday but I'm not home to play with it until Saturday. Managed to get it for £199, Amazon put the price up, I ordered, they took it down again when the pricing was announced and they honoured the price despite it being £100 more than I ordered it at. I'm happy with that.
I'll wait until next Black Friday when it's a lot cheaper and there are more games to choose from. I'm a huge Mario fan, but I don't see the logic in paying $350 and $60 a game right now.
It's just because its a new system and they're selling at full price, discounts will kick in and they'll come down, it happens with every new system.