Wii U launches on November 18th

[Jim Steele]

Kelthaz wrote:

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How quickly one forgets the Virtual Boy. That thing caused more people to go blind than cataracts.

Oh yeah. Well... that's two. And I hardly think the Virtual Boy is any kind of yardstick

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Turns out the Wii U starts making a profit for Ninty with just one game sale.

That's not bad going for a new machine, opening salvo of a new console generation no less.

[TemporalFlux]

Yeah; these things aren't selling. I went to a few Wal-Marts over the past couple of days, and they had plenty of them. With Wii, you were having trouble finding one of those for years.

Really, this whole thing feels a bit like Sega CD to me. It's really a kind of half step to a new generation of system.

[Chemahkuu]

And not long after the major losses and failure of the 3DS, they really don't need to be losing any more money or sales at this point. If the Wii U fails over the holiday period into the new year Nintendo are going to be in one very bad financial situation.

[Owain Taggart]

Yeah, the way I see it is that in addition to what I've said earlier in the thread, the casual crowd which was a huge segment of Wii users and helped make it such a huge success are likely comfortable staying with the Wii. Nintendo hasn't really given that crowd a good incentive to upgrade beyond HD and better graphics, so why would they upgrade, especially when they're things they very likely don't care about? And the added layer of complexity vs the simplicity of the Wii? Nintendo have themselves in an interesting dilemma, and that doesn't even count the price.

I think one of the main reasons for why the Wii doing so well was that it was priced just right. Anyone with curiosity would be able to pick one up, if they could find one on the shelves. I expect that people are balking at the price of the Wii U, leading to a less than enthusiastic adoption rate. I don't think anything can change now, but as I've said earlier in the thread, I think they could have made the pad optional, maybe a bundle with a game that requires it, which would have made it possible for the price to be more reasonable, but as it is, I think it's too tied to the system itself.

[Rincewiend]

Bob The Skutter wrote:

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They're apparently going to launch that in the future but it's not available any time soon. Though the idea is you can stick your own hard drive on up to 2tb. Though you'd probably have to work hard to get 27gb of saves on the premium version. Even 3.7gb of saves would be a lot. Don't think I have 3.7gb of saves on my Xbox after 6 years.

depends on the games one plays...
If you play Rock Band and use DLC, you need the extra space...
But then again, you would be better of with a PS3/XBOX360 for games like that...

[Bob The Skutter]

If you need space for DLC you can buy an external hard drive. My point was saves are usually no more than a couple of meg and it would take a long time to amass 3.7gb never mind 27gb of saves.

[Jim Steele]

^ Does the USB hard drive support actually let you do that though? As far as I was aware it was treated as backup, ie if you wanted to run anything off it you'd have to transfer it to internal memory.

Which is, y'know, ridiculous. But Nintendo generally are fucking ridiculous when it comes to that kind of thing.

[Bob The Skutter]

Jim Steele wrote:

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^ Does the USB hard drive support actually let you do that though? As far as I was aware it was treated as backup, ie if you wanted to run anything off it you'd have to transfer it to internal memory.

Which is, y'know, ridiculous. But Nintendo generally are fucking ridiculous when it comes to that kind of thing.

From what I've read it seems Mains Powered USB drives work to run the games off, USB flash drives, SD Cards and self powered USB work the way you mention.

[Jim Steele]

That's a bit mental. I wonder how it knows? (or why it cares :S)

[FPAlpha]

It's an interesting concept but i'll wait until there's more games and most importantly what kind of games.

I'm absolutely no Mario or Zelda fan so Nintendo has a hard time getting my interest (especially now that the next gen consoles like Xbox 720 may come out around Christmas next year).

[Bob The Skutter]

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.

[Robert Maxwell]

Jim Steele wrote:

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That's a bit mental. I wonder how it knows? (or why it cares :S)

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.

[indianatrekker26]

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.

[Mr. Adventure]

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.

[Robert Maxwell]

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.