Sorry, I didn’t feel comfortable returning after I freaked out :/. Sorry about that, my fault completely.
Anyway, I played with it a bit and I really like it. Keep in mind that I’ve only done Single Player on anything I mention. Nintendo Land is a pretty good games gallery, the minigames aren’t quite Mario Party level (imo), but they’re still fun. Wii Sports was definitely fun, but most gamers seem to agree that it was sort of a throwaway game. In my opinion, Nintendo Land was good. I wouldn’t say it has layers of depth, but the games are definitely fun at a real level above and beyond “decent time waster.” Most of the single player games are legitimately difficult, and only one (the throwing star one) did I feel was hampered by the controls. In fact, I haven’t actually gotten to the end of any of the single player only games I tried. They’re fair, but their difficulty is almost arcade level.
New SMB U was… well, New Super Mario Bros. For the Wii U. That’s about it. You can play with a Wiimote if you want. I play with the tablet because I like the feel of it, but I’m a bit annoyed that I can’t figure out how to turn off the tablet screen and just have it display on the TV. It seems wasteful to have the tablet screen on, and I fear it will kill the display eventually if it’s on when I don’t need it to be for long hours.
Speaking of the tablet, it really is good, I swear. It feels very natural in the hands, and the spacing actually makes it easier, not harder, to rest your hands on your lap. It’s definitely not heavy and holding it up isn’t a problem. The Nintendo Land games using the Wii U screen don’t, I think, make extremely creative use of it. I mostly found it slightly obnoxious that I bought a new TV console that they apparently wanted me to pretend was a handheld that I couldn’t remove from my home. That said, I can really see the utility for it, and it certainly has promise and could be used really well. I’m tempted to buy a Wii U copy of Assassin’s Creed III because you can use it for Eagle Vision while the main screen stays normal. This seems like a minor, but still very creative use for it. If Arkham City U has the same for detective mode, it could also handily solve the problem that 90% of the graphics are wasted because there’s no reason to leave detective mode. I could also see making more creative minigames (hacking, lockpicking, etc) using the touch screen.
I don’t see the tablet as being a huge revolution in gaming technology, but rather one that adds a bunch of tiny things to games that will increase their quality in unnoticeable but very welcome ways. Like I said, things such as putting important filters such as Eagle Vision or Detective Mode on the tablet are actually very creative ways to solve some of the minor issues people had with those games. I really do think they need to either make a smaller, cheaper one, or else sort something out with 3DS syncing, because the Wii U is just begging for a version of Four Swords with the tablet.
I haven’t bought anything from the online store, but it’s a monumental improvement over the Wii’s store. For one, everything loads more or less instantly – anybody who tried to actually use the Wii store remembers the painful loading times. As for the store interface itself? It was really good, actually. I found it a lot better than the PS3 store (even the new one). Not sure about the XBox marketplace, again, I haven’t done more than just play around with the Wii Store a little. What I saw reminded me a lot of Steam, which is definitely a good thing.
Setting up your online account was completely painless as well. No more friend code bullshit, and the touchscreen tablet keyboard is leagues better than entering your information with a controller ever will be (like I said, it’s the little things). The Mii Plaza thing worked well too, thousands of Miis in my area were in my plaza, and none of the messages were obvious dick jokes or anything, so I assume they have a decent filter in place. In fact, NSMBU has a feature where you can leave messages for other outside of levels from a set of pre-selected words. It reminded me a bit of Demon’s/Dark Souls which was pretty cool, and makes me wonder if more games with a Dark Souls-esque online mechanic will appear of the Wii U, since simultaneous, seamless online play seems to be a feature built innately into the Wii U’s networking package.
So pretty much my only complaints are the lack of imagination in Nintendo Land’s use of the tablet controller, the long console update time (which, by the way, happened for every game I tried), and their insistence on putting the download information of the controller rather than the TV screen. Like I said, it’s not really a huge gamechanger in any obvious way, but rather a console that’s aimed to deliver a superior gaming experience by improving how your games are displayed and played in ways that may not be immediately obvious to the casual observer. I suspect this will lead to a lot of complaining that the Wii U does “nothing new.” It really does, but the way it improves things are likely to be so subtle most people won’t even notice.
