Mind you, I haven’t actually gotten my hands on any of this yet, but I wanted to talk about what Nintendo announced today; their highly anticipated new console. …And they’re calling it the WiiU (Weeoo?)
Anyway, it’s quite interesting. It looks like they’re blending technologies between the Wii and the Nintendo DS, as the controller (shown here) has a massive touchscreen that you can actually use to play most games when the Television that your WiiU is connected to is being used by someone else.
This doesn’t mean you’ll be able to travel with your games, but it’s a small convenience, especially depending on the range. When I’m not feeling all that well, I play games from bed a lot of times, and that may no longer mean being restricted to purely handheld options if all my consoles are in another room.
Also surprising is the promise that the technology will be on par (graphically) with the PS3. I’ve been anticipating this for a while, there isn’t much more they can do with graphics once they become so realistic looking that nobody can tell the difference. Besides adding the capability to put more on the screen at once, you’re going to see graphics technology plateau very soon, and then it will be a race to the features (immersion, 3D, touch, and so on) and I think this is what Nintendo is trying to capitalize on…again.
It is to be backwards compatible with all current Wii products (game and peripherals) The controller is equipped with microphone, gyroscope, accelerometer, rumble, camera, and a stylus. Which is awesome…but I shudder to think what it’s going to cost to equip a home with a 4-player setup. The nintendo/too-many-expensive-peripherals-joke lives on.
As you can see, the form-factor (at least of what was presented) is quite similar to the Wii. We’ll see exactly what they’re planning a bit further down the line and how MS and Sony respond to it.
Sony has already shared their answer to the 3DS, which they are apparently calling “Vita” which appears to have a screen interface imitating that of current touch-screen phones, and it will be priced the same as the 3DS. ($250) So who knows whats coming to the party. The developer support for the PSP declined pretty sharply there. But, to be fair…I’m still waiting for a decent game to play on the 3DS…weakest launch ever. Hopefully the WiiU won’t have this problem.
(Am I the only one who thinks that WiiU and PSVita are both ridiculous names?)
