Topic: Feeling sad about Wii U, but also loving it very much

I got my Wii U in May 2015, which was already late, and I think I knew back then that this wonderful console wouldn't last much longer. But got it anyway, because it had some exclusives that I really wanted.

I don't regret buying it, but I have a problem with focusing on games and systems and my backlog gets bigger and bigger, and worst of all, I never really played much on my Wii U. Later, in November 2016 I got an Xbox One and my Wii U remained plugged into my TV, but started to only gather dust, literally. Time spent with the Xbox One also dropped significantly when I got my Switch last June and my baby daughter was born in August.

Since I have time to play almost exclusively when I commute, handheld systems -or hybrid- are the best way for me to play games right now, and I've started to sell some of my Wii U games in order to buy them again on Switch, where I know I'll have time to play them. The sad fact that some of them were still sealed -I bought a lot of games when I got the Wii U and in the following months, because its catalog, while small, is very interesting, and never had the time to play them properly- helped with getting the highest possible price, even though it seems that people are not very interested in buying Wii U games nowadays, sealed or not.

So, I have not only abandoned my Wii U, but also have sold and I'm planning to sell some of its games -which were exclusive and made the console strong in my eyes- in order to play them on another console, thus diminishing the reasons to keep using the Wii U.

And I'm sad, and lately I have been playing NES Remix -which is a blast- and plan on finally playing the other games and completing them, but reality bites and Switch is more convenient to me.

Regardless I love the Wii U, the double screen system, the HD games, the improved digital store... and feel sorry for its fate and angry with the circumstances that made it mostly unknown to people who still think it was a late model of the old Wii -true story-, if they know about the Wii U at all.

I have mixed feelings in this situation. I want to keep using it and I can, because I still have games to enjoy, and last year I even bought some more, but I feel like a traitor with all these selling and buying again for the Switch.

Does anyone relate to me?

I understand, which is why i haven't gotten a ps4 yet. Still haven't "used up" my wii u! I could probably go 3 more years before "needing" a switch or ps4.

I‘ve never made it a secret how much I hated using WiiU every step of the way. Holding the weirdly toy-like Gamepad, waiting for minutes on end for it to do simple tasks like booting up games or switching languages, charging the Gamepad with a standard definition screen (!) every few hours. And then the long time between releases! I am not overestimating nor underestimating my own feeling when I say I hated playing on it.

But when the time came to make space for Switch, I couldn‘t bring myself to take it to the basement where all the older consoles rest in a sort of graveyard. To this day it holds its own new spot next to its elder sibling, the Wii, right below the TV. It hasn’t been connected, let alone switched on, in more than a year, though.

I‘d happily buy all the WiiU‘s greatest hits on Switch again. The few it actually had that is. We‘re nearly there. All that‘s left is Wonderful 101, Pikmin 3, Wind Waker HD, Twilight Princess HD, Mario Maker Ver. 2.0 and Smash 4 Deluxe.

@sentiententity @GoldenGamer88 Interesting, I think I'm in the middle of your opposed stances on Wii U LOL

@sentiententity I'd really like to feel and act like you. Last March I even thought that if somebody bought me Breath of the Wild for Wii U on my birthday I'd forget about the Switch for one or two years, but they didn't, and in June I got the required money and Switch was back in stock in some stores and bought it.

But I wish I could resist temptation and kept playing my Wii U without thinking about the next console. I'm weak.

I'm loving people selling off their Wii U stuff - this week I bought a barely used 32gb, with a Pro Controller and MK8 installed, for £80.

I now own 3 Wii Us, which should guarantee me some Wii U (plus Wii and Gamecube) gaming for many years.

People are nuts. You're lucky if you can buy a Gamecube with one genuine Nintendo controller in this good condition for the same money.

Keep selling 'em off please

I'm actually the opposite. I recently bought Axiom Verge, Steamworld Heist, and forma.8 on my Wii U even though they are all on Switch. Having the second screen for a map was a lifesaver for Axiom Verge, and I just have a lot more storage space for downloads on Wii U than on Switch. Unless a Switch version substantially improves the experience (I'm waiting to get Hyrule Warriors on Switch), I'll get it on Wii U instead.

@Moroboshi876

I said I "could" go 3 years, I don't know if I will! Hehe.

Contentment and self control take practice and don't come easy. If only i could lose weight as easily as not buying new systems!

@gcunit I think if more GC games became available on later consoles its price would drop significantly too. HD remasters of Wind Waker and Twilight Princess along with the Metroid Prime Trilogy collection isn't enough.

@gcunit I should do the same lol. Between all my consoles, I expect the Wii U will be the first one to break down; GamePad battery leaking, defect screen, noisy HHD followed up by an explosion, or because of pure misery.

@Octane IDK - my gamepad has been tossed about a bit by my stroppy kid when I stop her playing, but you wouldn't know it to look at it, it's pretty bulletproof.

@gcunit Yeah that's true, it doesn't only look like a Fisher-Price toy, it's built like one too. But it's a complicated controller, with its own battery and screen. More parts means it's easier to break, the battery will break down sooner or later, and you can't buy a GamePad separately. So it'll be more difficult to replace than a GameCube controller for example. It doesn't help that the number of Wii U systems out in the wild is quite limited too.

I won't pretend like the system wasn't a failure overall, but I've had, and continue to have, good times with it, and until all of its best games migrate to the Switch, it'll have a place in my home.

Playing Twilight Princess HD right now. While I primarily use the Pro controller, I keep the GamePad by my side to switch equipment, look at maps, transition into wolf link form quickly, etc.

It's a cool functionality that the PS4 and Switch will never be able to emulate.

@Ralizah Does it work like Pikmin 3? I had the GamePad by my side displaying the map, whilst I used a Wii Remote to play the game on the TV. Tapping the GamePad paused the game, allowing me to plan ahead. It worked very well.

@Octane Well, it doesn't pause the game like in Pikmin 3, but yeah, it's there whenever I need to reference something or switch equipment. It works even better like this in Xenoblade X, where I can play with the Pro controller while also constantly referencing the GamePad screen to analyze the local environment and fast travel when the need arises.

Never understood all the moaning about the Game Pad: I don't find it bulky, unergonomic, having a bad screen and so on. The only thing that IS true, is the short battery life, but other than that, it was actually a pretty decent controller. Too bad that Nintendo's marketing and message concerning what the Wii U actually was, completely sucked, because in some ways, it was arguably even ahead of its time.

And to this day, I still find it a pretty great achievement how they managed to let this so-called under-powered console run two versions of a game at the same time, without any noticeable lag. On the console at 720p and on the Game Pad in 480p. Pretty neat.

The only other negative thing I could come up with, is the lack of analog triggers, but I really don't miss them that much, because it mostly only matters in racing games.

In my opinion, a lot of the criticism also comes from people always comparing systems to other systems. Consoles seen on their own aren't bad: they only become bad or worse once we start to emphasize the things that are missing in comparison with other offerings, but we can do that for every system that has ever been available, although obviously, the differences this time around were a bit bigger, but still...

I think that the only correct way to see the Wii U, is as a half-gen console in it's own bubble, pretty much like the Switch is now. Both cannot be compared to the Xbox One or PS4. And besides seeing it in its own bubble, it is more or less essential to REALLY see it as Nintendo's first ever foray into HD gaming, not only because it obviously is, but also because it makes the comparison more objective. So, seen in that light, and also remembering that the Wii U was little more than the evolution of what you get when you put the Wii and the DS in a blender, and add HD graphics, then the screen was actually pretty decent.

An HD screen at that size would have made the console even more expensive, and they probably wanted to keep the resistive touch screen, because of it being better in combination with a stylus, as it was on their handhelds. To me, gaming on the Game Pad was, and still IS, a wonderful experience and I have never thought that the screen was "smeared with Vasoline" as so many whiners always say. To me, the picture is sharp enough to play all the games I have, and it's of a better quality than the Wii, which is obviously the only console it should be compared to, because of the whole Wii U being a half-gen console.

And of course, compared to the Wii, it was an ENORMOUS step forward. But no, it was a "weak" console, that was nowhere near the Xbox One/PS4, and in some cases even performed worse than previous gen consoles. The explanation for that was pretty simple, but for whatever arbitrary reason that was conveniently forgotten in most anti-Wii U discussions...

The Wii U had a decent, if not spectacular CPU, but its chipset was mainly focused around a GPGPU, a General Purpose Graphics Processing Unit, which differs from a normal GPU, in that it can also perform other tasks, for example to lighten the burden placed upon the system's CPU.

BUT: if no developer uses it, then the CPU actually becomes the bottleneck. This was most prevalent in Xbox 360 ports. Both the X360 and PS3 were highly CPU focused, as were the engines of the day, so a lot of optimization was needed to adapt the software into taking advantage of the GPGPU in the Wii U.

In the end, only a small handful of third party titles truly took advantage of that, of which Need for Speed Most Wanted was the best example of a superior version. A shame, really. So much more could have been done, but it's all water under the bridge now.

@Moroboshi876 You thought you were late buying a Wii U? How about 28 December 2017?

So, I've got mine (black 32GB Mario Kart Edition) a little over a year ago, I collected a small amount of physical and digital games for it, and I still use it every now and then. Recently bought Darksiders Warmastered Edition for it, because it was on sale for only 12 euros (around $13,60) and I also bought the second game in that series, because that was on sale for even cheaper: only 8 euros.

So, these two games prompted me to start playing on the Wii U a bit more again. And I'm never going to get rid of it either: I never sell any console or handheld, let alone its games. If I ever feel the need to go back to my old games, I want to play them on the actual system. Backward compatibility and/or remakes are nice, but for me, it's original hardware that comes first.

As we speak, I have the following systems still connected to TV's in my living room:

I've got a GameCube and a Dreamcast hooked up to my smaller, non-HD TV, and to my large, full HD plasma screen, I've got a Wii, Wii U, SNES Classic Mini, Xbox 360 and Xbox One S connected via an HDMI hub. That last console was also my most recent buy. Again, a sort of belated Christmas present to myself, much like the Wii U was a year earlier...

@Octane There's plenty of replacement batteries available still, some brands even offering better quality batteries with a longer battery life per charge than the original, so that's really not an issue at all.

And I wouldn't be surprised either, if replacement parts for the Game Pad itself will become available at some point. The screen isn't really proprietary, and so aren't any of the other internals, so people who aren't afraid to open up their Game Pad, will be able to replace parts themselves. I've done the same for screens and other parts in various DS handhelds. (not my own, by the way, since I take really good care of my own consoles, and I never had any bad luck with them so far. Knock on wood... )

But knowing Nintendo, they'll probably still offer repairs for some time to come, so that's also an option, at least for some years to come.

@ThanosReXXX I'm more worried about the battery than anything else. Yes, you can get new ones now, what about in five years from now? Or ten? That's when the battery dies, and probably all the other replacement batteries that were manufactured around this time. I'm certain there will be a solution, but it's definitely more of a hassle than any other controller.

@Octane Well, you could of course buy multiple replacement batteries. Much like I used to do for my phones, back when we didn't get a new one every 1 or 2 years: I just bought a $10 battery and all was good in the world again...

And as long as you keep these replacement batteries dry and in their packaging, nothing is going to happen to them. The degradation only starts once you start charging them, but you should at the very least get 3 to 5 years out of every battery pack, unless your total number of hours of gaming per week is far above average, in which case it would be closer to those 3 years, but still...

And of course there are more controllers/addons with rechargeable battery packs, and for the Wii U, there's of course also the Pro Controller. I have one, and you probably also have one, and that has the same problem, well at least: it's only a problem if you decide to make it one. I always like to think in solutions, and the solutions in this case are pretty obvious.

And as far as other console's controllers are concerned: not that this is actually going to happen, but let's just say for argument's sake that someone somewhere along the line, decides that penlites and triple A batteries are to be made obsolete. How are you gonna solve that, then? Same problem, different form factor battery, same solution: buy yourself multiple rechargeable batteries, and you and your old controllers will be good for decades to come.

Wow not even Earthbound Beginnings being exclusive to Wii U help sell the system.

Sold mine and got a Switch. No regrets!!

I bought my Wii U on 10 April 2016.
It was Very Late to buy Wii U, but i Regret Nothing.
My Wii U games that i have just Very Few, just ONLY 7 games ( I will find the 8th Wii U game for Finale due to Terrible game library) & 2 of them are also on Nintendo Switch (Mario Kart 8 & LEGO CITY UNDERCOVER).
I still use my Wii U for playing Wii games mostly, streaming Youtube and displaying on my TV, etc.

Actually i felt disappointed with Wii U's fate.
It has great potential but terrible at marketing.
But, at least i won't sell it due to its Backward with Wii, the selling point.

Btw, on year 2014, i had ever sold my Five 3DS games due to crappy gameplay quality, one of them is Pokemon X due to lack of interest to play at that time. After 2 years, i felt regret to sell my Pokemon X, so i rebought Pokemon X again on December 2016.

No need to feel guilty.
If you are ready, you can rebuy Wii U again, defy all the negative reviews.
I know you want that.