Rapadash6

I thought something seemed missing from that final level.

Nintendo deserves this. I love Nintendo games to death, but the company itself is plain stupid sometimes. How can they expect to carry out this big digital push, when they can't instill a bit of securety within their customers? I haven't bought any digital games on my Wii U as of yet, and I plan to hold off as long as I can. When you buy something you really should have the confidence of keeping it. Please fix this, Nintendo.

Not surprising at all. Nintendo did next to nothing to promote this new console, so this is to be expected. Nintendo always seems to prefer learning lessons the hard way these days, but hopefully they can turn things around in 2013 by announcing compelling first party software, obtaining major 3rd party games, (as well as exclusives), and improving the systems functionality. As it stands now, and while I personally adore my Wii U, I can understand why many won't give Wii U a second, or even first, look.

Very little journalistic integrety within those publications as evident by the rampant assumptions over the details of the killers personal life. Also, the fact that the killer was chemically inbalanced, had immediate access to guns, and zero support structure are all more likely reasons for him to do what he did than what video game he happened to be playing last.

There's going to be a lot that we don't see on Wii U. Fortunately there will also be a lot on Wii U that you won't find anywhere else, which, I assume, is the reason people buy Nintendo consoles in the first place. At least that's how I look at it. If developers are already making excuses it's probably not a good sign of us seeing major support for this system, but luckilly, Nintendo provides enough quality games that it doesn't matter in the slightest.

I don't mind the Youtube app really, even if it is horribly unituative. Most of my Youtube watching is done at work, where it belongs.

The standards by which games are reviewed have changed dramatically over the years, so this comparrison isn't really fair.

Still working my way through NSMBU and last weekend I picked up Sonic and All-Star Racing Transformed. I've got plenty to play, so I'm good.

When I heard about the drawing mechanic, a red flag went up. Sad to see I was right to be concerned.

This petition is not needed. Nintendo has already said a future firmware update will unlock NNIDs. Why can noone remember this? It's frustrating that we can't now, sure, but it only means Nintendo is still working on its Network Infastructure. Excusable considering how new this is to the company. Cut them some slack. If they haven't fixed it by this time next year, yeah, then we should all be up in arms.

He makes it sound like he hasn't even started.

I think we'll have a better idea of what kind of system the Wii is, as well as how robust the services are in a years time. Even a company as large as Nintendo needs to prioritize its resources. Launching a console is now easy task in this day and age, and Nintendo did an admirable job introducing the system with a decent amount of working features. No one should've expected everything to be perfect though, and Nintendo will likely improve every aspect of the system over the next year. Hopefully, next November we will be playing some sweet Wii U native Virtual Console games, Gamecube and Dreamcast included, on our fancy new screened controllers.

The system looks like it was pulled right out of the early 80s, which is kind of cool in its own way, but overall this thing is a piece of junk.

Wait a minute... did we here in North America ever get Wario Land II?

Didn't Nintendo already confirm that we'd be able to transfer our IDs in a future firmware update? I think this is just the solution they have for the time being, but it seems thier network by Nintendo's own admission, is still very much a work in progress. Whatever the case, though, I don't think there is any technical reason why this can't be changed in the future.

@GameLord08

Who says I don't like what they have right now? I actually feel this is Nintendo's most diverse launch line-up, like, ever. The problem isn't the current library though, but the unknown beyond that. If Nintendo remains tight lipped, say, until E3, then we have the problem of not knowing what's on the way the two or three months before that and after we've all finish playing Pikmin 3. Not the lack of software within those specific months, mind you, but the uncertainty of anything in the future at all. Many will undoubtably dump their new consoles in lieu of greener pastures, some may just let thier systems collect dust indefinately and no longer pay attention to Nintendo's releases, even when new stuff is finally announced. It's about keeping people excited about the Wii U, and Nintendo has failed miserably at doing that thus far.

I would also have to disagree with you on the claim that is was Nintendo's openess to future software that caused the famous late 2008 lull within Wii's lifecycle. It would've happened regardless because all the games we knew about were already released. In fact, I would argue it was Nintendo's holding the cards to close mentality that actually made that time worse for Nintendo fans. Perhaps E3 2008 would've been better had they announced Punch-Out!! and Sin and Punishment in that presentation too. Even if those games weren't coming out until the following year, they would've comforted a many Nintendo fan to know that they were on the way.

@GameLord08

No, that is unacceptable. For Wii, we knew of Mario Galaxy, Metroid Prime 3 and Super Paper Mario right away, and those games didn't come out until later the in the year following the systems release. Same thing with the Gamecube; Mario Sunshine, Wind Waker, Metroid Prime, Star Fox Adventures... they didn't keep those games hidden from us, and many bought it on the promise of those titles alone. With Wii U, we have Mario and Pikmin... solid games, yeah, but not enough to sell everyone on the console. We know Zelda and Metroid and 3D Mario are on the way, but why keep them a secret from us now? It doesn't surprise me that Wii U isn't grabbing people beyond the core Nintendo fans right now, because Nintendo has given them no reason to take notice, period.

If not at E3, and not in these Directs, then WHEN will Nintendo show off more Wii U games? It's not so much about us being insatiable, but about Nintendo not following precedence. Never has Nintendo held back on information for a systems software at launch as they have with Wii U. Buying new hardware is an investment, and while I'm confident there are some great games on the way, we've always been able to see a year or beyond that in the past. Nintendo has starved its fans of this information this time, for whatever reason, and its not unreasonable for us to be expecting to see these games sooner than later. It should be damn soon, although I know we likely won't see anything new until halfway through 2013. Unacceptable!

Ah, fudge-cicles.

I'd rather the game be the best that it can be though, so no biggie.

Also, on another note, forget Dark Souls! From Software has made a much better game that I'd like to see ported and/or sequelled on Wii U: 3D Dot Heroes! Come on, this game is a love letter to Zelda of old, and a perfect fit for the system. I think it would actually sell well on it, and perhaps turn it into a franchise.

Good first week sales, but next weeks are even more important. Vita, for example, sold quite well in its first week, but dropped sharply the next. The rest is history. Wii U has to keep the momentum going, and then, and only then, can we begin to predict how well the system is going to do in the long run. You also didn't need to be a psychic to predict that Mario and Monster Hunter were going to be the best selling titles over there. Poor Nintendo Land though.

I'm a bigger fan of efficient console designs with modest graphical power than I am of unstable ones that are considered cutting edge, graphically. I can only imagine how much energy the next Sony or Microsoft console will consume, considering this is only a secondary concern for them. Like I've said before I'm still impressed that Nintendo was able to get as much power out of the Wii U as they have in such a relatively tiny case.

This thing looks god aweful to me. The lack of WiFi and an SD card slot make it a rather expensive paper weight, in my humble opinion. The original Wii might be my favorite console design ever, and this might be my least. How ironic.

If Wii U is already petitioning to get games, it's pretty much too late to hope for any kind of decent support from third parties. They've already made up thier mind about the console, unfortunately. Like Wii and Gamecube before it, however, I know Nintendo will supply enough goodness that it won't matter in the slightest. I always have my PS3 for anything else I might want anyway.

I giggled childishly at what the girl in that screenshot says.

Tough times ahead for Nintendo. Wii U is an awesome system with a decent selection of quality software (as far as launch periods go, anyway), but half baked ports of third party software isn't going to entice the people who buy lots of games.

I admire and respect this guys desire to preserve these games in digital form. Really wish I had the money for these physical carts though.

One thing I have to know before I pull the trigger on this, for those who've played with the Wii Remote/Nunchuck controls, can you shake the remote to do stunts like in Mario Kart Wii? I always felt that was more intuative than pressing the D-Pad or moving a second stick around.

@theJP

Don't get me wrong here; the Wii U is a solid console with a lot going for it. The asymetrical gameplay is fun, Miiverse is groundbreaking stuff, and the games I've played so far are excellent. The problem really isn't with the product though, but the messege of said product. You see, the Wii was accessible because you really only had to SEE it to understand it. Wii U doesn't have that benifit, and in fact, seeing it might confuse some moreso than simply hearing about it. This is where Nintendo is faultering, because it seems they are relying soley on word of mouth to sell this console, but even with how awesome the Wii U is, you have to admit it's a lot less inviting of an experience to grandma or your kid sister at first glance.

And it only cost him $350 to do this, all of which went into Nintendo's pockets. Brilliant!

Seriously though, this is harmless. The fact that he was willing to purchase a Wii U at all is admirable in that he's open to playing others games. Also, he'll know, on a more personal level, what his competition is doing.

I'm pretty sure Wii U sales will wind down fairly quickly. As a Nintendo fan, I'm really happy with mine, but the lack of clarity in what Wii U is all about will alienate the general public, while the lack of any substantial third party support beyond Q1 2013 will discourage the remainder of the gamer populous. It's possible Nintendo is holding onto certain information in order to prevent thier limited supply chain from creating bad press. They let the companies biggest supporters buy up the initial runs through the holidays while they ready a bigger supply and garner more support for the broader crowd next year. At least I HOPE this is what's happening, otherwise Nintendo's ineptitude with this launch is among the worst I have ever seen, and this is coming from a fan.

At least I have my 3DS XL to fill the Wii U void until some new games are announced at E3 (hopefully).

Coming from a huge IGAvania fan, I can see some promise here, but I never liked that they shoehorned the Castlevania name into Lords of Shadow; only a slightly above average action game in my opinion, and nowhere near the quality of the series highest highs. Hopefully knowing this from inception will prove to make Mirror of Shadow more Castlevania-y, for lack of a better word, than that game.

I was debating in my head whether or not to pick this up on launch day, and hearing of some game breaking glitches shortly there after didn't exactly give me any more confidence in it. However, between the recent patch that fixes those issues, the overall positive reviews of the title and the $40 price tag, I'd be crazy not to pick this up, especially sinse I love kart racing games.

I'd really like all the guys from Rare's heyday that left the company to reband and start a new company. What would be even better than that is if it was a second party to Nintendo. Only then could we hope to see anything even close to the awesomeness of the original Rareware.

Looks like GTA, only instead of gratuitous violence, it's replaced with off the wall silliness. There's potential here and I'll keep an eye on it for sure.

First of all, I am really enjoying my Wii U, but this Nintendo Direct furthers my fears about the system and its future. Nintendo's handling with the original unveiling the system in 2011, all the way up to its launch has been just so bad. It's like a movie that never really hits its climax, and the audience (Nintendo fans) are never really satisfied.

Looking back on all of Nintendo's hardware launches we've always had that window into the future, and the games we knew were coming, even if they were far off, helped us through that typical software drought that tends to succeed those launches. We are once again facing such a drought, but with no knowledge of the future to help us through it. Nintendo needed to open up to us fans, and so far they have failed to do so.

My hope is that this is a system that will leave me satisfied by the end of its lifecycle, and so far no Nintendo console has done any less, but Nintendos silence here has me quite worried.

Yoshi's Land on Wii U developed by Good Feel perhaps? Remember now, Wario Land Shake it and Kirby's Epic Yarn were both announced mere months before release, so I don't think it's completely out of the question here. Maybe it's just wishful thinking, I know, but I feel like Nintendo really needs to start lifting the curtain on future software now. We've been patient. I'm sure we'll get release dates for titles like Pikmin 3, Luigi's Mansion 2 and Animal Crossing: New Leaf though. Oh, and also, can we start talking about Wii U's Virtual Console service now, please?

Miiverse is the Wii U's killer app, in my opinion. It's actually fun to surf through communities and read what others have to say about specific games. Unlike any online video game blog, though, Miiverse also encourages creativity with the touch screen interface, judging by some of the amazing doodles I've seen out there. What's best about Miiverse, though, is that it opens up the online environment for Nintendo fans, all while keeping things very much Nintendo centric. It's probably too early to say it beats out Xbox Live in that reguard, but it's a really good start for a company with whom usually shy's away from such interactions.

US Wii U owner here. My living situation changed earlier this month, and because of that, my time with the system has been minimal; at least not as much as I'd like anyway, but I really am enjoying it quite a lot so far.

I'm very fortunate that I haven't experienced any of the connectivity and/or lock up issues that seem to plague others, but I've mostly only been playing NSMBU. I find the relatively slow OS a minor annoyance rather than what it has been overblown to be, and I'll bet dimes to dollars it will speed up as more firmware updates become available. I mean, let's face it, this has been pretty much the case for every system with any kind of OS like, ever, so I'm a bit perplexed as to why Wii U is being heavilly criticized for this fact by the broader media and gamerdom in the extremes that it is.

That's not to say I can't recognize where improvements are needed, and the Wii U definately has it's share of faults. Most glarring for me is the hardwares handling of digital audio, which bypasses most of the matrixed surround options available to me via my A/V reciever and will only output sound from the front left and right speakers in MOST cases. Of course when it is outputting true 5.1 channels it's as good as it can possibly get because linier PCM audio is second to none quality wise, but we should have more options for games not encoded with this type of audio. Most likely this is an oversight, but it affects not only new games but my entire Wii software collection as well. It feels like a step backwards when I can't enjoy the ambient surround effects in games like Skyward Sword on this newer and technically more capable machine. What's worse is surround sound isn't an option at all if you aren't using an HDMI connection for audio.

Other than that, which will likely be remedied in a future update, the system is solid as far as I'm concerned. The games I've played are fun, Miiverse is an incredible implimentation of social networking into a console environment and the gamepad offers tons of deversity and potential to the systems future library. I look foward to seeing what the future holds for this new system.

The days of Nintendo competing in the graphical arms race have been over for a long time now. Surely those for whom tech specs are important have already jumped into PC gaming already, no? With more and more games getting PC releases anymore, the relatively cheap costs of do it yourself computer building, and an online infastructure that's second to none, there's no reason not to get into PC gaming for those who care about such things. Console games, for me at least, have always been a different experience that existed outside of those other gaming options, and in recent times the line between console and PC gaming has blurred significantly. Most likely this is due to the decline of the Japanese influence has on the hobbie, and obviously, the massive increase in western ideals within the industry. Nintendo remains an exception in that it still offers unique experiences while retaining the influence on trends it always has. Either you like that, or you don't. Whether or not Nintendo's hardware meets the lofty demands of the over zeleous tech junkie shouldn't matter to those who play these games for the pure enjoyment of them. Pretty graphics are nice, and I appriciate that Nintendo updates there hardware a couple of times a decade to keep up, but they no longer need to be cutting edge, and if you can't get past that, seriously look into other options.

I played this game on the 360 on Saturday and really enjoyed it, but it felt a lot different than Mario Kart does. Not better or worse mind you, but I feel like other than the fact that both games are kart racers, they each offer unique experiences which helps them each stand on thier own. I plan to get the Wii U version after they patch up the few issues that have cropped up sinse Sunday's release. I hear it's the best version outside of those little glitches.

Personally, I don't plan on downloading any retail games, so the 29 or so GB available to me from the internal memory should last me a while.

All the proprietary stuff shouldn't be all that surprising to anyone. Nintendo loves to challenge hackers in any and every way that they can. From what I've heard, running games off of a USB 2.0 drive is much slower than the internal methods that the 360 and PS3 use, but at the same time we still don't know for sure that it'll be reading data from directly from the drive. It's possible that it will work similar to how the Wii handled data on SD cards: by transferring software onto the internal memory before it can be used. It'd be annoying to have to wait for what could very well be as long as a couple of minutes everytime you pulled from the drive, but overall it's not a terrible solution. I'm just glad the Wii U is more open to storage solutions than the previous system was, looking back on how greatful we were when they finally added the SD data loading menu, they really didn't have a clue in the onset of the Wii's lifecycle.

Not surprised at all. Ever sinse Wii U was announced I'd been racking my brain trying to figure out how Nintendo would even go about updating VC titles on newer hardware. Turns out the most obvious answer was the correct one, and that was that they wouldn't bother.

It's hard to complain though, because we are still able to keep what we've paid for, but this does give Nintendo reason to charge us again for the same games. With the original Virtual Console, I wanted to build this awesome library of retro games, and barring some notable absenses, I did that for the most part, but I will not pay again for all those games. I may be willing to plunk down for games like Super Metroid or Super Mario 64, because I'd love to be able to play those both in 1080p and on the gamepad, but the must haves only represent a fraction of my VC collection, and I can't help but feel a bit burned by Nintendo in all this nonsense.

I love Nintendo and I think Wii U is a superb product, but I don't see it coming anywhere near the numbers that the original Wii did. First of all the economy is much worse than it was 7 years ago, so it's unlikely that many current Wii owners will be willing to front the $350 to upgrade anytime soon. Second, Nintendo, and particularly NOA, has done a poor job expressing just what Wii U is, let alone giving the mass population any reason to want one. I'm sure the system will do well amongst the Nintendo faithful, myself included, but there's very little evidence to suggest that this system will reach much beyond that, and it's early third party support, while decent, still leaves much to be desired for those gamers who traditionally never followed Nintendo consoles.

The only guaranteed good thing I see in Wii U's future is it's first party software support, which has always been top notch on Nintendo systems, but everything else seems questionable at the moment. Hopefully I'm wrong, because I'd really like Nintendo to have all bases covered this time. We'll see.

Nintendo needs to simplify it's commercials. Show the system, controller and a montage of game footage. Take that artsy fartsy stuff and throw it out the dang winda! I remember the "Play it Loud" campaign from the mid 90s and it was really effective because it was a simple concept of letting the games sell themselves. Well, I could've done without the whole grundge theme, but they did an excellent job showing off the goods.

To an extent, he does make a good point. The 360 is well established within the marketplace and it does have it's legacy backing it up. However, I think Wii owners would've already picked up the system by now if it was purely an HD experience they were after. Heck, a lot of them did just that, but those that didn't are the players that understand that a Nintendo console isn't a draw because of it's hardware specs or FPS library, but rather for it's exclusive IP.

In just two and a half weeks, Super Mario will be presented in HD for the first time; a truley momentous occasion for any Nintendo fan. This, of course, picks at our nostalgia bones a bit, recalling the first time we had seen Mario in 16-bit, or in 3D. Sure, technology helped in molding these experiences, but it was the pure joy of exploring new worlds with an old friend that defined these moments in our minds.

No, Microsoft, Nintendo doesn't have the vast library of genuinely quality games you do, yet, but what we know we'll be getting over the next generation means more to some people than you may have assumed.

Why is Nintendo focusing on 3DS right now? The Wii U is less than a month away and there are still too many questions unanswered for them to be sitting on their thumbs like this. I think we all expected Nintendo to open up about Wii U this month, and now it looks as though we won't have our questions answered until we have already hooked up our new consoles to our entertainment centers. If Nintendo's not willing to talk about Wii U's online and eShop capabilities, how can they expect us not to assume the worst?

There were definately issues with the console's technical limitations and Nintendo's often baffling methods for presenting it to thier fans, but in the end I may have gotten more enjoyment out of the system than any other in my history of playing games. While the hardware left plenty to be desired, Nintendo as a software developer has never been better than they were these last six years as far as I'm concerned.

@DarkKirby
Sadly, you are right. I think the problem is so widespread that unless the United States as a whole, as well as other benefitting countries, can stand together to boycot these products, a true solution will never be realized. It also doesn't help that we can't be certain which products these are, as well as the implications on our own economy and job market by eliminating these practices entirely. It's also sickening to know that this is all driven by greed in the end, but that's the kind of society we've created for ourselves, and that's what it takes to maintain it.