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Wii U
Developer: Nintendo
Price: £250-£280
Released: 30th November 30th 2012
Notes: A handheld console!? |
The time of the Next-Gen console war between the big 3, Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft, will soon be upon us, and racing out of the blocks with a head start over the others is Nintendo with their new WiiU console. Costing between £250-£280, this is possibly Nintendo's most expensive console ever, but will it be the best, and more importantly, will it be worth it?
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| Bask in the glory of a screen in the controller! We haven't seen innovation like this since the days of the Dreamcast! |
Being released this early I don't expect it to live up to Sony and Microsoft's new consoles in terms of specs at all, but having around 3 times as much RAM as any of the Current Gen consoles is certainly a good start... Well, for Nintendo at least. Nintendo have always seemed to be behind the industry for some reason, or actually, they're just that little bit ahead that after their focus has been completed, everything else catches up and leaves them in the dust, and it will happen again this time as the Wii U doesn't bring anything really special to the table, it's more like they're just jumping on the bandwagon with most aspects.
For starters, it looks like now, every WiiU game will feature Accomplishments, which as you have probably guessed, are just like Achievements and Trophies. The thing I find interesting about this though, is that Nintendo once said that the reason they didn't put Achievements or the like into their 3DS was because they didn't want to make players focus on particular goals like that (in more understandable terms, some of the criteria for achievements is silly, such as Halo Reach's almost impossible 'If They Came to Hear Me Beg' achievement, they'd rather you just played the game to have fun, not to focus on ridiculously pointless tasks).
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| Nintendo Land - A game probably made by Nintendo to show off what the WiiU can do, just like Wii Play was all those years ago, unfortunately it will probably also be very limited in what it has to offer |
In addition to this, Nintendo's famous Miis are now getting ever more social with the new Miiverse which, put simply, is Facebook for Miis, allowing you to share pictures and screenshots with friends, and maybe even appear in friends games, a screenshot of the exclusive title ZombiU revealed a little pop-up in the corner of the screen showing that a friend had fallen victim to the zombies and gotten infected - though I still don't know whether that's just to inform you what your friends are doing in game, whether it's for a bit of fun, trying to trick you into thinking you're shooting your zombified friend, or whether they'll play on that and actually have a feature where your friend becomes a boss character or something, I'm interested to see what it will be like.
Speaking of ZombiU I can't forget about the launch line up, featuring great and promising titles like Pikmin 3, Bayoneta 2, Assassin's Creed III, Mass Effect 3 (although quite late) and of course New Super Mario Bros U, there's a lot to look forward to here, though there's also a lot of what we already have as I can guarantee NSMBU won't be much different to pretty much any 2D Mario Platformer out there.
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| Even Arkham City is coming to the Wii U as part of the 22-game-strong release calender, despite already being out for ages on the 360 and PS3, but will the WiiU's added features make it worth buying again? |
The last notable feature left for me to talk about is the game pad, which is a lot like a tablet or I phone with analogue sticks to be honest. During WiiU games, the screen on the game pad will be used for extra features of the game, whether it's a little mini-map or a forever accessible menu, it's a nice and welcome feature that sets the WiiU apart from all the other consoles, however the real thing that get's me excited about this game pad is a little rumor I heard - If someone wants to use the TV, you can send the full game to the game pad and play it on that. If this rumor is true, console gaming could easily become a whole lot more convenient, at least when there's a family fighting over the TV.