Wii-U boat torpedoes Nintendo's '¥20bn profit' into ¥20bn loss Facing a looming $219m loss, Nintendo today restated its mission “to pursue its basic strategy of compelling products that anyone can enjoy, regardless of age, gender or gaming experience”. This is marketing speak for targeting occasional players, in particular the very young and the old, folk who might not normally be …
The last PC game I played was Skyrim. The remapping in that was awful. Perfect example of a game (franchise), ruined for casuals and their consoles (though that UI sucks on console as well IMO).
I'd hope that some are better than others because chances are that I'll be avoiding the next batch of consoles for many years so PC will be my only option.
"It is Nintendo’s first console for 16 years to play host to a Mario game written specifically for it"
First Nintendo console to launch with a Mario game written specifically for it maybe
Also as Thomas said, although i'm sure that smartphones and tablets are hurting Nintendo's core business, running off 3DS Vs smartphone sales is useful to absolutely no one
>>"It is Nintendo’s first console for 16 years to play host to a Mario game written specifically for it"
First Nintendo console to launch with a Mario game written specifically for it maybe <<
No, the quote from the article is just ridiculous, all Mario games are written for a specific piece of hardware. TBH, if the author of the article really thinks this then you may as well stop reading, they don't know shit.
And Enjibenji, there's a game called mario 64 you might be interested in....
I'm a sucker for a new gadget so we got a Wii U for Christmas. We got the original Wii on the day it came out and played it a lot. However, since my son was born 3 or so years ago, it hasn't seen much use. Now he's hit that PEGI 3 rating age, I thought the Wii U might appeal...I wasn't wrong.
I'd not seen one before buying so when unboxing I was surprised by how big the new controller was. It's not heavy though, which is good for long gaming sessions.
Set-up was quite genius and allowed me to port everything over from the old Wii. You install the Wii U transfer app on your old Wii and the Wii U and, with the help of an SD card and your internet connection, all of your save games, store purchases etc. are transferred over.
All of our Wii games and accessories work perfectly on the Wii U, it's effectively dual boot. You tell it to go into Wii mode and it reboots to the Wii menu. Want to play Wii U games again and you click a menu item and it reboots again to the Wii U home screen. Switching to the Wii menu for the first time showed me my transferred software and inserting a game disc confirmed that all my save games, Mii characters etc. had been transferred. It worked perfectly.
As for the Wii U gaming side of things, I'm highly impressed. We got Nintendoland, Zombie U, Sonic All Star racing and the Super Mario game for the Wii U too.
Nintendoland is simply brilliant and consists of loads of mini games, many of which show off the new controller functions well. On some games, for example, it's effectively hide and seek. The player with the Wii U controller uses their "private" screen to see where they are on the map whilst up to four other players try to find them using the TV screen. We've had a lot of family fun doing this.
In other games, the controller screen is used for aiming or display of maps that would otherwise clutter the game screen. In Zombie U the Wii U controller is excellent for looking at what's in your backpack, switching weapons etc. As a gamer, I love how that works without the need for pop-up menus on the gaming screen.
Sonic All Star Racing uses the controller screen for player 2 if you're racing another local player. In fact, using this method, up to 5 people can race on the same console, with the other 4 using old skool Wii controllers.
Mario is more of the same and can be played just like the Wii version but, if you use the Wii U controller you have increased functionality. Firstly, the co-operative function allows the Wii U controller player to use the touchscreen to build extra platforms, kills monsters and other functions whilst another player controls Mario. With a 3 year old, this is really handy. When he's about to jump into a hole and die, I can put a platform right under his feet and save him.
On top of that, the apps from YouTube, LoveFilm and Netflix are a real winner if you don't already have a device connected to your TV for this. The buffering on YouTube is pretty good and I enjoy HD video from there often. The HDMI connection has also made it easier to hook up to my home cinema for audio and video.
I'm really happy with all of it, pretty much, except the DVD drive is a little bit noisy when the disc is spinning. I had a to struggle to think of that fault though as we love it and it's even got us playing our old Wii games some more..
It's good to know that people who have one are enjoying it. Don't think it'll help sales though....
But I was a fan of the N64 (though PSone was supposedly better) and the GameCube (though ps2 was supposedly better) and I love my wii (apparently there are no games for it! My collection must be all in my head) so I don't really care if the WiiU is a big success, it just needs to be successful enough to allow Nintendo to carry on making games.
The irony with some of the 'collecting dust' style comments , is that two of the best Wii games, (two games that could be considered hard core), only came out last year. If you've played the top bunch of Wii games listed on metacritic, you've got your moneys worth and you didn't get bored.
Also the Wii is probably the cheapest and most pleasing form of emulation on the big screen once soft modded.
£38 at CEX .
The Wii's controller wasn't just a motion sensing gimmick, it was actually a decent pointing device that gamers on other consoles have been screaming out for in the form of a mouse, only Sega answered those cries back in 1999. IMO the Wii was originally cheap enough to get out every christmas for family fun and Wii sports. Smart phones that have stolen the casual gamer cost at least 3 times as much.
The Wii U is one third of the price of an iphone, the latter that will mostly get used for texting.
Pretty much all of my friends own a wii, and we all fall back on the same staple games, house of the dead, for the 'light guns' and mariokart.
Both of them serve as party games for my crowd, all of whom fondly remember the snes version of mariokart. As an aside, one of my friends fired up his old snes and let his daughter have a go on mariokart, she kept crashing as the motion controls were 'broken'
Exactly, their main strengths are in their first- (and second-)party titles. Mario (best-selling franchise), Pokémon (best-selling RPG franchise), Zelda, Smash,... I thought Shigsy was beginning to lose the plot with the Wii (actually he began to lose it when dropping the CD-ROM deal with Sony, and look what happened there), but the Wii U, definitely.
Oh well, Pokétards have another generation of games to look forward to in October.
I was gifted a 3DS, proudly marketed as an official UAE product. Only problem being that getting it back home to the UK it turns out that despite the UAE being a PAL region, Nintendo have concocted their own idea of regions, and decided that the one I have will only work with games from the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Singapore (?!). Looking through the list of countries that you can set as your 'home' country, I found the US and many South American countries, so it's essentially an 'NTSC U/C' console. However some games are region coded, some are not, but there appears to be no way to tell. Googled plenty of forums, asked Nintendo etc. but no solutions other than sell and buy another.
Net effect? We only have the one game that came with it, Resort Wings. We loved the 3D, but the Russian Roulette of whether a game will work or not, and that they are expensive second hand (PS3 and Xbox 360 games are so much cheaper) meant that we bought no more.
.. and this company thinks I'll buy a Wii U, or anything else they'll produce?
Oh did I mention we have a Nintendo Wii, gather dust somewhere?
Trouble with the wii was it didnt even do what it claimed to do very well. The motion controller was pretty unresponsive and inacurate (unlike the later ps3 move, which was great, but also a pointless toy destined to be shoved in the cupboard 2 weeks after purchase and never used again due to limited game types). Loads of games could be bested by just sitting and violently shaking the wii controller, and for anything not motion based the controller was beyond horrible and the graphics subpar compared to other systems.
I dont think consumers will be fooled twice, not even casual gaming ones.
As for the wii u, It just looks boring and overpriced to me, they will wheel out mario,zelda,that ape thing and a few more tired franchises onto its almost obsolete hardware, but it just doesnt interest me tbh. Shooting zombies with a touchscreen controller, yawn, hide and seek games zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz, srry i nodded off there..
Wrong, the internal motion sensor technology worked as intended but was inherently laggy and not to everyone's taste. The pointing device part (like a mouse, that gamers cry out for) relied on calibration in the Wii menu, good positioning of sensor bar, sitting the right distance from the sensor bar, and no interference from reflections i.e the shiny plastic black stand built into our Samsung TV.
The Wii's user interface was vastly more user friendly to navigate with it's pointer and simple graphics than the Xbox 360 and PS3's, button clicking treasure hunt. As always though, Nintendo were blind to golden opportunities.
The movement in the FPS Goldeneye was great with the Wiimote and chuck, but hey, the graphics were rubbish so nobody actually played it to find out.
As for the Wii U being overpriced, it's the same price as the SNES with inflation and significantly cheaper than a smart telephone, that many people use as a fashion accessory.
"Wrong, the internal motion sensor technology worked as intended but was inherently laggy and not to everyone's taste."
Thats my point, the lag destroyed it for me, it was supposed to be a natural way of playing, but it wasnt, there was a disconnect between your movements and what happened onscreen. The ps3 move actually did this type of control much better, with no lag and better sensing of where it was in 3d space. I never saw anything on the wii that came close to the way you could swing,jab and twist a sword or raquet with the move. The wii tennis game was quite limited in comparison.
I dont think the wii could ever detect full axis movement like distance from the screen could it? (dont know about the wii+ addon, id ditched mine by the time that was released).
I was very nearly excited by the wii U, thought I'd be able to play wii/cube games up-scaled to hi def. Then ninty announced that wii games would only play in low res mode, and cube games wouldn't play at all. boo.
I'll stick with HTC/3DS for now. Maybe they'll release an update. Maybe.
The term 'shovelware' might not have been coined for the Wii but it certainly became it's poster boy. Every Nintendo fanboi always buys Mario, Zelda and Metroid. The casual gamer might buy another game on top of Wii Sports. But the shovelware grinds everybody down:
Food Network: Cook or Be Cooked
Gallop & Ride and My Horse & Me
Charm Girls Club: Pajama Party
Imagine: Party Babyz
My Aquarium
If the casual game buys one of these, or more likely gets given one by Grandma at Christmas, they are then jaded for the rest of that ownership.
This is how the Wii U will die too... death by a thousand party games.
Shovelware, indicating which platform is the most successful since the PSone.
If Wii U ends up with a catalogue full of shovelware it'll be because it has the largest installed base. The thing you say will be it's downfall will actually be an indicator of it's success.
Nintendo have stayed a head by creating new ways of interacting with games... this new console just doesn't contain anything new. As many people have said, its just a PS3 with a Vita as a controller... I wish it wasn't true, but it is... if they can't come up with anything new, they've killed them selves.
I love all the commentards with their "the trouble with the Wii was..." There was no trouble with the Wii. It decimated the competition during the last hardware cycle. It was profitable out of the gate. Its innovations were such that both of its major rivals scrambled to emulate its features.
For the Wii-U, it is a little early to write it off. The launch line-up was admittedly pretty sad. Having said that, the ability to hand off your game to the controller and go and sit in a corner and play pretty much wherever you like is a slow-burn killer feature that's starting to get some traction in the press. Nintendo still have, what, a year maybe before MS and Sony release their next consoles. Plenty of time to get the rest of their first-party catalogue into the open.
Nintendo's old fashioned consoles sold staggering well during black friday several weeks back. The total was around 1.5 million, with Microsoft selling approx 800,000 (admittedly impressive with just the one ageing console)
Is the market really ready for the ultimate console? Looking at the comments and complaints here and on other forums. A 'gamers' console, to satisfy the majority needs would probably cost at least $800 to build.
Only Apple can get away with that price point. Sometimes people expect Nintendo to be a charity.
How out of touch with reality are you? Kinect is a massive failure and compared to the Wii has made absolutely no impression on the general public. Everyone knows what wii tennis is, most people have no idea what Kinect is. The idea that Kinect paddled anyone's arse is ludicrous, it's no more popular than that PS3 lollipop thing. Spend some time on planet earth, xyz....
Top 15 games for the Xbox 360
________________________
Grand Theft Auto IV
98
BioShock
96
The Orange Box
96
Mass Effect 2
96
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
96
Red Dead Redemption
95
Portal 2
95
Batman: Arkham City
94
Gears of War
94
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
94
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
94
Halo 3
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2
94
Pac-Man Championship Edition DX
93
Braid
93
________________________
Top 15 games for Nintendo Wii
________________________
Super Mario Galaxy
97
Super Mario Galaxy 2
97
The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess
95
World of Goo
94
Super Smash Bros. Brawl
93
The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword
93
Rock Band 2
92
Xenoblade Chronicles
92
Rayman Origins
92
Rock Band 3
91
Metroid Prime Trilogy
91
Resident Evil 4: Wii Edition
91
Okami
90
Metroid Prime 3: Corruption
90
The Beatles: Rock Band
89
______________
Top 15 IOS games
______________
World of Goo HD
96
World of Goo
96
Super QuickHook
96
The World Ends with You: Solo Remix for iPad
95
Need for Speed Shift
94
iBlast Moki
94
Scrabble for iPad
94
N.O.V.A. - Near Orbit Vanguard Alliance
94
Anomaly: Warzone Earth
94
Jet Car Stunts
94
Real Racing 2
94
Bastion (2012)
94
Monkey Island 2 Special Edition: LeChuck's Revenge for iPad
93
Dominion HD
93
iBlast Moki 2 HD
93
i've been saying this for years even before the wii U was even introduced....i predicted that the wii would run out of steam due to the type of gamer it was targeting but more so because of the awful games it produced.....and said that their next gen machine had to be on the same level as sony and microsofts next offerings otherewise it would fail miserably.......then when they announced the wii U years before the others had even announced theirs yet i was scepticle because the specs would already be out of date before the ps4 or 720(silly name if it is) came into play.....the touch pad was an interesting idea that would have worked if the games matched up to it...but they dont and are bland and non-existant at best....i just dont understand how they could bring out a machine of this type...their still living in the past after seeing all thats happening in the past 5 yrs with mobile and pad devices and the incredible success of titles like modern warfare and halo...but they still rely on lame mario and zelda type titles....such idiots..wont be long before they either fold completely stop making consoles and develop only like sega did or be taken over by another company...just the way it is now but they should have seen it coming years ago.
After reading your moaning comments, I checked to see how much one costs. Looks like I can get one for £208 So if you can't stretch to that then it looks like you're underfunded and as games cost £40+ it's not really for you anyway.
So stick with your cheap and cheerful is 'phone games and the equally limited tablet games and stop moaning that you can't afford to get something better.
For those that don't understand ... a gimmick is something that isn't taken on by the whole industry to the extent that it becomes the norm. By your definition cars would be gimmicks ... or so say the horse breeders and carriage manufacturers association.
Comparing the 3DS with the smartphone market rather than eg the PS Vita or PSP? *shakes head*
Expressing shock that Wii sales are down between 2011 and 2012, when that was the 6th year in which the console was available and crucially the Window during which it was replaced by the Wii U?
*shakes head*
Spouting nonsense about Mario not having had an outing on Nintendo consoles for 16 years? (Hello, Super Mario Sunshine/Galaxy/Galaxy 2/New Super Mario Bros Wii) *laughs, shakes head*
I don't doubt that Nintendo are facing problems right now from the casual-gaming market, but the failed attempts at using data in this article make its claims suspect at best.
I purchased a Wii U as I have been a fan of Nintendo since my NES. For the latest super graphics, multiformat games I will play them on a gaming rig either using KB/Mouse or 360 controller to the TV (depends on the game).
The Nintendo provides me with the console experience, pick up and play and focus on multiplayer, for this Nintendo have again done a good job. The issue I have is that the IP games we all know and love seem to take an age to be released, Mario - already finished, waiting on Pikmin, Zelda and the usual suspects. 3rd party games, most folk will play on another console or PC so why bother. The age old issue of Nintendo official peripherals being extremely expensive prohibits many from having the true 4 player system it should be.
That said, it's early days so we shall see what happens going forward. I want Nintendo to succeed, I enjoy their IP and how they approach gaming.
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