10 Days With The WiiU: An Update

A week or so ago I wrote about my first experiences with the WiiU console (http://www.denofgeek.com/games/23685/our-first-48-hours-with-the-nintendos-wii-u) and having explored it for a further eight days I felt it would be a good time to update you on how it’s going.

Spending more time with Nintendo’s new console has allowed me to appreciate its elements much more. The Miiverse – the WiiU’s social plaza – has become much more apparent, mostly thanks to its neat integration within ‘New! Super Mario Bros U’ where comments from other game players appear scattered around the world map. It really does feel like the console is part of a bigger picture and though it does feel like the other players are on the end of a long road and not really accessible, it’s a neat feature.

I’ve also experienced much more of my three games. ZombiU – as seen through my other review at http://www.denofgeek.com/games/23777/zombiu-wii-u-review – is a delight, even if a scary one. NintendoLand is a great multiplayer game with lots of depth but feels lacking if you don’t have lots of friends round: it feels like a one-player game or a many-player game, not suited for two or three players. The Mario game is as nostalgic and as familiar as every other recent game in the series but the controls are slick, the platforming surprising tricky, the graphics a treat for the eyes and the world map and alternative pathways a delight.

It’s not all been plain sailing though. The console has hung up three times so far, requiring a switch off at the wall, and the console has had trouble reading a disc once, and just a few days after the first mammoth one hour update the console got another one, this time coming in at under fifty-minutes. Nintendo have been a little cagey on what it did other than fixed some stability issues, but reported faster loading menu times are not particularly apparent as the moving between them still takes an age, and the only evidence of a change is in YouTube asking to be updated. I hope these regular large updates aren't going to be a regular occurence.

The GamePad is still winning me over as a great tool to use and I have no regrets in buying the console. I’m still ploughing through the three games and taking in all they have to offer and looking forward to Nintendo TVii and games like Rayman and Scribblenauts Unlimited on the horizon.