Okay guys, I've just arrived home after a Wii U demonstration in Germany.
Some initial impressions:
Hardware:
- the Wii U Gamepad is extremely light and feels great. Analog sticks are instantly comfortable if you are used to play with Nintendo controllers. The buttons feel clicky and responsive and are easy and comfortable to reach even without looking at the controller. L+R and LZ+LR are also perfect to reach and feel good but there are definitely no analog triggers on the back. All in all the Gamepad is a joy to play with.
More importantly, the screen is vivid and responsive and both 3D and 2D games looked great on it. The colors are really bright, feels very HD, even if it isn't. I own both a Vita and an iPad 3 and the screen still looked modern and great.
- the Pro Controller feels great, too. For me it was easy to play with the left sticks and the right buttons regardless of the uncommon placement.
- the console itself looks good, to me all materials look like it's a bit higher in quality than Wii. But maybe because all was brand new
Software:
- Pikmin 3. The moment you watch it on a big HD TV, you're sold. While you can see it's origin, it definitely does not look like an upscaled Wii game. There are a lot of cool small visual touches I haven't noticed in the videos, like reflections on the enviroment and on the characters and enemies. I played it with Wii Remote + Nunchuck and I really like the controls that way.
- New SMB U. It's what you expect. You can play single player on the Gamepad and use a button to do the spin attack, which I really like. Multiplayer was fun but placing blocks with the Gamepad was dull compared to actually playing the game. It's more a father-son-thing. Apart from that, it looks perfectly anti-aliased, very nice parallax scrolling and background details and just plays as you would expect from a Mario game.
- Batman. The visuals do look worse than PS3. Horrible texture pop in and framerate issues. When using the boomerang thing, somehow the graphics looked more detailed on the gamepad than on the TV. The gamepad ideas looked a bit tacked-on. Batman's new suit is very shiny.
- ZombiU. It's very slow and scary and feels great. It does use the gamepad in very clever ways and you're really losing control of what's going on around you as soon as you have to look in your backpack, and you're nervous and scared. Even within a crowd. Controls felt really good to me. Visuals are on par with better-than-average PS3/360 games with some nice lighting effects but nothing extraordinary. The game looked pretty polished to me. Multiplayer was fun, too, but I didn't spend too much time on it.
- Nintendoland. I didn't care about it after E3. I played the Ninja minigame and thought "nice. but boring.". I played the Animal Crossing game and it was fun, so I played it again three times, then I wanted to play something else. That was the Luigi's Mansion minigame.
Honestly, this is my new system seller. I played the minigame for one hour continuously with the same four people. The person who finally "killed" the ghost got rewarded in getting the gamepad. It is perfectly balanced, you have to communicate all them time and there was not a single match that was boring. It's that good. Best multiplayer session I've had in a very, very long time. We only stopped playing, because Nintendo forced us to.
Bonus impressions:
- New Super Mario Bros 2 for 3DS: It's fun, and I found it relatively demanding compared to it's predecessors because you're constantly trying to get more coins and you're doing more risky stuff. The 3D effect was strange (and different to the 3DS eshop trailer). In 2D mode, the background was sharp and clear. In 3D mode, the background was blurry and much further away.
- Castlevania: I only played it for 5 minutes, visuals look great for 3DS but the framerate was horrible. I can't comment on gameplay as I haven't played the old games.
- Luigi's Mansion: Very polished and full of charm. The map I played, a clock tower, had something like 6 levels and looked very big. The controls are better now than E3 build 2011 as slight movement of the gyros already helps to change the angle of the cleaner and the 3D is a bit more subtle and doesn't get distorted that fast. I still hope for support of the second circle pad.
All in all I came away much more impressed than after E3. Personally, the Wii U is a must buy as long as it is around 299$. I'm looking forward to play Nintendoland now, and I would buy Mario, Pikmin 3 and ZombiU, as long as there is enough content. I didn't play Project P-100 because I got stuck with Luigi's Ghost House, but it looked fun and was graphically maybe the most impressive game (great shading).
If you have any questions, I'm happy to answer.
