Wii U Architecture
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As a homebrew device it is amazing. There are still exploits being found with a new, safe, simple method out now thanks to some crazy dedicated modders.
There’s a whole homebrew sdk. The Wii U can also run Wii and GameCube games by reconfiguring the hardware (or some other sort of firmware voodoo). That’s three generations of video game libraries that can be explored on one console!
Always felt like it deserved more popularity, but it couldn’t compete with the ps3/4 and Xbox 360/one.
It did, and it shows in that many of the top-selling games on Switch are ports of Wii U games.
That said the Switch remains underpowered compared to contemporary game consoles.
Except for a few AAA-scale action RPGs that launch on PS4/5 (e.g. FF7R, upcoming FF16), the vast majority of JRPGs being released today come to Switch first. And when Switch exclusivity expires, many of them only get a PC release beyond that with PS4/5 and XB1/XSX releases simply never happening.
For a good chunk of JRPG players, the question is "PS5 or Switch?". And if you're like me and specifically prefer turn-based JRPGs, you can forget about anything that launches as a Sony exclusive so that leaves the Switch as your #1 console.
Though I guess the comparison to the DS works well here, as the DS was to platformers during its heyday what the Switch is to JRPGs now.
The PSP was a pretty strong contender, since it had the 2.5D Trails games, FF7 Crisis Core, and some of the best remakes of FF4, FFT, and Tactics Ogre.
And PS3 got a lot of then-exclusives in mid-budget franchises that would be Switch games if they launched now, such as multiple Atelier trilogies and the first half of Trails of Cold Steel (and in fact they've all been ported to Switch). By comparison, current Atelier games now launch simultaneously on Switch and PS4 with PC ports following soon after, and the much-delayed English localizations of Trails now get cross-platform releases (Switch/PC/PS4 simultaneously).
There was never a point during the DS's lifetime where you could say "except for a tiny handful of AAA-scale PS3 exclusives, every JRPG either got simultaneous DS/PS3 releases or was a DS exclusive", but it is the case that right now you can say "except for a tiny handful of AAA-scale PS4/5 exclusives, every JRPG either gets a simultaneous Switch/PS4 release or is a Switch exclusive". I'll also add that we're in a PC renaissance too; JRPGs on PC were virtually nonexistent during the PS3 and DS's heyday (unless you spoke enough Japanese to play unlocalized Falcom games), but now pretty much every JRPG that isn't a first-party Nintendo game gets a PC port, with even the timed Switch exclusives coming to PC after a few months to a year.
I stopped playing on Wii U and rebought it for the Switch where it’s significantly better.
The battery life was completely irrelevant to me. I just kept it plugged in.
With individual devices, you can make a game where N people see something different, or N-1 people see the same thing and 1 sees something different, or where N people see the same thing (and maybe also something different, c.f. the Four Swords GBAs+GC model).
With the Wii U, you can make a game where everyone sees the same thing, or N-1 people see the same thing and 1 person sees that and something else. Even if you try to make the 1 person see something disjoint, it's too easy to cheat. And if you try to make everyone but one person see their own thing - too bad.
I always wondered why they never built something to render simple (or even complex, it can't be that costly) scenes out to multiple connected (3)DSs - relatively everyone with a Wii U must have had at least one...
especially since the switch has a touchscreen, why is the inventory screen not using it?
Thing felt like a failure the moment it was announced. Doubly so when its second E3 felt like a second attempt at the initial announce and still didn't do much to clarify what it had going for it. Triply so once you realised how limited it was.
That it took several years for games willing to engage with the platform enough to be capable of being as big of a mess as Star Fox Zero was seems like a bigger flag of its issues than the game sucking tbh. Just not an enticing format at all.
> LiPo 3.6 V DC 2550 mAh (upgrade WUP-013; 8 hours use)
Especially considering a lot of Wii buyers were not exactly deep gamers, but very casual customers.
The idea didn't really end up panning out for most games.
It's not actually portable, it's purely a controller.
The Wii U marketing was a total disaster. Using the same name as a well established, casual platform, with a tiny suffix + pushing the "same gamepad compatibility" makes this hardware looks like an expensive "revised" version.
I can't understand how Nintendo didn't catch on this.
I had a Playstation 2 and 3 before, but since we became parents, we wanted something family-friendly. We seriously considered a Wii U, but were totally put of by the Wii U controller, which seemed clunky, annoying, and expensive to replace in case it breaks. It was the primary reason we went for the XBox One that generation.
We got a Switch pretty soon after it was released and love it (our daughter also has a Switch Lite).
You were right on all counts. It was a pretty terrible controller. Flimsy, heavy, way too big. And it was actually impossible to replace; they never offered replacement pads for sale, you had to buy a whole new console or find someone who fried their console and wanted to sell just a pad.
clunky
However, I can certainly understand that it looked massive and heavy. That was my assumption as well. Bit of a marketing issue there.
annoying
expensive to replace in case it breaks
But, once again, your assumption totally made sense. Another marketing issue.
It was the primary reason we [passed on it]
This is a bit of a meme, but it isn't generally true. The Nintendo 64 and GameCube were pretty cutting edge in their day. At the time the Nintendo Switch released, the Tegra X1 was still about as cutting edge as mobile GPUs came (in early 2016).
What Nintendo is about - to a fault, some would argue - is cost cutting. Sometimes that means they use older stuff, but using older stuff isn't always the best cost cutting balance to strike. The article even notes this:
> To be fair, it’s known that Nintendo’s choices are not always based on ‘cutting-edginess’ but on cost and supply.
The meme is about "Nintendo consoles have outdated technical capabilities and the games look like shit", and that is accurate.
Switch is as much a console as it is a mobile device. Compared to an XBox, a Switch is a few horses short of a full stable.
Even the blockbuster Wii could only do 480p while contemporaries were doing HD.
What Nintendo does well is make the tradeoff worth it. Both the Wii and Switch make up for their reduced graphics by pioneering new ways of thinking about console gaming.
The one generalization that is maybe fair is that Nintendo's design goals don't seem to satisfy all of the desires of enthusiast gamers, and are not aiming to satisfy them.
The example I like to give is the game GT Pro Series. It looked super rough even for the horsepower the Wii was packing.
However, the motion controls make that game among the most fun racing games I have ever played. It was great! I still play occasionally.
Not always. The N64, for example, tried to be cutting edge.
[1] https://www.polygon.com/2015/3/27/8303247/the-legend-of-zeld...
If a Nintendo employee claimed it was to avoid distraction I'm pretty confident they are lying.
>"In doing our testing without the touch features we noticed looking back and forth between the Gamepad and the screen actually took a little something away from this type of Zelda game," he said.
>"There was no hesitation or reluctance in removing those features because we felt the way it is now is the best way to play the game," he added.
I can understand the cynicism, but, to me anyway, I agree that it's not ideal gameplay. The game pad was a big miss for me for anything other than being able to play a game when my husband was using the TV. I ended up kinda hating the gamepad.
So I believe both can be true.
* They bungled the audio aspect, though. If you played with headphones, you couldn't route game pad audio through them.
On the Wii U only the tablet has motion controls, the pro controller does not, so at a minimum the game was designed to have you hold a tablet and make motions with it while Link holds his tablet and acts out that motion.
I owned a Wii and loved it. To this day I don’t know what the selling point(s) of the Wii U were supposed to be.
I just don’t think it was marketed well.
The controller is meh, however most games also let you play with a pro controller. The screen on the Wii U brick is barely used.
And if you have a party or so just let them bring their Wii controllers, all the multiplayer games support them.
If you are not a classic gamer but are looking for some gaming fun it might still is the perfect console for you
Eh? Like Wii Shop games which are WiiU only are all free?
If that's the case, I might dig mine out of the closet.
https://en-americas-support.nintendo.com/app/answers/detail/...
Oh wow, how did Nintendo manage to be this stupid?
Except the cryptography and security has been bypassed. So the consoles have a homebrew app that lets you download and install to console and pirate the game. All done on the console.
The games library was just too weak honestly, I think that was the main thing. The software problems were in large part caused by Nintendo under-speccing its machines catching up to it. Multiplatform's were particularly adversely affected.
All in all you were better off buying a PS4 honestly.
- OTB web browser
- OTB audio and video chat with friends, native support for 3rd party headsets
- real-time direct messaging (via Miiverse) notifications and other friend notifications via the home button LED
- Ability to view online status of friends
- High definition graphics
- 5+ player synchronous local multiplayer
- built-in Nintendo TVii service
- built-in support to use the gamepad as a TV remote
- eShop selections for mobile retro consoles (e.g. GBA, DS)
- background installations and updates
- accelerometer, gyroscope, front-facing camera, touch screen, IR sensor, NFC all packed into the gamepad
- full backwards compatibility with a prior console (Wii)
Not to mention, all online services were free to use. And those still existing, are still free.
Edit: As a kid, this was the first console that had just enough 3rd party support for me to enjoy games like Fifa, Need for Speed, and Call of Duty akin to an Xbox 360, while also hosting all my favorite Nintendo games. It was a fun system, even if it was poorly advertised and a bit awkward. But I enjoyed the gimmicks and I still use it, mostly for playing exclusives that never made it to the Switch.
Edit: This is an optional install, not OTB.
Wasn't the Wii, at least initially, compatible with gamecube? Mine even has gamecube controller and memory card slots.
Otherwise, all Wii models had GCN game, controller; and memory card support.
Fun fact: the Wii was a modified GameCube for a bit of its development cycle. Prototypes of the Wiimote with a GCN have been found.
The Wii Mini originally released in Canada but came to other regions later. Japan never got the GameCube-less models for some reason.
The Wii was compatible with the GameCube largely by being basically an enhanced GameCube under the hood, and the Wii U is kind of a further step down that same road with its "vWii" backwards compatibility mode, so it's possible to use homebrew to play dumped GameCube games on a Wii U natively, only providing some light glue to hook things together. It's not officially supported though.
It's good that they basically built a product that was impossible to market badly with the switch, it probably sells itself, considering the form factor and all of the first and third party support they have now.
Splatoon— second player without split screen.
New SMB U— gamepad player can spawn blocks to help you reach secrets.
Wind Waker— map and inventory.
But an awful lot of titles just mirrored the TV or had a button to enable off-TV play.
While it wasn't necessary it freed up screen space for the main diaplay while also allowing you to play only on the gamepad.
I think shared/split screen on the TV adds an additional social element to it. Otherwise it's just all of us playing on their phones/Switch.
The best overall use is the Nintendo DS emulator. Unfortunately only few games are available for purchase but with a bit of hacking the compatibility is great.
That combined with the increasing inevitability that everything was going to be ported to a later, single-screen system anyway, and it's not hard to see why titles like Donkey Kong Tropical Freeze and Zelda BOTW didn't use the secondary screen at all.
Compare that to the Wii U back then: Turn on and play.
Nintendo even achieved to keep this mindset with the Switch: It will update in the background so usually you just turn it on and play.
On top of that, the default behavior is to stop downloads while playing a game. You can change this in the settings, but at a significant performance hit.
Re: The 'just works' - In handheld mode, all Steam Verified titles have 'just worked' for me. Docked mode is a different story, because no game has automatically switched resolution automatically. You need to set the Native resolution mode on a per-game basis.
Additionally, there is always a chance that an unverified game you're looking for will not work very well on the Steam Deck - be it control-wise, graphically, or some other reason. It is not as 'plug and play' as a traditional console, but the device continues to get better over time with updates.
Assuming the game itself runs fine, usually the main issue is mapping steam deck controls to the in-game keyboard and mouse config. I find the UX for doing this to be pretty confusing and terrible (doubly so when using an external controller), but this is helped some by the fact that you can apply controller mappings submitted by other Steam users.
I don't agree. I play my switch maybe once every couple of weeks, and almost without fail there's a system or game update that it asks me to install.
Granted, _most_ updates can be put off for a while by hitting "update later", but I see very little difference between the consoles (and PCs) in terms of update behaviour these days, for better or worse.
With Wii U games rarely received patches, everything was on the disc and ran off it too.
However, we used play Fortnite quite often on both the Switch and the PS4. On the Switch it was ready immediately in most cases. If not, the update loaded and was installed rather quickly. Compare that to the PS4: It's updated in about 50% of the cases. If not, downloading takes very long and then it is applying the update so slow, that we usually just give up.
At some point, if someone buys a ps5 or xbox for power only. Then they just get a pc, those consoles takes years to design. By the time they're released, it's already outdated
Actually, consoles are tricky to develops on because they are quiet restricted from hardware standpoint, so you have to invest a lot in hardware knowledge.
I don't think that's really true. Hardware moves slowly enough nowadays that really good hardware from a couple of years ago is still very competitive with today's hardware. And if you tried to build a PC with comparable specs to, say xbox series x, you'd be paying a very substantially larger amount because MS have economies of scale and a strong negotiating position.
Nintendo, on the other hand, tries to appeal to a much broader market. They learned from their success in the 80s, when pretty much every North American living room with kids in the household had an NES and a stack of games on top of the TV. Nintendo sees themselves as friendlier to casual gamers and families. They want to the "the safe choice" when grandma or grandpa whip out their checkbook at Walmart to buy a gaming system for their grandchildren.
Just being family-friendly doesn't quite guarantee success, which is why they've always been exploring new ways to interact with video games. Basically every new console they've introduced has had controllers markedly different from what came before. (Even if it turns out they were not necessarily _better_ than what came before.) In the case of the Wiimote, they pretty much hit a home run. It was not only a novel input method, it turned out to be loads of fun for casual gaming, social gatherings, and families.
Luckily they ported it to other consoles too. My kids are still playing it with their friends.
I hope they are working on a successor.
NES: Well designed. SNES: Well designed. N64: Hampered by the originally 12-24 MB cartridges as opposed to 650 MB CDs. GameCube: Well designed. A little hampered by the 1.4 GB mini DVDs as opposed to 7.8 GB DVDs. Wii: Underpowered, but a surprise smash hit capturing that era’s sensibilities (like the PS2). Wii U: Clunky and awkward, which however led to the Switch. Switch: Well designed.
GB: Well designed. GBC: Well designed. GBA: Well designed, however with a very bad audio quality as compared to the SNES. NDS: Well designed, again with very bad audio quality, and a surprise smash hit capturing that era’s sensibilities (like the PS2). 3DS: Hampered by its pitiful 2004 era 200 MHz CPU and 240p display. Clunky and unremarkable, which had a success in its second half of existence because people just want Nintendo games. Switch: Well designed.
Success is more dictated by 4 main constraints or factors: - Game selection and support - Price point - System performance (including storage) - Innovative-ness or accessibility
Successful consoles typically met at least 3 of the above. For example the Nintendo Switch had very mediocre system performance, but it had great (1st party) game support, priced lower than competing XBox and PS4, and seemed very approachable for all demographics.
Nintendo Switch had the most powerful GPU of any mobile device released at its time. Furthermore it has 4 GB of RAM. Just the Cortex A-57 CPU wasn’t bleeding edge any more, having been replaced by the Cortex A-72 by the time of the Switch with a higher IPC of 16%. It was a well balanced system.
You might be mistaken because mobile CPU performance grew in an unparalleled explosive fashion, and the Cortex A-72 was already replaced by the A-73, A-74, A-75, A-76, A-77, A-78, and A-710 by now. But this is unfair to a system where its design was frozen already 6 years ago.
It just means that, if a successor Switch is built the same way, and a Cortex A-78 is used, its CPU would have ca 2.6x IPC. If it ran at twice the clock speed, its CPU performance would be 5.2x.
You’re being unfair because CPUs grew so much.
It’s more complicated than a simple good or bad checkmark whether a thing is popular or not.
With the tech at the time, the Game Boy wasn't going to have a better screen without seriously compromising battery life. Case in point, the Sega Game Gear which was graphically way better than the Game Boy but died fast if you took it off the wall plug.
The GBC didn't have the same excuse; it was so many years newer, and it offered very little over the Game Boy other than a color screen. And its color screen still looked like a joke next to a Game Gear. Given how much newer the GBC was than the GG, I doubt Nintendo couldn't have made a handheld with Game Gear-quality graphics but without the awful battery life.
But it doesn't matter, because the GBC had an awesome games library and people loved it.
The game didn't age as gracefully as other StarFox games.
> Similarly to how the Wii Remote mangles the Bluetooth protocol to avoid third-party usage
with "mangles the Bluetooth protocol" being a broken link. Anyone have information on this? I'm interested in how so.
Just remove the extra text
https://github.com/xwiimote/xwiimote/blob/master/doc/PROTOCO...
The console initially promoted the gimmick of being a controller for cable TV, as seen by the blue TV button the bottom of the gamepad. This was at a time when cable TV was starting to die out for the younger crowd. The original Xbox One made a similar misguided focus on controlling TV, while the overall market was making a major shift to streaming in that period.
Next, the gamepad used a resistive touchscreen instead of a capacitive one. Phones with capacitive touchscreens had been the norm for years at this point, making the Wii U touchscreen feel very low quality.
The gamepad came with too small of a battery, which limited the gamepad's use as a portable console, which was already tied down to being nearby the console itself to stream games smoothly. The battery could be easily upgraded to a larger size, but it had to be purchased and installed later on.
The base console only had 8 GB of storage. The deluxe model only came with 32 GB of storage and cost an extra $150 (for $350 total). The console largely focused on using discs for games, but the next gen of Xbox and PlayStation consoles showed that internal storage was important. The Wii U had an SD card slot, but SD cards could oddly not be used to expand game storage; USB storage could be used however.
The Wii U had some very strong game releases that eventually saw successful ports to the Switch, and it also had the best Virtual Console release of games in any console ever, that the Switch still has not matched. The value of a Wii U by the end of its life was insane. It's the only console where so many incredible games (almost all of Nintendo's catalogue through the Wii - but not the GameCube) could be played on the system. I think the console just focused on all of the wrong things in the minutia. Tie that with terrible marketing, and the console was doomed to failure. The Wii U's genius was later revised upon and proved to be a success with the Switch. Despite it's failures, the Wii U was a great console that is one of my favorites of all time (along with the PlayStation Vita).