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Comment by causi | Hacker News Reader

The problem was that albatross of a gamepad. Not only did it have garbage battery life, but its presence led Nintendo to actively make games worse just to force mechanics onto the gamepad. Anyone else remember how godawful Star Fox Zero was, for absolutely no good reason?

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I really liked the Wii U pad and used it a lot. The Switch is a more fully realized version of the concept, but it has its downsides -- it's not as comfortable to hold and play for long periods, and the lack of a two-screen mode makes certain concepts less effective. Mario Maker, for instance, worked perfectly with the Wii U and feels compromised on the Switch in comparison.

The battery life was completely irrelevant to me. I just kept it plugged in.

Another example of the two-screen mode I liked was asymmetrical local multiplayer like Nintendo Land. It's not that it's impossible now, with two switches, but I haven't seen any games do it (with 4 players on a single switch, and 1 on the other).

The Wii U's model doesn't really open up that many interesting asymmetrical multiplayer game designs, compared to multiple individual devices. There's a psychological effect of everyone being in the "same space" when most people are on one screen, but mechanically most of the time you'll want the opposite of what the Wii U can do - one person can see everything but everyone else can only see some limited view (c.f. Pac-Man Vs).

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...

Smash Bros. for Wii U let you use a 3DS as a controller. It was awkward - you had to download the “Smash Controller” app onto the 3DS from the eShop - and didn’t have any kind of video streaming, but the connectivity was there at least.

Zelda Wind Waker was also great. You could assign weapons or items to the buttons whilr you were walking, or scroll through the map.

Breath of the Wild development started on the WiiU and I'm convinced it would have been better if they didn't have to shoe-horn in Switch support. The inventory menu of BOTW is horrible and totally was meant to be used real time on the gamepad.

i was surprised by that too

especially since the switch has a touchscreen, why is the inventory screen not using it?

I always thought that the name was the cause. I don't follow Nintendo very closely so when I heard about the Wii U I just assumed it was a slightly enhanced Wii, not a separate console.

I always found it pretty funny that the system's best game, Zelda: BoTW, features a tablet carried by the protagonist prominently in the game, but the game makes ZERO usage of the gamepad. This was likely a last minute change due to the decision to also make it a launch game for the Switch, and they didn't want people to say "the Wii U is better because you can manage your items on the game pad more easily".

It felt like they were pressured into putting out a new machine due to the extremely rapid decline in Wii console/game sales in 2009/2010 and had no choice but to go with the thing they were deepest into R&D with.

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.

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