Wii U Launch Day - Who's buyin'?

anyone partaking in day one shenanigans?

<chirp chirp>

those are crickets, not birds

Preordered a while ago and then forgot about it. I guess I'm medium psyched about it? Mario looks good and I heard stuff about the zombie game. I'll probably be more excited about it when it shows up tomorrow.

Only if the Xenoblade sequel is good and exclusive.

Buying it, but only because I'm Batman-preparing for Pikmin 3. There is no set of circumstances in which I will not be playing Pikmin 3 at launch.

The launch library isn't the WORST, but it's hardly full of system-sellers. Apparently Zombi U is pretty cool, as long as you go in expecting a survival-horror game and not an FPS. Beyond that, though - it's NSMBU, which is supposedly really good but is going to be just as good later on, a load of bad ports, and Nintendo Land, which is apparently a decent enough pack-in, but is still a minigame collection.

Does a 2D Mario game that isn't the disappointment NSMB2 was sound good? Sure. But it's not exactly 400 dollars worth of good.

Wait until some other titles hit. Pikmin, Wonderful 101, Monster Hunter, etc. At least some of the OS jank will be out of the way by then (how much is another question entirely), and if you're lucky it might even have dropped in price.

also, re: the Monolith game - it's not a Xenoblade sequel. Which is a good thing, mind you; Xenoblade stands just fine on its own. But it's definitely going to be exclusive, seeing as how Monolith Soft is a subsidiary of Nintendo.

Okay, knowing Monolith is working on a new RPG for the WiiU actually does make me interested in the system, after the amazing experience that was Xenoblade, this would be a reason to look at the game.

Allow me to sum up Xenoblade in a short review:

*ahem*

"REYN!"
"SHULK!!"
"MONADO!"
"THE MONADO-!!"
"The Monado's power?"
"SHULK, THE MONADO!"
"REYN, LOOK AT ME AND MY MONADO!!"
"THE MONADO IS SUPER"
"I ALSO ENJOY THE MONADO"
"MONADO?"
"MONADO~!"

9 out of 10.

The only game I actually felt any sort of pull to purchase since getting my Wii is Xenoblade Chonicles. I still have not. The Wii U is further off my radar than any console has been. That said, between my phone and my PC, when the hell would I have time to mess with a gimmicky console that has about 3 exclusives that I will want during its entire life cycle. :)

you forgot ITS REYN TIME

Oh shi-, you're right! Guess that makes it a 9.5/10. Or, by IGN scales, 9.4732-1.

I found it lulz that, a year or two ago, IGN put out an article saying "our point system is ridiculous", and even tearing apart how stupid it is to arbitrarily rate something 9.6 instead of 9.5, and now they're doing it again. So fed up with IGN.

Heh... I can't actually recall a time IGN was relevant. My favorite 'review' of theirs was their God Hand review, which basically boiled down to "BAWWW this game's too hard! 2/10!"

No shit guys, that was one of the major features of the game. It's supposed to be difficult. That's... kinda the point.

On the topic of the Wii U... I *might* end up getting one, but certainly not at launch... I kinda want to see where the console goes first.

I used to follow IGN a lot back in like... 2003, but after Bozon and Cassimasina left the Nintendo team, quality of reviews went down fast. It was around that time I discovered Destructoid, and I've never looked back since.

As for the Wii U, I'm a big Zelda fan so when they've got a game there, I'm sold. There's also talks of a full-fledged Star Fox title, which I'd be dying to play in HD (if it's snes/64 style starfox) in the works. If Starfox comes out first and is as pretty and awesome as I hope, that's likely going to be my reason to buy a system. If not, Zelda will be. Either way, I'm looking at 2-3 years away.

I would also really like a 3D Classics release of the original Starfox and Yoshi's Island on 3DS. I would play those over and over again. Until then, I can share this pipe dream: http://youtu.be/4XAJEDJJ_Bo

You two. What a pair of jokers.

In what sense is this surprising?

"Top Ten ugliest hamburgers in videogames."
"How exaggerated badassery could increase Rapelay's popularity."
"Killzone meets Dead Space in the new Xenoblade sequel."
"What SSX could learn from Skyrim."

I would be hard pressed to separate the fake titles from the real.

I'm pretty sure that this should be offensive, but I'm too impressed by the sheer brass balls to actually be offended.

Shame it won't cut down on the eight-year-olds online.

Wow, Nintendo. Just wow. I wonder how long that will last before they get rid of it due to complaints. I really don't think a fee is going to change a single thing.

"Is Dudebro II a Diablo for adults?"
"Why breasts must succeed."
"Top ten most generation-defining merchandising in video games"

I really hope the Halo Mountain Dew thing made #1

It was actually worse than that. In addition to the difficulty they complain about: the enemies being "generic" (wtf), the combat being tedious and shallow (you'd think the fact that they found the game too hard might tip them off that there was maybe more to the combat than pressing one button over and over again after all, but no), and that "you'll often have to fight demon spirits that arise from fallen enemies," which is dropped in as a negative as though that's just something we all understand to be bad game design. The review is premised on the thesis that God Hand in its entirety is a joke and that the design and mechanics are intentionally bad. That the writing is as piss-poor as we've come to expect from IGN is just icing on the shitty review cake. There's also this classic follow-up that helpfully informs us that the rest of the IGN staff circa 2006 were just as idiotic as he was.

It was obvious long before that review that IGN was strictly to be ignored, but that was when I stopped just pretending it didn't exist and started wanting to shoot it into the sun.

"Top Ten fattest sex scenes in videogames."

I mentioned in the Nintendo Announcement Thread that I picked up two of them at launch. I wasn't really planning on getting one on launch day but we were out of town and the kids woke up really early and strapping them into the car seemed like a better solution than muzzling them to keep them from waking up my whole extended family. That, and my wife had taken a interest in the thing.

So that was the first one, which was had without any sort of line at all. Later in the day I figured I'd get one in case a family member or friend was interested and wasn't able to find one. After a very brief wait in front of Best Buy later, I had two.

Come to find out, no one was interested in it. I was considering eBaying it in the spirit of the free market fairy, but that market seems flooded with barely-marked up consoles. Last night I was at Toys 'R' Us doing some Christmas shopping and wandered through the game section.



So today I took the extra one back to Best Buy.

Something tells me this is not the blockbuster launch that Nintendo was expecting. I remember when the Wii first came out I didn't see one on a store shelf for something like a year and a half.

Fixed. Also, serves you right.

Actually, I really was buying it for my sister-in-law. The same weekend, she wound up getting a 360, which I'm going to go ahead and call a win for her and her kids.

If I had planned on flipping it on eBay I'd have done it day one while there were still people dropping $450+ on the thing. Suckers.

No one is.

Well except for that Jibble guy.

I don't know anyone whose purchased one and anyone I ask about it has no clue what it does (outside of it being a game console)

I wouldn't have known they'd launched if not for this thread.

There does seem to be a general lack of awareness about it, for sure.

I plugged it in yesterday and ran all the cables and charged the controller and turned it on and started getting myself signed in and then I hit the Update button. That's as far as I got. It was still downloading when I went to sleep, and in the morning it said there was a connection error. I started the update again, so I guess we'll see if it finishes by the time I get home.

It seems like they truly have updated it into the current gen. They may beat the PS3 for shitty update download times.

I'm assuming that, like every other Nintendo console, it will be lame and devoid of good games for at least a year. I got a Wii pretty early and a 3DS at launch and both were dumb decisions. The 3DS is only just now beginning to have a not shitty library, and at a fraction of the original launch price, and the Wii never did mature because it turns out its big gimmick sucks. (I really want to play more Skyward Sword, the game is really good, but every time I think I should play it, I remember, "Oh, right, I have to use the dumb waggle controls" and then I don't play it.)

I'll wait a year and see if there's anything worthwhile on it, when more games are out and the console is $100 cheaper and comes in a new hardware revision that fixes all the terrible design decisions of the first console. And maybe new colors or bundles.

While that IS true, and I think they really over-estimated it, they also supposedly purposefully made a fuckton way ahead of time so that they wouldn't have a christmas shortage. Things could change by mid december, though.

HW_AHBPROT still exists in the Wii U's backwards-compatibility mode.

This is the single funniest thing I've seen all week.

What does this mean? Based on context I'm guessing maybe it's something exploited to jailbreak a console?

Reconcile this:

And this:

With this (from a story on engadget):

Reggie also said that Codblops looks better on the Wii U than on other consoles. Reggie is a LIAR.

He is a bit of a corporate shill, but I think there's at least some truth to the stocking story. That was easily the biggest problem with the wii's launch, and they claim they've learned that lesson. I also read that some Nielson rating or something said it was the #2 most-demanded item this holiday season by kids, with the iPad as #1. When did spending $500+ on an 8 year old for christmas become the norm? When I was 8, I got some clothes, candy, and a trip to funcoland where I got to pick out two used super nintendo games. iirc, it was goof troop and return of the jedi. AND DAMNIT, IT MADE ME HAPPY.