Wii U Launch Day - Who's buyin'?

The Wii normally doesn't let the PowerPC access any of the devices directly; it has to go through an IO/security ARM core that's been nicknamed Starlet.

HW_AHBPROT lets you set a single bit in the TMD of an application to access everything directly. It completely defeats the purpose of having this security system; presumably it's used in manufacturing tests, but it should not work by the time the consoles leave the factory. It completely defeats the purpose of having the ARM core there. Imagine if the Bond villain's spectacular security corridor with all the lasers and shit had a power switch by the door.

They've gone to great lengths in the version of the system menu used by the BC layer to try and patch the many, many exploits that exist, and then they went and left this in. It's hysterical. Good news for me and you, though. For one thing - it means Devolution is going to work. Probably. Maybe. Gamecube backwards compatibility ho! Though losing the Wavebird as a controller is going to suck.

re: sales - deluxe is still sold out at all kinds of places online. The keyword here is "online." They're making sales, but it's to crusty fucks like myself for whom Pikmin is a system seller. In other words, the same people who bought the GameCube. They need to do something about this if they want it to achieve the kind of success they're looking for.

Thanks, makes sense.

Also, I would like to say that Miiverse is pretty cool.

Nintendo introduced a competently-executed, interesting, useful online feature.

Are we all going to die?

Always, your parents didn't want to spend the money or couldn't afford it. Neither did mine.

To me, the biggest indicator of demand/supply for an item at Christmas is the eBay market. When I hit up eBay and look at completed listings for Wii U deluxe bundles, I see a whole lot of unsold consoles with $350 starting bids. There are a few that are selling at around the $400-$425 mark, but that's just a hair over retail+tax. At Wii launch, I sold one for $200 over retail.

Only one of two things can be true. Either they're not selling like hotcakes or there's high demand but it's being outpaced by Nintendo's amazing supply chain.

I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to determine which of those seems more plausible.

I refuse to get excited about this. Yoshi's Island DS was awful.

I refuse.

I am refusing!

Inflation has really gone up so much in 6 years that the Wii's price is raised $35? I find that just a little hard to believe at face value.

While we do own a Wii for the little guy’s very occasional use, I’ve been choosing other consoles over Nintendo since the Sega Genesis was released (Sega didn’t censor Mortal Kombat like Nintendo did). I don’t see any reason to change now.

Then again, I’ve little interest in the next generation Sony and Microsoft offerings either. The current stuff is working just fine.

So...impressions.

Everything is slow. I've really just barely scratched the surface of Nintendoland, so I'm basically just talking about the console at this point. I haven't been so crazy as to actually time it, but the wait to open anything at all is excessive even ignoring the constant need to update everything. You can't get to a settings screen without a load time. A SETTINGS SCREEN. Honestly, Nintendo. What the hell?

I want to play the games in Nintendoland, but this irritating unskippable robot keeps popping up to tell me about trains and boxes and prizes or some other horseshit I don't care about. Then if I actually want to play a game I have to run around this big circle of doors. From a distance, all you see is basically an icon floating above the door, which is meaningless if you've never played any of the games before. You only get to see the name of the game when you approach the door. Maybe there's a menu I can just bring up with a list of all the games, I don't know. It seems like they just did this to justify the $60 price tag for the standalone version. I'm sure once I've passed all the tutorial nonsense and start playing it with my kids they'll actually enjoy it.

Their Netflix app is pretty great, though, and it finally realizes my dream of having touch-screen access to the Netflix library. Only problem with that is that I'm not going to turn on the Wii and wait for the interminable load times to use Netflix when I can do it from my TV or my Roku almost instantly.

The Miiverse seems interesting, but I can't help but feel like it's stocked with ringers considering the art I'm seeing come off some of the game pads.

I need to actually open up my copy of NSMBWU, which I presume will be just an HD version of the Wii one. I picked up Scribblenauts Unlimited for the kids, and I'm guessing we'll all get a laugh out of making horrible abominations of nature that should not exist.

I've been making a habit of dropping by the game section whenever I'm in a store that has one. Both last night and today I saw at least one white Wii U on the shelf but no deluxe versions.

Over the holiday a neighbor gifted my wife with an old TV with RF connectors and she hooked her old Intellivision up to it. It's been quite a long time since I've seen one of those in action, but it amazes me how simple it was to push the cartridge in, push the power button, and the game itself is instantly playing on the screen. There was something really cool about that. I'd actually forgotten it ever even worked that way.

I understand the requirement for boot time, that's not a big deal. But once you've booted, there's no excuse at all for slow interfaces, especially when we're talking about opening up a settings menu.

Wii U Sold Out Almost Everywhere!
Really? Are they sold out because they are flying off the shelves, or are they sold out because Nintendo restricted initial supply to give the appearance of a sell out and gain marketing leverage. The article states 400,000 units were sold launch week, but that is less than 10% of the 5.5 million units Nintendo has targeted for sale by March 2013. Having a launch date during one of the busiest retail weeks of the year and not even shipping 10% of your projected total units seems silly to me, unless the idea was to create scarcity and drive up demand and hype around an otherwise mildly received product launch.

Ha, I was in Target today and they had two standards and one deluxe. It's not sold out.

Bingo. It's sold out everywhere! It's incredibly popular, and your kids will hate you because all their friends will have one, so you better start calling stores and rushing down there immediately to pick one up!

Marketing 101. Fake it til you make it.

Oh, in all my complaining I forgot to mention something small Nintendo did that deserves major kudos.

There's an HDMI cable in the box for both the white and black bundles. There's no other A/V connector, but it's compatible with the old Wii A/V cables. The one they included isn't just a penny-cable black cord, either, it has a nice little custom molded Nintendo logo on it.



Not that this is super expensive for them to do or for me to handle on my own, but you don't get a damned HDMI cable when you buy a 360 or a PS3.

Who cares about the cable? Check out that bitchin' giraffe.

Not pictured : HDMI port on Giraffe. You don't want to know where, why do you think he looks so frightened?

I wish that photo was taken in my house. Alas, I have no bitchin' giraffes lurking about, nervously waiting for their turn to be sodomized by an HDMI cable.

The Best Buy in my area has them as well. I haven't checked Target, but I'll look next time I'm there.

I'm glad they spent money on custom badging and not making it so you could transition between menus without a motherfucking load screen.

Reminded me of:

I finally got to play with one at a gathering of grad students. We fired up Nintendoland, I think. We had a great time playing 4 players at a time. First the ghost game, then the "Chase Mario" game, then the picking up marbles game. Lots of yelling, and quick games that then led to switching controllers around and getting another round going.

It reminded me of when I first got the Wii and the family all had a great time that holiday playing Wii Sports. Then we never did it again.

Still not buying a WiiU.

Is this where we sign up for Adreebuse for having bought one of these?

According to GI.biz, 90% of the hardware sold during the launch weekend in the UK were Deluxe units.

There are also some software charts there, but they're not too reliable since it only counts November 25th to December 1st, and the Wii U launched on the 30th in Europe.

Was in a Target today. Two regular and one deluxe on the shelf. I'm going to stop reporting this, as it seems to just be a plain fact that if you want one of these things you can just walk into a store and buy it. Reggie is a LIAR.

That chart of console prices makes a point but OTOH with the proliferation of tablets (and smart phones), it's a different gamer realm than when the original Wii launched in 2006. Now there is an abundance of cheap / free games for those tablets and while the markets do not map perfectly together, it does launch a giant question on why one should drop hundreds of dollars plus hundreds more (for games and accessories to enable more players)…

…console market has stagnated, so maybe this is a window where Nintendo strikes gold again. But I would not wager on it.

If you load it up now you might be able to play by this time next week.

If it doesn't hard lock.

Oh, no - launching the console now makes perfect sense. The OS should be fully beta-tested by the time Pikmin 3 is out!

Also, Devolution works.

Doing what Nintendon't.

That's brilliant. Though I'm certain that Nintendo plans to offer GameCube games for download in the near future, for $10-15 each.

Only if Nintendo gets its shit together and manages to establish a digital platform that is worth a damn. I'm not expecting that to happen.

New Pikmin 3 footage. New enemies and environments look interesting - more dynamic than the previous games. Visually, it looks much less like a Wii game than it did at E3.

Now, if only they'd launched with this...

Supposedly the game is finished and has been for a while, but they're holding it back to fill in the sizeable gaps in the release schedule.

Over a million people bought Pikmin and Pikmin 2. Seems like it should have been a launch title, but I guess Nintendo would rather have a bump along the way than a steep cliff that bottoms out through a dead release calendar. They also have Lego City Undercover and Rayman Legends dropping in Q1 2013.

That said, I'm not sure I can fault them too much since launch lineups haven't exactly been spectacular for the last round of consoles.

Yay, Pikmin 3! It looks so pretty. I get the feeling that they're going to hold it off to be 2013's big holiday title, and I sure hope they use that time to polish that bitch up even more.

Another thing I've noticed: the system doesn't have a port for digital optical audio. Bad news for me as the way my 'theater' is set up, I wouldn't be able to use surround sound with the HDMI cable. That's a real downer. I'm not planning on buying a new surround system anytime soon, and mine doesn't do video pass-through. Oh well. Sucks to be U! (c what i did thar?)

Does your TV do optical out? I know there are some who run HDMI to their TV and let it push the audio back out...

Wouldn't be surround, though, so it's something of a moot point.

And all this time I had no idea that TVs just push 2-channel through the optical out for connected devices. Everything I know is a lie.

I don't think that's universally true. My LG set can be made to push AC3 through the optical out. Granted they cleverly hid that in the service menu, but it works if you know how to turn it on.

So last night I finally sat down with the wife and played a bit of Nintendoland beyond the end of the tutorial. For the life of me, I cannot understand why they'd hold off the availability of the "please-just-start-a-game-now" menu until near the end of a 20 minute unskippable tutorial process. You insult us all, Nintendo.

That said, we had a decent amount of fun playing the Pikmin one and a little less fun with the Mario Chase one (not as much fun with just two people, especially if one is an advanced player and the other isn't). I was surprised to find that there were only a handful of party games on there. It's an absolute ripoff for anyone who bought the gimp console and paid $60 retail for it.

I received the console (and a couple games) as a gift yesterday. Because I've been a Nintendo fan since the 80s, and enjoyed my last seven years with the Wii (more than got my money's worth out of it), I was cautiously optimistic about the WiiU.

I'm returning the console tomorrow. I absolutely loathe the pad controller. I could write three pages about all the problems I've had with it in the last 24 hours (it remains completely functional, it's the design and implementation I take issue with), but suffice to say, this fucker isn't going to work for me at all.

I've never been so frustrated with a control scheme in my life.