second day of wii u-related impressions.
so the day started over at pikmin 3. i spent a while doing the find mii stuff on my 3ds so i wouldn't be spoiled by the guy taking forever on the demo. i spent about 12 minutes at the demo. 7 for the main game stuff and 5 for a boss battle. i haven't played pikmin npc, but i picked up the controls and it was like second nature. point the controller at the screen, push a to call pikmin. push b to throw them. use the z button to switch between types (this one was explained to me).
i haven't played pikmin 2 in eight years, but i think there's a somewhat new thing that each day or area is ranked on how much pokos you can make back at your ship. by the end of the demo, the guy said i had gotten pretty far, so at 955 pokos, i probably did reasonably well. you can get a silver and a gold medal for the day/area (i forgot to ask). the boss fight was using the rock pikmin to break open the shell and the red pikmin to murder the thing. all-in-all, it's pikmin all right. it looks very nice in person, but it was also very obviously a wii game at some point. it's not a graphical showcase, but it retains its charm pretty well.
i checked out zombi u, more specifically, the part that was once killer freaks. i took control of the gamepad and placed zombies around the map. the guy playing the fps game on the cc pro went around trying to capture the flag while i was also using a zombie to capture the flag and using zombies to kill him. you can spend 3 or 4 points to create generic zombies that will hunt out the duder, and 10 points to create a zombie made to capture the flag/zone. you can also spend 12 points to create a superfast zombie. your points as the gamepad guy increase steadily over time. in the end, i won this segment, and then i watched someone play the single-player game.
aside from some weird stuff with the zombies vanishing in a puff of smoke sometimes, the single player was pretty tense, especially with the stakes being that one bite kills you. there are ways around it- you can stab a zombie with a syringe to kill it, or push it back and then aim carefully at the head. i think the longest runtime i saw someone do was about 13 minutes. it looks more like a survival horror game than a traditional first-person shooter. sure is ugly though.
also, the triggers on the back are definitely not analog. or if they are, they're barely analog. this is true of the gamepad and the cc pro. i made sure to double check before i left.
after zombi u i checked out project p-100 it's kinda got the feel of viewtiful joe but in 3d. you use the gamepad to draw a circle around civilians and add them to your gang. i didn't like this because there's no reference point, really. you also use the gamepad to draw up and up-and-right to draw a sword and gun respectively. if you use either one of those you can use it against enemies, but it depletes battery power. battery power can be rebuilt by mashing the x button which makes all the civilians rush the baddies and attack like pikmin. you can also defend and evade attacks as a group.
there was a part where you could go inside a building to solve a puzzle. the game then moved to the gamepad screen. i think everything involving the gamepad screen was pretty dumb and didn't need to happen. for instance, switching between types of civilian-weapons could have been done by pushing a shoulder button or even clicking an analog stick.
assassin's creed iii was also in the ubisoft booth, but it was only the mulitplayer. this was another capture the flag type thing. if you were in an area capturing and the other team showed up, you could only stun them. if another team showed up in your area, you could murder them. i had a couple of kills myself, although i took down many civilians on accident (assuming they were actually the other team). one guy did pretty well in stunning two of us, laying down a smoke bomb, and nearly vanishing before another guy from our team killed him. i liked the multiplayer.
the only single player game being played was one kiosk at the nintendo booth. and this was being manned by a ubisoft employee only so no one else could play. according to the guy at the booth, the wii u version is 720p, 30fps, and that is the same across all consoles. the game is the same across all consoles (aside from the gamepad stuff on the wii u), and it looks the same across all consoles. the single-player itself looks pretty nice. i jumped in with the second assassin's creed and was really unsure about the change in scenery, but after today, i'm more interested in seeing how it turns out. i thought it was cool how main character man escaped up a ship's sails, bouncing up the ropes to get there. i was worried that setting this new game in relatively new places like 100 year-old boston and new york would make for few rooftops and platforming to be done, but that appears not to be the case (mostly). i'll keep an eye on this as well.