• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

Wii U Community Thread

Status
Not open for further replies.

TheChits

Member
Well, now people are saying that the Wii U will have no games that surpass PS3 first-party games graphically, the "vast majority" of Wii games looked worse than average Gamecube games, and that nothing on the Wii looked better than previous generation games.

It's a real "quality" discussion going on in there right now.

I thought I could handle it but the stupidity is off the charts so I just left.
That thread is hilarious
 
Okay guys, I've just arrived home after a Wii U demonstration in Germany.
Some initial impressions:

Hardware:

- the Wii U Gamepad is extremely light and feels great. Analog sticks are instantly comfortable if you are used to play with Nintendo controllers. The buttons feel clicky and responsive and are easy and comfortable to reach even without looking at the controller. L+R and LZ+LR are also perfect to reach and feel good but there are definitely no analog triggers on the back. All in all the Gamepad is a joy to play with.
More importantly, the screen is vivid and responsive and both 3D and 2D games looked great on it. The colors are really bright, feels very HD, even if it isn't. I own both a Vita and an iPad 3 and the screen still looked modern and great.

- the Pro Controller feels great, too. For me it was easy to play with the left sticks and the right buttons regardless of the uncommon placement.

- the console itself looks good, to me all materials look like it's a bit higher in quality than Wii. But maybe because all was brand new :)


Software:

- Pikmin 3. The moment you watch it on a big HD TV, you're sold. While you can see it's origin, it definitely does not look like an upscaled Wii game. There are a lot of cool small visual touches I haven't noticed in the videos, like reflections on the enviroment and on the characters and enemies. I played it with Wii Remote + Nunchuck and I really like the controls that way.

- New SMB U. It's what you expect. You can play single player on the Gamepad and use a button to do the spin attack, which I really like. Multiplayer was fun but placing blocks with the Gamepad was dull compared to actually playing the game. It's more a father-son-thing. Apart from that, it looks perfectly anti-aliased, very nice parallax scrolling and background details and just plays as you would expect from a Mario game.

- Batman. The visuals do look worse than PS3. Horrible texture pop in and framerate issues. When using the boomerang thing, somehow the graphics looked more detailed on the gamepad than on the TV. The gamepad ideas looked a bit tacked-on. Batman's new suit is very shiny.

- ZombiU. It's very slow and scary and feels great. It does use the gamepad in very clever ways and you're really losing control of what's going on around you as soon as you have to look in your backpack, and you're nervous and scared. Even within a crowd. Controls felt really good to me. Visuals are on par with better-than-average PS3/360 games with some nice lighting effects but nothing extraordinary. The game looked pretty polished to me. Multiplayer was fun, too, but I didn't spend too much time on it.

- Nintendoland. I didn't care about it after E3. I played the Ninja minigame and thought "nice. but boring.". I played the Animal Crossing game and it was fun, so I played it again three times, then I wanted to play something else. That was the Luigi's Mansion minigame.
Honestly, this is my new system seller. I played the minigame for one hour continuously with the same four people. The person who finally "killed" the ghost got rewarded in getting the gamepad. It is perfectly balanced, you have to communicate all them time and there was not a single match that was boring. It's that good. Best multiplayer session I've had in a very, very long time. We only stopped playing, because Nintendo forced us to.



Bonus impressions:

- New Super Mario Bros 2 for 3DS: It's fun, and I found it relatively demanding compared to it's predecessors because you're constantly trying to get more coins and you're doing more risky stuff. The 3D effect was strange (and different to the 3DS eshop trailer). In 2D mode, the background was sharp and clear. In 3D mode, the background was blurry and much further away.

- Castlevania: I only played it for 5 minutes, visuals look great for 3DS but the framerate was horrible. I can't comment on gameplay as I haven't played the old games.

- Luigi's Mansion: Very polished and full of charm. The map I played, a clock tower, had something like 6 levels and looked very big. The controls are better now than E3 build 2011 as slight movement of the gyros already helps to change the angle of the cleaner and the 3D is a bit more subtle and doesn't get distorted that fast. I still hope for support of the second circle pad.


All in all I came away much more impressed than after E3. Personally, the Wii U is a must buy as long as it is around 299$. I'm looking forward to play Nintendoland now, and I would buy Mario, Pikmin 3 and ZombiU, as long as there is enough content. I didn't play Project P-100 because I got stuck with Luigi's Ghost House, but it looked fun and was graphically maybe the most impressive game (great shading).
If you have any questions, I'm happy to answer.

We were looking at the videos. The zombies actually sped up as you looked in your backpack or had to do something with the Gamepad. Then they would slow down when you went out of that mode back to real time. Was really funny hehe
 

Donnie

Member
yeah that is another issue. 55nm would be supper cheap at this point and is what the r700 is based on. If they went with 40nm, that still would be cheap and got rid of the rumor r700 gpu core for the Evergreen. It would be a lot better.

What you do think is the max tdp that could fit in the wiiu? I have been thinking some where in the 25-40w range for the gpu. Maybe a downclock 5570 would be very nice but i dont see why they would start at r700 and jump into a new design. i havent seen any rumor to match that. Plus wiiu is dx10.1 not 11 like this card.

Seems like they made changes to r700, maybe drop it to 40nm or lower and added edram. But I agree evergreen[r800] would be a lot better.
well that is some very good news. I ask about it over there because everyone been talking a lot lower than this. thanks for the info.

I only mentioned the 5570 as an examples of a 40nm GPU with a performance near to the number being referred to. Don't get to hung up on the WiiU GPU actually being any specific retail GPU because it won't be. It started out based on R700 because that was the newest GPU available when development began. But around 3 years later it could be very different (HD5000 and HD6000 are arguably just based on R700 afterall), and from what we're hearing lately (GPGPU ect) it is.

We also have no confirmation that WiiU is only DX10.1 level. In fact again latest rumors suggest otherwise.

I'd say something around 40 watts for the GPU is reasonable. But not of your comparing it to a entire graphics card with RAM ect. In that case 50+ watts is reasonable IMO.
 

USC-fan

Banned
Going all the way back to the first WUST, wsippel talked about the GPU being "an underclocked 4830". I heard similar much later after he said that. Based on that info the early dev kit GPU came in at approx. 576 GFLOPs. And that was while using (as pointed out by Donnie) a 55nm part. I'm of the belief the final will be 32nm which greatly help the TDP, though I also believe that case can handle more than what some others believe.

What you think the the power will be with this case?

4830[110tdp at 55nm] card even underclocked and moved to 40nm would still be at 65-80w. 32nm would be even better but that hard to believe since most rumors point to 55-40nm.


I only mentioned the 5570 as an examples of a 40nm GPU with a performance near to the number being referred to. Don't get to hung up on the WiiU GPU actually being any specific retail GPU because it won't be. It started out based on R700 because that was the newest GPU available when development began. But around 3 years later it could be very different (HD5000 and HD6000 are arguably just based on R700 afterall), and from what we're hearing lately (GPGPU ect) it is.

We also have no confirmation that WiiU is only DX10.1 level. In fact again latest rumors suggest otherwise.

I'd say something around 40 watts for the GPU is reasonable. But not of your comparing it to a entire graphics card with RAM ect. In that case 50+ watts is reasonable IMO.
Even if you remove the ram from the gpu tdp you still have edram and ram in the console. So it really a wash. I dont see why they wouldnt move to a new design sooner but maybe they did. The r700 has been around for over 4 years. It not like they havent had time to upgrade.

Well the gpgpu started with r700. Not sure that really tells us anything. Going by the released dev specs. They match perfectly with r700 feature set not evergreen.
 

AzaK

Member
I've just listened to the latest GiantBomb podcast and two things they said about Wii U concerned me. Can anyone who's used it talk about them?

1) That the screen definitely feels like a big DS screen and not at all as responsive as an iPhone for instance.

2) That you can notice the video compression on the gamepad. Especially in the blacks.
 
I've just listened to the latest GiantBomb podcast and two things they said about Wii U concerned me. Can anyone who's used it talk about them?

1) That the screen definitely feels like a big DS screen and not at all as responsive as an iPhone for instance.

2) That you can notice the video compression on the gamepad. Especially in the blacks.

Well...of course it's not as responsive as an iPhone screen. It's resistive, what did they expect? Did they use the stylus?
 

AzaK

Member
Well...of course it's not as responsive as an iPhone screen. It's resistive, what did they expect? Did they use the stylus?

No and although they mentioned that obviously with the stylus it'd be better they also rightfully mentioned that we won't be playing games like Zombi U with a stylus in our hands. I also got the impression that was was quite bad and in fact I think Patrick Klepek called it "rubbish". I felt like it was a pretty damning evaluation.

I should also add that they experienced a LOT of calibration issues with the gyro's in the controller to the point of calling it "Broken".

I'm just interested to hear other experiences with the thing, although the compression/streaming artifacts do concern me.
 

USC-fan

Banned
I've just listened to the latest GiantBomb podcast and two things they said about Wii U concerned me. Can anyone who's used it talk about them?

1) That the screen definitely feels like a big DS screen and not at all as responsive as an iPhone for instance.

2) That you can notice the video compression on the gamepad. Especially in the blacks.

Is this the one of the ones from e3? I been trying to catch up but they are like 3 hours long and all over the place.

Thanks
 

Effect

Member
About Miyamoto's quote regarding competition not being able to balance power with costs:

I think Miyamoto is underestimating Microsoft's willingness to lose money on each console sold. I see MS putting out a powerful system that isn't priced significantly higher than Wii U's price. And they'll do it specifically to kill the whole "Price vs power" argument that Nintendo keeps using. I expect Microsoft to use a lot of dirty tactics to derail the Wii U.

Microsoft is not Sony. They are willing to lose money to grab market share. They did it with Xbox 1. They did it with Xbox 360.

Sony will have a tough time balancing power with costs. Sony doesn't have that wiggle room with money. But it's not as big of an issue for MS.

If the next Xbox is pushing Windows 8 integration as hard as we expect then they'll do everything they can to make sure it's the dominate system. It's not just about gaming anymore for Microsoft. I expect Microsoft to come out swinging and more next year.
 

Redford

aka Cabbie
Would it not be possible for the touch screen to be flush with the bezel? I hate having a slight halo of grime around the edges I can't reach with a cloth.

Also back to my trusty Garet avy. :3
 

Gahiggidy

My aunt & uncle run a Mom & Pop store, "The Gamecube Hut", and sold 80k WiiU within minutes of opening.
Are there any pics of the back of the final console design yet? Since E3?
 
What you think the the power will be with this case?

4830[110tdp at 55nm] card even underclocked and moved to 40nm would still be at 65-80w. 32nm would be even better but that hard to believe since most rumors point to 55-40nm.

First I would say I think that case can handle ~100W. I don't remember what I thought way back when, but as of now I think 80W will be the highest TDP Nintendo will target with the GPU taking up a big majority of that. Also any rumors talking about 55-40nm were probably just guessing what was in the early dev kit and not the final GPU.

Is it okay to port-beg in here?
Because I really wish Okami HD were to show up on WiiUshop... :(

I'm going to go out on a very short and small limb to say no.

Are there any pics of the back of the final console design yet? Since E3?

I haven't seen any, but Van Owen posted a picture showing how big the power brick is (so far).
 

AzaK

Member
First I would say I think that case can handle ~100W. I don't remember what I thought way back when, but as of now I think 80W will be the highest TDP Nintendo will target with the GPU taking up a big majority of that. Also any rumors talking about 55-40nm were probably just guessing what was in the early dev kit and not the final GPU.

So what node size are we looking at, 32? I hope so because Pikmin would suck on a 45nm node.
 
So what node size are we looking at, 32? I hope so because Pikmin would suck on a 45nm node.

LOL. Well 32nm seems the most likely when looking at how Nintendo thinks. Also when looking at those Oban "coincidences", another is that Oban is a 32nm chip and is using a modified Southern Island GPU. We now have the rumor of Wii U having a GPGPU and Iwata talking about "slightly different architecture" compared to the other consoles.
 

USC-fan

Banned
First I would say I think that case can handle ~100W. I don't remember what I thought way back when, but as of now I think 80W will be the highest TDP Nintendo will target with the GPU taking up a big majority of that. Also any rumors talking about 55-40nm were probably just guessing what was in the early dev kit and not the final GPU.

Wow that is high. the xbox 360 slim is 85 watts and that console is like twice to three times as big.

v= 325.81 inches xbox 360 slim
v= 128.52 inches wiiu
 

japtor

Member
Wow that is high. the xbox 360 slim is 85 watts and that console is like twice to three times a big.

v= 325.81 inches xbox 360 slim
v= 128.52 inches wiiu
Compare to something like a laptop or tiny desktop, although they run the fans loud at full tilt. I think the 360 still uses a desktop optical drive, which would account for a huge chunk of space (like almost the size of the Wii itself).
 

USC-fan

Banned
Compare to something like a laptop or tiny desktop, although they run the fans loud at full tilt. I think the 360 still uses a desktop optical drive, which would account for a huge chunk of space (like almost the size of the Wii itself).

Yeah and you also have a hdd. Wish some one would get a good picture of the writing on the power brick. That would tell us a lot.
 

Gahiggidy

My aunt & uncle run a Mom & Pop store, "The Gamecube Hut", and sold 80k WiiU within minutes of opening.
bgassassin,

In the rush of E3 news there is this overlooked spec Nintendo released about the console:


Weight

Approximately 3.41 pounds (1.5 kg).



Is there anything we can learn from that? For reference, the original Wii is 2.65 pounds.
 
Xbox360 (and PS3) aren't efficient with their cooling either.

Not only that but they weren't designed with any sort of size, power or heat envelope in mind when they were originally built. The Wii U was clearly designed with having a small size in mind from the word go.
 
^ True. Even ignoring their current TDP they could make them smaller than what they are.

bgassassin,

In the rush of E3 news there is this overlooked spec Nintendo released about the console:


Weight

Approximately 3.41 pounds (1.5 kg).



Is there anything we can learn from that? For reference, the original Wii is 2.65 pounds.

I'd probably attribute that to the casing being bigger. Although there was that article from CES talking about being surprised at the weight which we attributed to the cooling. So it could be a little of both. Probably will need to see what the final will be as that's not much of an increase over Wii.
 

Gahiggidy

My aunt & uncle run a Mom & Pop store, "The Gamecube Hut", and sold 80k WiiU within minutes of opening.
Also, I'd like to point out that the drive in Wii U probably weighs less without the mechanism for GCN disc compatibility. In addition, they dropped the controller and MC ports. I'll bet the lion's share of that 3.41 pounds goes to the mo/bo and cooling system.
 

AzaK

Member
I'd probably attribute that to the casing being bigger. Although there was that article from CES talking about being surprised at the weight which we attributed to the cooling. So it could be a little of both. Probably will need to see what the final will be as that's not much of an increase over Wii.

I seriously can't wait until someone opens up one of these suckers.
 
Also, I'd like to point out that the drive in Wii U probably weighs less without the mechanism for GCN disc compatibility. In addition, they dropped the controller and MC ports. I'll bet the lion's share of that 3.41 pounds goes to the mo/bo and cooling system.

When I looked at Wii teardowns in the past, the drive didn't seem to have a drastic impact (minute IMO) on Wii's weight. But I do agree about the ports being dropped. Do you know the weight of the modified Wii? I'll start looking to see if I can find it.
 

japtor

Member
Also, I'd like to point out that the drive in Wii U probably weighs less without the mechanism for GCN disc compatibility. In addition, they dropped the controller and MC ports. I'll bet the lion's share of that 3.41 pounds goes to the mo/bo and cooling system.
Don't have anything to add about the weight, but in terms of space looking at a Wii teardown (original model) the optical drive seems really chunky (compared to most 12.7mm drives, which itself is the larger of the laptop sized drives), while the GC controller ports intrude a bit with the GC memory card ports taking a huge chunk of space.

I'm guessing the U has some fat heat sink(s) and perhaps a bunch of shielding/wacky arrangement for the various antennas/wireless protocols (Bluetooth, WiFi, magic controller wireless).
 

Lonely1

Unconfirmed Member
First I would say I think that case can handle ~100W. I don't remember what I thought way back when, but as of now I think 80W will be the highest TDP Nintendo will target with the GPU taking up a big majority of that. Also any rumors talking about 55-40nm were probably just guessing what was in the early dev kit and not the final GPU.
Lies, a guy on B3D said 55nm!
 

Gahiggidy

My aunt & uncle run a Mom & Pop store, "The Gamecube Hut", and sold 80k WiiU within minutes of opening.

japtor

Member
Thanks for that. Weird back plate there. Is that some kind of security alarm attachment? Also, one of those looks like it could be a power switch for the unit. Perhaps Nintendo did not want people to be able to hit the power button from the front and shut down the units?
I'm surprised you didn't mention the coaxial ports and your dream of an integrated DVR or something (unless I'm thinking of someone else).
 

Gahiggidy

My aunt & uncle run a Mom & Pop store, "The Gamecube Hut", and sold 80k WiiU within minutes of opening.
I'm surprised you didn't mention the coaxial ports and your dream of an integrated DVR or something (unless I'm thinking of someone else).


But I don't think those are coaxial ports, they seem much too shallow from the close up:

1nfcn.jpg
 
Was there any hint that there might be a symmetric multiplayer mode?




Has anybody commented yet on doing this game with less than five people? My gaming trio has three people in it*. I'm wondering if the balance would hold when it's two on one or three on one.




* four or higher person trios are hard to keep stable

zombiu: there was only the assymetric multiplayer available, no more information.

luigis ghost house: it only worked with 5 people. same with the AC minigame.

by the way, the black gamepad looks so much better...
 

Gahiggidy

My aunt & uncle run a Mom & Pop store, "The Gamecube Hut", and sold 80k WiiU within minutes of opening.
This caught my eye. Is there anything technically interesting or new that's going on in this scene?


Ul8GX.jpg
 

I should have added IMO to that.

360 is better than PS3 IMO, but both consoles are having to accommodate "standard size" optical drives though it seems to be a worse offender in the 360. 360 Slim moved the HDD to being internal. With PS3 the PSU is internal, the CPU/GPU are still discrete, they are more toward the center of the MB, it also has an internal HDD.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Top Bottom