Wii Play, U Suck

The Wii U is out of the box... for two weeks now in the US and since Friday here in Europe. Not much excitement on my front though. And I probably won't get a Wii U in the near future and it most likely will depend on the Wii U Zelda game, which will arise 2014 or whatever...

But it wouldn't be the first time, that I skipped over a Nintendo console. I didn't get the GameCube until late 2005, at the time the most interesting thing about the Wind Waker was the Master Quest disc bundled with it. And the GameCube didn't feel like an attractive gaming system until I had the chance to test a demo of Twilight Princess at the Games Convention 2005 in Leipzig. That's what changed my mind about the system and made me get a Cube together with all the Zelda stuff for it.

But as cliched as it may sounds, right now the GameCube looks and feels like a much better gaming system than the Wii U ever will be. Why? The GameCube was solely about the games! You insert a disc, you play, no big fluff. The Wii U? You get Miiverse, TViii (lol) and lots of more junk that doesn't have to do anything with gaming. It's all bloated and all of it is not going to matter in ten years. Nintendo's biggest strength used to be making timeless systems and games. I can still put some batteries into my old GameBoy and play Link's Awakening on it. And when I visit home, where all my pre Wii/DS era video game stuff is at, I really enjoy bringing out my GameCube and play the Zelda CE for example. That stuff is timeless. Well, maybe except for the Scart cables and the batteries, but otherwise pretty timeless. The Wii U in ten years? All the Miiverse, TVii, Wii-ever crap won't matter, if they still work at the time that is. Only the games matter then. In fact for most people that's already the case. Or is there actually someone, who's excited about Miiverse? Or buys a Wii U to watch TViiii? (At least in Germany we won't get TViii, it's not important.) So, as always with a Nintendo console, it's the games that will ultimately matter. But what can we expect from Wii U games?

Will we get timeless games that you even can enjoy in ten or twenty years? Or will we get gimmicky Wii U GamePad games?

The biggest gimmick about the GameCube was the GameBoy Advance connection, which is a tad similar to the whole Wii U Gamepad stuff. I didn't like the GBA connection. The Tingle Tuner was an aweful feature and playing Four Swords Adventures with the GBA can gave you headaches, because you had to constantly refocus your eyes between the big screen and the GBA screen... sadly Zelda had to be guinea pig for this gimmick, while all other big Nintendo titles stayed safe from it.

And Zelda remained to be the primary guinea pig for Nintendo's new hardware features. Zelda was THE game to make the most out of the features of the Nintendo DS and Wii, may it be the touchscreen controls or the Wiimote swinging. However, with the Wii and the Nintendo DS the innovative controls helped to provide a more natural and intuitive gaming experience. Especially playing Zelda Skyward Sword with the Wiimote and Nunchuk felt great (it was all the "please slice in the right direction"-puzzles that ruined the experience).

Now, with the Wii U we got innovation just for innovations's sake. With no true advantages more than "you can now play Mario while your girlfriend watches Grey's Anatomy". The console comes with this expansive GamePad and now all big Nintendo games simply have to use it to give the consumer the feeling that he or she didn't buy the pad for no good reason. And of course Zelda will be up front to be the guinea pig again. They won't try to improve what they've started with Skyward Sword and labeled as the best possible Zelda experience. They'll scrap it and do something with the GamePad instead, Aonuma already confirmed that. And I'm really skeptical about that.

One more thing I don't like about the Wii U is the so called "backwards compatibility". With previous systems it was very simple. I put my GameCube discs into my Wii and they run. I put my GB games into my GBA and they run. I put my GBA games into my Nintendo DS Lite and they run. I put my Nintendo DS games into my 3DS and they run. All nice and simple. With the Wii U? In order to play Wii games and use transferred download titles you have to boot up the old Wii interface. Seriously? Imagine you install Windows 7 on your new fancy computer, but in order to play your favorite PC games you'd had to boot up Windows XP again. That would be aweful! No one would like to do that. But with the Wii U and Wii games that's what it is. And there's no good excuse for this.

Instead of focusing on useless crap like Miiverse and TVii they should have focused on these issues. People may have large Wii libraries and naturally they want to carry over their Wii games to the Wii U without them being treated as some foreign beings. And they want to keep using their virtual game libraries without any downsides. If I buy a game like The Legend of Zelda digitally I should be able to download and play it on all future systems. I shouldn't have to boot a different OS in order to play it or even pay for it again, just because it's now in HD, has some 3D effects or save states...

Whatever the Wii U will bring, I just hope that Nintendo returns to focus on what matters most: not gimmicky hardware, not gimmicky features, but the games.

2013 Zelda Calendar

Did you know that there's an official Zelda calendar licensed by Nintendo? I didn't. Immediatly after I learned about it I bought one on Amazon:

As you can see on the back of the calendar, it spans rather typical art from the last five retail games, Twilight Princess, Phantom Hourglass, Spirit Tracks, Ocarina of Time 3D and Skyward Sword. Usually the different cover arts. So, while the quality is very nice and shiny, it's overall nothing special and a little bit boring.

But I like that the calendar has one additional page at the beginning that spans the months September til December 2012, which means I can already use it. Which is quite nice.

Reasons to buy a Wii U at Launch

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3DS Virtual Console: Zelda II

Zelda II - The Adventure of Link is now available on the European eShop for all non-ambassadors. I think we are the first to get this and my inner Zelda collector forces me to buy this, so let's take a look.

Zelda II will probably be THE game profiting from the restore point feature. Next to Super Mario Land. Well, with Super Mario Land a part of the game's experience was to fail and start over, otherwise it's a terribly short game. So, the restore points make this game a little bit too easy maybe. Zelda II on the other hand is just brutal and unforgiving, being able to save right before a boss makes this game so much more less frustrating and enjoyable. I'd wish the Wii version had this when I replayed the game last year for the anniversary.

But of course the new restore point feature is probably part of the reason why I had to pay for this game yet again, even though my Club Nintendo account (which is linked to the eShop) clearly tells Nintendo that I already bought the game for the Virtual Console on the Wii (and the NES Classics version for the GBA). That Nintendo is charging you again for the same game, just because the emulator "improved", is ridiculous. Emulators on the PC offer me ten quick saves, screenshot tools and many more while being completely free. Of course you shouldn't download any illegal ROMs, but they are very easy to find. And Nintendo is competing with that. If it wasn't for my inner collector, I would never buy any Virtual Console games. Playing the games on the PC is just much better and completely free.

Nintendo has to improve their Virtual Console service. And they should start with a unified account based library. Oh, wait, we already got that in Europe, but Nintendo decided to ignore it...


PS: I'll save this one for the next big replay session. Together with Zelda I. I've already beaten the VC version of Link's Awakening though, did it while writing the guides for ZeldaEurope.

Bigger and Better Rumors

You've heard the rumors.

Overall it reads exactly as the stuff Nintendo said about Skyward Sword. It was said to be the biggest Zelda game and Nintendo's biggest project yet with a hundred people working on it. It was supposed to be revolutionary with its controls. It got tons of orchestrated music. It even had a Faron Woods dungeon demo, where the entire woods would act as a dungeon. Just take some interviews about Skyward Sword, replace Wii MotionPlus with the new GamePad, add some talk about detailed HD visuals, dodge all specific details and what you get is this pile of rumors above. Everyone can come up with that.

I had an "inside source" once. No one big, but informative. He told me all about the Four Swords Anniversary Edition, before anything was known, primarily because I cared a lot about the game and he wanted to me to know. But I had to promise him not to leak anything (which is why I made some spot on speculation posts instead), because he feared for his job, and he was very specific on how the singleplayer worked and what the new levels offered. So, if you go out and leak some information, why not tell us how they use the Upad in the game exactly? Or what's the hardware feature that they included for Zelda. It just tells you how glorious and large everything will be, but it lacks any details.

And I do not like the idea of focusing on the Wii U Gamepad. Of course it's the new toy and it would look bad, if one of the main titles doesn't use it. But with Skyward Sword they acted like the Wiimote and Nunchuk is THE way to play Zelda. And frankly they were right. The controls felt great, you got sword and shield in your own hands, everything was intuitive. It was the forced way of how you used the controls in the game that no one liked. All those terrible "slice in the right direction"-puzzles. If you use the controls in more natural sword fights, it could be really awesome. Only a few fights in Skyward Sword felt truly natural. I enjoyed battling Demise, but that was the last fight in the game. Most of the other fights just felt wrong, including long time enemies like Stalfos or Deku Babas. Now imagine fighting one of the Darknuts in Twilight Princess with the new controls - that could be fun! But instead of focusing how to make it right, they throw it all away and just focus on the newest gimmicky toy. Actually I would fully believe that! Because that's seems to be the new Nintendo way... sadly. So, I wouldn't wonder, if large parts of these rumors turn out to be true.

But I can't think of any fun or natural way to use the Upad to play Zelda. 2D Zelda maybe, but not a 3D title. Especially if they want you to hold the pad in front of the TV screen all the time. Like in the Zelda Nintendoland minigame, Battle Quest. I can play Skyward Sword all day long only using my wrists. But stiffly holding that pad in front of me? No way.

What I like is the ambitious part. Zelda hasn't been ambitious in a long time. With every new game they have a new main gimmick, some new visual style and that's all "good enough". For example it's always the same number of dungeons, some have more, some has less, but no other Zelda game has surpassed A Link to the Past yet in number and size of dungeons and that was the third of 16 games! What's up with that? But whenever Nintendo tried to increase the scope, it became a problem of emptiness. Hyrule Field in Twilight Princess is large but empty. Which is why they preferred to make more "dense" areas in Skyward Sword. But now they suddenly have the resources to make everything bigger? I sure hope so.

One Million Rupees

So, I've finished this game recently:

New Super Mario Bros. 2 - a big pile of recycled content covered with a coin collecting gimmick. It's definitely not the first time that Nintendo recycled the content of one game to make another. But it's the first time that such a follow-up lacks any ambition. For Majora's Mask they reused pretty much everything from Ocarina of Time, even the characters. But the game was so full with great new ideas, interesting gameplay mechanics, dense atmosphere and amazing new worlds that only few people cared about the recycling. In case of New SMB2 it all just feels like an expansion pack for New Super Mario Bros. Wii.

They tried to hide this with the new main gimmick of collecting as many coins as possible. While this gives you tons of lives, it doesn't add anything else. There's a main counter for coins, but nothing to unlock except for a new title screens that gets unlocked by collecting one million coins. Nintendo actually advertises the game by challenging you to collect one million coins...

So, I've fully completed the whole game (five sparkling stars) and guess how many coins I've collected... probably close to the million, huh? ... Actually it's just around 50.000 - 1/20 of the main goal. What teh eff, Nintendo?

Well, I could start playing Coin Rush mode and grinding coins everywhere, but for what really? So, that the title screen changes? But even if I would go through the effort, there's actually another one for 10 million. That's just too much and collecting coins is not much fun at all.

How could Nintendo screw this up so badly? This is weird, because they made a game with similar mechanics, which got the coin collecting concept entirely right - The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Anniversary Edition. This little free gem was all about collecting as many Rupees as possible. There's also a main counter for Rupees and you unlock harder levels by collecting more Rupees. You need 5.000 Rupees in a normal stage to get the best key and you need to collect 30.000 Rupees alltogether to unlock the Hero's Trial.

30.000 Rupees are not hard to get, you might even get them at once in the 12 floor version of Vaati's Palace. Still you might continue to play, because collecting Rupees in this game is fun and there are many different random levels. You will turn every rock, cut every piece of grass and fight with your buddies over all the treasure chests just to get those precious Rupees!

Right now I have collected a total of 410.000 Rupees. It's the entire opposite of New Super Mario Bros. 2! And instead of collecting one million coins in New SMB2 I'll challenge Zelda fans to collect one million Rupees in Four Swords instead. Probably the better waste of time.


UPDATE:
To encourage you to actually reach the million coins Nintendo of Europe gives away prizes. So, I thought, I'd give it a try. A Mario fan package is definitely more interesting than just a different title screen. Reaching the million by just playing is of course nearly impossible or you'd have to waste tons of time. So, you have to use some tricky farming methods to win as many coins as fast as possible. I started with the dual Goomba pipes in 2-4, but check this out. Extremely easy way to reach the 30.000 cap in Coin Rush mode. Got the million within two hours...

Hyrule Historia NA Release

I'm SO getting this!

Source: NintendoEverything