To bring a breath of fresh air to everyone worrying the heck about the quality of the ports, here's a report of "Assassin's Creed III" on WiiU. According to 1up, it fares quite well. Not a sign of a bad port in any way.
http://www.1up.com/do/blogEntry?bId=9115585
By Jeremy Parish Nov 18, 2012 8:47PM PST I was taken aback by the reaction to my early impressions of Mass Effect 3: Special Edition. What I wrote was penned with a mindset of, "This has some issues but isn't the worst thing ever." Somehow, though, the Internet parsed it as, "This is a crime against human existence, and EA and Bioware are the most horrible creatures in the history of the world." Fortunately, I don't expect history to repeat itself here: Assassin's Creed III's Wii U port doesn't seem to bear the troubles that affect Mass Effect 3. Admittedly, it didn't make a good first impression -- the opening cutscene lacked sound when I first played it -- but that seems to have been resolved with the patch that went live last night once Nintendo flipped the switch on the Nintendo Network. Since then, it's been a pretty solid and stable port. ACIII runs in three different modes: Normal, optimized for GamePad, or GamePad-only. However you play it, the visuals look on par with the PlayStation 3 version of the game, and the game doesn't demonstrate appreciable slowdown or stuttering even when you're being pursued by a crowd of Redcoats through a large, open area. I haven't noticed any glitching that hasn't been reported on other platforms, and the game's annoyances -- like the inexplicable decision to make the simple act of switching weapons require loading into a separate screen -- are features that plague the game regardless of the system it runs on. Actually, this serves as the basis for one of ACIII's bigger disappointments on Wii U: Not that the game plays worse on the new hardware, but rather than it doesn't play any better. I was really hoping the GamePad-optimized format would fix the menu-selection design flaw by allowing you to make weapon and item selections on the GamePad without switching away from the active visuals, but that turns out not to be the case. Instead, the game's entire HUD moves to GamePad to leave the action clutter-free until you use these menus, at which point both screens show duplicate icon selections against a blank black background. Well, not quite duplicate: For some reason the GamePad menus aren't laid out the way they are on the main screen, which makes navigating them while looking at the smaller screen is confusing (since your controller toggles through them according to its main screen layout). It's a minor thing, but a small letdown regardless. They could have improved the game experience considerably with this one tweak. The game's other Wii U-specific problem doesn't have anything to do with the game itself, but rather with the layout of the GamePad. We've mentioned this elsewhere in our coverage: The way the face buttons, triggers, and analog sticks sit in relationship to one another forces players to relearn how to control this kind of game since our hands have been trained to expect interface elements to be arranged differently. On the plus side, playing ACIII on the GamePad's smaller screen really makes me appreciate how compromised and limited Liberation turned out to be. It seemed like a perfectly legit portable Assassin's Creed until I was able to play a real console sequel in a portable format. Now, I see just how many corners had to be cut. Not that it's fair to compare a console game streaming to a handheld tablet to a game running on limited portable hardware, of course; I'm simply making an observation. But the important takeaway here is that Wii U delivers an Assassin's Creed III experience on par with other consoles, being neither significantly better or worse. If you're inclined to check it out and haven't picked it up for another console yet, you may as well play it here.Assassin's Creed III Fares Well on Wii U
Wii U provides a viable format for Ubisoft's latest historical killing spree.
