Wii U surprises and disappointments

[famousringo]

Got my Wii U this past weekend. There were a few pleasant surprises, and more disappointments. I'm sure this has been done a thousand times already, but here are mine.

Surprises:

MiiVerse is actually pretty cool.

I'm not much of one for social networks, and I was skeptical that online-fumbling Nintendo could create one I found engaging, but they actually succeeded. I can see myself spending some time here. And Nintendo figured out surprisingly quickly that children need to be protected from d21lewis.

Use of sound on the gamepad is amazing.

I just love the way sound on the gamepad is utilized. Whether it's menu music harmonizing between gamepad and TV, or the way Batman hears electronic voices from one set of speakers and nearby voices with another, it's just great stuff.

The system is pretty quiet.

I detest ambient noise, and I was worried extra cooling might make the Wii U noisy, but fan noise seems about the same as the Wii, and disc noise seems even quieter. Good work Nintendo

Touchscreen is great for menu navigation.

Both in system and in game, if you're navigating a big menu, doing it on a touchscreen is just better than twiddling a d-pad.

And now for the disappointments:

But the Touchscreen isn't that great.

It's resistive, which means it sucks  for thumbs, which is what you're going to be using on it 90% of the time. I've already had plenty of problems with touch accuracy while scrolling or hitting buttons. Would have been so much better with a capacitive screen.

Gamepad connection issues.

When we heard about the gamepad, we all thought it would be awesome to play our game console in any room of the house. Upstairs, downstairs, in bed, on the toilet. Well, I've been lucky if it even works in the same room as the device. Granted, my household is a carnival of EM interference, with two wireless routers, almost twenty wireless devices, and an amateur radio enthusiast. At one point, for no obvious reason, the gamepad connection became so unstable that even sitting 2m from the console was a dodgy prospect. After trying every kind of voodoo the internet thought to suggest, I asked my roommate to power down all of his electronics and the connection stabilized. He powered them all back up, one by one, and the connection stayed stable. It's been well behaved since, but I still have no idea what was behind the problem.

Wii transfer is dodgy.

It's a simple gazillion-step process to migrate your Wii data over to your new Wii U. Maybe more if you only have one wiimote. It did eventually work, but not before failing in the middle of the transfer and crashing my Wii U so hard I had to pull the power on it. Any time you wanna figure out these unified online account things, Nintendo...

TVii is worthless to me.

I'm a cable cutter. TV listings are useless to me, because I watch what I want, when I want. Using the gamepad as a universal remote is a clever idea, but it will only try to control the TV and a cable box. I have no cable box and I use exactly one button on my TV remote: The power button. The gamepad can't control my sound bar, so I have no audio controls. It can't control my tuner, so I have no input controls. And it can't control my Apple TV, so I have no way to change the channel. As you may have guessed, I have a horde of remotes in my setup that I was hoping I might replace with one gamepad. Nope.

Wiimote is second class.

The wiimote is clearly an afterthought at this point. Not only in games, but even the system menu barely works at all with it. Go into a menu anywhere, and the pointer stops doing anything useful. You can't even use it for Netflix. Which sucks, because watching TV with a remote control the size of a dinner plate isn't my idea of relaxing. My only hope is that...

System software feels unfinished.

Nintendo has said so itself. Load times are huge. Handy things like the clock are hard to find. Virtual Console is yet to arrive, and it sounds like it may not include titles we've already seen on previous VCs. Maybe they'll figure out a way to let me navigate the system with a wiimote, because it just feels more natural sometimes.

That's it for now. Feel free to chime in with your own surprises and disappointments, or to tell me why mine are retarded.