Is the Wii U Already Dead? 403
kube00 writes "The Wii U has been struggling as of late. Even Nintendo has admitted sales haven't been as high as they would like. So what went wrong? Is this just a fluke? Will the Wii U recover and bounce back? Will the PS4 and the next 360 come out the door and leave the Wii U in the dust? GoozerNation takes a look at some of the NPD's and speculates on what it all means."
Re:I want Super Mario on my iPhone (Score:2, Informative)
So install an emulator and go for it. You might have to jailbreak, I am not sure but that sounds likely with a walled garden device.
Re:Not Even Close (Score:5, Informative)
It seems like the next generation MS and Sony consoles essentially run high-end commodity PC x86(-64) hardware with Blu-Ray drives and huge gobs of system and video memory (8GB combined GDDR5 in the case of PS4). No more Cell, powerpc, whatever have you and horrible graphics memory limitations (like 256MB, wtf).
So yeah, porting for those and PC will be relatively painless while the Wii U is stuck with Xbox 360 launch specs.
Nintendo has missed the boat.
Re:Nintendo needs to rethink its place in the worl (Score:4, Informative)
Because a lot of family-friendly and all-ages content shows up on the Wii, and as every teenager will tell you, 'all-ages' and 'family-friendly' is just code for 'games for babies'
Re:Nintendo needs to rethink its place in the worl (Score:2, Informative)
Which is why they also appeal to older, never owned a gaming console, generations looking for "That thing that lets you bowl at home..."
Re:Nintendo needs to rethink its place in the worl (Score:5, Informative)
You don't need to remind DS and Wii owners that Nintendo doesn't comprehend software. Even at a lower level, it's clear they don't understand the fairly common OS concept of hardware abstraction, and that they stubbornly refuse to figure it out.
The DS was released back when WPA/WPA2 was... okay, maybe not "new". When the DS was planned, yes, WPA/WPA2 was probably "new". So, the DS couldn't connect to WPA/WPA2 wifi points, only unencrypted or WEP. Fair enough. So then the DSi comes out. Hooray! It can support WPA/WPA2, finally! Except... all old DS games can't. Apparently, DS games THEMSELVES make explicit calls to the wifi hardware with no layer of abstraction between them. That is, a DS game can't just ask the console "Give me a network connection, I don't care what the underlying encryption standard is", it reads data from the OS and makes its own calls to set it up, and Nintendo couldn't even be arsed to come up with an emulation layer to trick those games into using the DSi's WPA/WPA2 network access. No, their answer is to present an entirely separate configuration screen just for DS games in the DSi interface, going so far as to start the DS emulation just to load this screen. Worse, they figured this was as good an idea as they could get, as the exact same setup STILL EXISTS IN THE 3DS!
The Wii's SDHC support, though, that's another story. At first, the Wii only supported plain SD cards (no SDHC). This worked well enough for a while, right until Guitar Hero World Tour came out. DLC songs sure ate up the size limits of non-HC SD cards quick (and Nintendo wanted to push WiiWare more), so Nintendo released a firmware update that allowed SDHC cards to work. But, of course, you can probably guess where I'm going with this: Any Wii game released before the update that supports SD cards? They couldn't figure out SDHC cards at all. Even if the console understood the card, the older games wouldn't, apparently because nobody at Nintendo bothered to look up filesystem abstraction. Hell, I only had ONE class in very, very basic OS design back in college, and even I know why this is necessary in a modern OS, yet this is a company with supposedly thirty or so years of computer experience under their belts!
I'm completely convinced that if Nintendo gave up on hardware and went third-party, they'd fail. Badly. It'd make Sega look like their old selves by comparison. From what I've seen of their crazy broken hardware ("broken" in terms of "services not directly related to playing the game"), it seems to me that Nintendo's got a very, very stubborn culture and developers who entirely depend on having complete and total communication with the hardware designers, just like the old days. In fact, it just seems like Nintendo wants to pretend like it's the old days, and that things like XBox Live, Steam, smartphones, tablets, and the internet itself don't exist.
Frankly, I say, if you've always liked Nintendo in the past, like I have, then you'd better enjoy them now while they're still around. They won't be around much longer unless they get their heads out of their asses in a timer-just-reached-100 hurry.
Re:Nintendo needs to rethink its place in the worl (Score:5, Informative)
I'd also prefer it didn't have big easy-to-break-looking, drain-its-batteries-all-the-time controller tv things.
As a Wii U owner w/ 4 children, let me just say, you're wrong on both of these points regarding the GamePad.
Re:Nintendo needs to rethink its place in the worl (Score:4, Informative)
Fruit Ninja Kinect is awesome. Kinect Party is pretty fun with kids. Kinect Adventures is sort of fun. I certainly play any of those three titles more than I ever play with the Wii.
Re:Nintendo needs to rethink its place in the worl (Score:2, Informative)
Here is a simple method, don't have any.