“ wanted a console that was the same size as the Wii and wouldn’t make much noise, so “mum wouldn’t mind having it in the living room”, so a basic comparison/calculation makes the Wii U look, on paper at least, significantly slower than an Xbox 360 in terms of raw CPU. The Eurogamer article titled The Secret Developers: Wii U – The Inside Story is especially revealing when it comes to the Wii U’s lack of processing strength:

Texture quality and frame rates are certainly not modern concerns either, especially if the likes of DOOM and Daytona USA have anything to say about the matter. The notion of gameplay before graphics has rung true many times in the past, but the idea of gameplay before performance just doesn’t work when good performance is so crucial to gameplay in the first place. Titles such as Assassin’s Creed IV, Mass Effect 3, Batman: Arkham City, Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Blacklist and Darksiders II all struggle to play well on Wii U. One of the hardware’s biggest problems is its poor CPU. The Wii U is plagued by this duality of purpose and not in a quirky ‘let’s root for the underdog’ sort of way, but rather the exasperating ‘what the **** were they thinking!?’ sort of way. The Wii was a huge success, but it did little to dispel the stigma that Nintendo is “for kids” and you can blame the abundance of shovelware party/fitness games and Brain Training knock-offs for that one. Building upon the solid foundations of the lucrative Wii brand was no doubt tempting for Nintendo, but that name also has connotations that the “core” video game market would not soon forget. The console’s best games are all available in the West.Įven the name is problematic. The console is region-locked, but there’s nothing worth importing. Nintendo has also done a poor job communicating that the Wii U is a standalone product and not just some newfangled controller or hardware accessory. The Wii captured everyone’s attention with its intuitive motion controller and senior-orientated advertising campaign whereas the Wii U confuses its respective audience with a half-hearted sales pitch and lacklustre tech. What’s curious though is just how drastically the Wii U seems to oppose itself in the pursuit of this goal. Nintendo was keen to build upon the monumental success of their Wii whilst designing a new product that would recapture the “hardcore” market they had previously ceded to Sony and Microsoft. Now it’s easy to forget that the Wii U kick-started the eighth generation of home consoles as we know it.

In the months following I turned my attention towards the games themselves and from Bayonetta 2 to Lego Marvel Super Heroes, the impressions have been polarizing.ĭuring this final analysis I want to widen the scope even more and talk not just about the console and its games, but also about the events that have led to the Wii U’s current predicament and how Nintendo has gone about handling it. In episode 2 I detailed my early impressions the positive aspects of the machine’s build quality, the unique prospects of the Gamepad controller, as well as the criticisms concerning its weak CPU, equally slow UI, and lack of expected features. Although 2016 is not quite over yet, I think the time has come to conclude this journal with a Wii U console review.

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