Note: This article was written over a year ago, just before the Wii U skulked into the marketplace. Y’know, just so you don’t think I’ve gone fucking doolally, but I think a lot of what I’m saying still stands.
Do you hear that distant rumble? Already the plates in the cupboard are starting to rattle under the constant vibration. Can you discern the sound like millions of coin slots working in unison, putting money into the hands of tame journalists? And I know you can hear the voice with the abysmal, borderline offensive Italian accent slowly repeating, “Buy-a me, buy-a me,” over and over again.
This lumbering behemoth, my friends, isn’t the product of screen induced dementia on my part – it’s the monstrous Nintendo PR machine for the Wii U stomping across the landscape with its dozens of compound eyes fixed on your wallet. Probably squishing a load of civilians in the process. A couple of bloody feet on the stomping hype beast don’t matter as long as the company can turn a profit.
Yes, that’s right. As you’re probably aware the people at Nintendo are well into the inexorable process of pushing their latest console into your consciousness. Some of you might even find the whole thing as uncomfortable as I’ve described it and some of you might be as excited as puppies who’ve managed to eat a bag of coffee. No one who has any interest at all in gaming is going to be unaware of this product. Ads and features will soon rain down on your poor beleaguered gamer’s head in the coming weeks. Here’s a fun quiz: who will be the most inappropriate person will Nintendo approach to endorse it? I’m going to say Stephen King or Richard Dawkins. Or a hologram of Steve Jobs*.
I’m not a Nintendo denigrator, in fact I’ve owned and enjoyed a few Nintendo consoles over the years, going back to the good old NES, but there’s something off about the Wii U. I’m not the only one to notice it, either. There are a few people looking askance at this new bit of hardware and wondering just what Nintendo are playing at.
Innovation is something that Nintendo have always been pretty good at. The NES gave us the small and easy to use game pads as standard to replace Atari’s bulky joysticks. The Gameboy opened up a whole new world in which to annoy people on the train or bus and the potential to crash a whole plane – how cool. The Wii broke through and really pulled in the whole family to play games and to get fit and wreck your television. What we got were fairly chunky bits of innovation, but delivered in an accessible way.
With the Wii U’s blocky tablet-like controller (called the GamePad, with a depressing level of mundanity and grandiosity) we have something that they’re telling us, fix-grinned and sweating, is a whole new way of playing games. You can look at inventories and stuff on the small screen, while you play on the big screen! Solve puzzles while in mortal danger! Do stuff that we hope developers will work out for us!
It all sounds a bit duff. The GamePad screen sounds to me like a distraction. Nintendo looked at the success of the DS and thought they could scale it up. A neat idea, but one that falls down if you think about it in any sensible way. With the DS you have your two screens one on top of the other, about a finger width apart and you can take in the information from both with a minimum of fuss. What the Wii U invites is whiplash. You could describe the distance between the GamePad and your TV as fingerwidth if you were talking about the finger of the god-like ‘It’s you!’ being from the early days of the UK’s National Lottery. Otherwise what you have is an annoying device that calls for your attention while you’re doing something on your eighty-four inch LCD TV.
Speaking of which, what if someone else has the audacity to watch something on your titanic screened television? Don’t worry, you can play your Wii U game just on the GamePad’s screen. That doesn’t defeat the purpose of having the huge screen with super HD at all, does it? All those pretty graphics squished down to coloured blobs on the screen that’s one hundred times smaller than the one they’re supposed to be viewed on, that won’t suck any of the fun out of games, no sir. What about those features that you need to look at your GamePad screen to use? Will you need an even smaller screen to get the full effect or will it – gasp! – do what every other game does and either have an HUD or get you to pause the game? Wouldn’t that kind of go against the effect they’re going for?
It’s not all bad, they’re keeping the system backwards compatible with the Wii controller. Which is a smart move. By all accounts the old Wii players will get to play with much prettier games since the Wii U makes the Wii look like one of those watch calculators by comparison. But will that be enough to give the Wii U an edge?
The last console I saw with anything like the screen on the controller was the ill-fated Dreamcast with its visual memory units. These VMUs had a tiny screen on them, something that would even make a Tamagotchi feel cramped, and the worst battery life imaginable. Six months was all you got out of them, then you have to scuttle off to get two (yes two) expensive new batteries for it. And you could count on one hand the number of developers who incorporated the tech into their games. The highest profile of the adopters was Sonic Adventure with the frustrating and weedy Chau subgames. There’s the feeling the GamePad screen will be left behind like the quiet kid on the school trip, lonely and forgotten and a bit dusty.
The problem is, of course, that gamers don’t really want extraneous stuff cluttering up their gaming experience. An extra little screen for widgets and whatnots will only annoy gamers. Some even see through the ruses the screen is there to create, like on quite high-profile game ZombiU. The oft-seen clip is of the player typing in a code for an in-game number pad on the GamePad while onscreen a zombie shuffles up wanting to gurgle sweet nothings in the player’s ear while chowing on their virtual brains. This doesn’t even look fun. It would be fun in a film or television programme, but all you risk with this is endless game-ending and players who throw their hands up and stop playing. Somehow I don’t think that’s what Nintendo is aiming for.
The GamePad is an interesting idea, I won’t argue that point at all. It’s just not a great idea. Nintendo’s best ideas are great and technically pretty out there, but they manage to make them accessible. The GamePad has every possibility of closing off that accessibility. Then again I could be proven wrong and it will go onto roaring success, I just hope I don’t get trampled by the roaring PR beast as passes through for questioning Nintendo’s wisdom**.
* Thus far, over a year later, they haven’t been going for celebrity endorsements. They’ve been pretty low-key generally about the Wii U.
** And it turns out people are starting to think Nintendo are fucking bonkers and self destructive. Feel that, it’s my sense of swelling vindication. Stay calm, don’t struggle.
Will
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