About a week has passed since I finally got to try out the machine that marks the dawn of the eighth video game console generation: the Wii U. Along with the N64, the Wii and the 3DS, this is the fourth time that I got my hands on a console on day one, and while nothing blew my little mind quite like venturing into the third dimension for the very first time with Super Mario 64, I have to say that I've never been this satisfied with a console launch before. The 3DS didn't have any games worth drooling over, and though the Wii did deliver the extremely awesome Twilight Princess, in all fairness it was just a Gamecube port. With the Wii U, I've got Nintendo Land, New Super Mario Bros. U and ZombiU. Two weeks ago, I claimed that none of these were system sellers, and while that can be argued over, after playing them all for several hours each, I'd at least go as far as to say that if you do happen to own a Wii U, they're all absolute must-have titles.
This article's headline is mostly true. Upon first booting up the console, you'd be inclined to steer toward a rather different verdict, after overcoming that first sensation of incredulous exasperation. Following the simple enough first setup steps is an initial system update. This update unlocks a couple of major features that are disabled in the Wii U's original status: the shop, the Miiverse, the internet browser and the ability to play old Wii games. It's a whopping 5 GB in size. That's freaking insane. It took me nearly two hours to get it downloaded and installed. Since I'd heard about that before the Wii U got here, I set the whole thing up at the office and leeched on to the speedy connection there like the little parasite I am, so I could go back to work while the console was busy assembling itself and wouldn't have to worry about any of that at home when I'd be itching to get down to work on those games. But still. Insane!
Apart from that, there's really not a whole lot of bad things I can say about Nintendo's new baby, so let me get that out of the way right now. I'm already knee-deep in the gooey swamp of uncompromising praise, and it'll only be minutes before it swallows me whole.
There's the loading times. Whenever you switch from one menu to the next, for example from the main menu to the shop, you can easily grab a book and read half a page before you regain control. And even if you return to the main menu, it takes that long. I timed it: 16 seconds, and you're back. I can't fathom why this is. Sure, many of those menus require an internet connection and have to request data from a server before things can continue, but why does the main or any of the other local menus take so long to load? My hopes are that this issue will be remedied with a future patch. Then there's the fact that it takes about three hours until the Gamepad tells you it needs more juice. This is expected, considering the large screen that has to be powered, but it's a bit annoying because the charging cable's so short. And for some reason it doesn't connect to the console but to an extra power jack, which does pose a minor inconvenience to me. Another problem is that what's displayed on the TV screen goes a few centimetres beyond the screen itself, cutting some things off. This is annoying because there's no way to influence the picture size unless your TV sports such an option.
And that's pretty much it. Sure, there are features that aren't really my cup of tea and that I personally find unnecessary (such as the Miiverse, a social platform that allows you to share texts and little hand-drawn images with other Wii U players across the world, either via its own menu point on the dashboard or inside specific games), but I can easily ignore those and let others have fun with them. When it comes down to what it's all about—the actual games and what this new system can do with them—the Wii U scores big time. It's bursting at the seams with potential, and I really can't wait to see what the future will bring. I realise this is pretty much the same sermon people kept regurgitating back when the Wii launched (and apart from a few exceptions, it was badly wasted), but even with the few Wii U games we have now, the whole concept seems even more revolutionary than the sort of motion-based controls Nintendo introduced six years ago, though it's basically not much more than a DS on the big screen, if you wrap your head around it. The difference is that one screen is separate from the other—which is bigger a deal than it seems—and that there happens to be only one such Gamepad. In multiplayer games, the other players take control of one of the old Wii remotes. The significance of this should be pretty clear, but I'll elaborate on that later, anyway.
I'd like to talk about the three games that I own now. I won't go into too much detail for fear of never finding an end to this article (Edit: okay, I lied), but there are a couple of things that I absolutely must get off my chest. Let's start with our little plumber friend.
New Super Mario Bros. U
The reason why I'd like to get this game out of the way first is that it's the only one of the three whose use of the new Gamepad is anything but spectacular. It's still an amazing game, make no mistake—hell, it's Mario, and in glorious high definition to boot. Unless you're one of those people who for some reason are upset over getting dealt the same card over and over again with every new Mario game, you're getting more than your money's worth here. I've finished the first two worlds thus far, so I assume there's lots of nifty little things yet to discover for me, but the levels I've played are laid out wonderfully and are as much fun as ever. New Super Mario Bros. Wii is my all-time favourite 2D Mario game (yes, I like it even better than beloved Super Mario World!), and this game might just take the crown. The inclusion of the acorn item is a stroke of genius (it allows you to float for a while and execute some sort of double jump—it controls beautifully). And there actually is something new in this iteration: the challenges! The concept feels so natural to a Mario game that it's beyond comprehension why something like this is only now seeing the light of day in the Mushroom Kingdom. Those challenges range from traditional speed runs to dodging obstacles and collecting a certain number of coins. I've played perhaps a dozen of them and am anxious to see what else there is.
The Boost Rush mode is a nice enough feature as well. When I first heard about it, I thought it would be cooler, but to me it only serves as a neat little diversion. Not really sure what I expected, though. This mode drops you in one of the game's levels and makes it auto-scrolling. It starts off at a very slow pace, and every time you collect ten coins, it speeds up a smidgeon. Your goal is to finish these levels as quickly as you can, and after a while, it's starting to feel somewhat hectic, to put it mildly. Maybe the fact that this is pure time trial and doesn't have specific goals the way the challenges do is what puts me off. It is fun, but I prefer some kind of arbitrary purpose.
If you play this game on your own, the Gamepad mirrors what you see on the screen. This serves to showcase Nintendo's grand idea that if you're sitting in the living room occupying the TV and your mom or spouse or hamster enters and insists on engorging themselves on random casting show number umpteen, you can be like "chillax, I got this", hand over the remote and keep playing on your Gamepad. The idea is good for those unfortunate souls who have to share their TV, I guess, but then again, New Super Mario Bros. U seems to be one of very few games making use of this feature, as far as I'm aware. Since, you know, you can do so much cooler stuff with the hardware, so why would you waste the potential on something as mundane as this? The touchscreen's other use lies in the game's multiplayer: Mario, Luigi and the Toads are controlled with Wii remotes, and the player with the Gamepad takes the role of some benevolent God and can assist the others by creating additional platforms to jump on or blocks to keep enemies at bay. Or you can be a total dick and screw everything up for the others. It's up to you! I for my part much rather enjoy being part of the action.
Other than that, it's plain old Mario. Wonderfully executed and a blast of fun, just as I have come to expect over the years. Next up: the hardcore game!
ZombiU
Behind what seems to be the most uninspired and agonizingly stupid video game title I have heard in recent years hides what has got to be one of the greatest zombie-themed games of all time.
About three hours into the game, the story seems all but negligible—it's your off-the-shelf zombie virus catastrophe fare, nothing out of the ordinary—but that's okay, because that's part of a pretty ingenious design decision. The game is set in post-apocalypse London, and
you assume the role of a terrified survivor who's trying his or her very best to cope with the dire situation. The gist is that if you fail and get killed—and you will get killed often—you don't respawn at the nearest checkpoint. No, you will be dead
for good and become a new inductee in the honourable band of zombie gentlemen. You continue the game as a whole new randomly generated survivor waking up at the safe house and preparing to set
out into the dangers outside to complete tasks given to you by a disembodied voice talking to you over radio comms. Your old guy, meanwhile, carves out its sorry existence as a zombie right where
it died and can be tracked down to retrieve the lost items. If you fail to do that, they're gone.
The threat of pseudo perma-death along with the fact that you're no Rambo who can handle weapons better than a ballpoint pen makes for quite a frightening experience. It takes four or so hits to the head with your cricket bat until a zombie stays down for good, and if you're surrounded by three or more of the bastards, fleeing like a panicking fawn quickly becomes the most reasonable option. There are firearms in the game, but ammunition is hard to come by, so you have to think twice before you decide to engage a group of zombies with a gun, and if you do, every bullet that goes off-target will be a painful loss. The aiming controls are somewhat sluggish and there's a noticeable delay between pushing the right analog stick and the corresponding camera movement on the screen, which makes things even more difficult. It's actually kind of annoying if you're used to playing more responsive shooters, but I get the feeling that this serves to emulate the amateurishness of the ordinary citizen you're controlling. You can easily distract the undead with flares, but of course that means the area won't be safe. There are lots of different collectibles like this that can aid you in your quest, but they need to be managed well.
While the action commences on the big screen, your Gamepad serves various different awesome purposes, the predominant one being a map of the area. This appears to be the prime use case for the new hardware, since most of the launch titles that are ports of older games are doing this, but then again, why wouldn't they? It feels really cool to hold an interactive map in your hands. Beside that, there is a small icon that momentarily makes a radar appear around your position on the map, revealing the location of anything that's currently moving nearby in the form of a red dot, be it a zombie, a rat, a crow or something else. This feature is a double-edged sword because you're never sure whether a fight is ahead of you or you're worrying for nothing. Then there's your backpack. You open it by sliding down the respective symbol on your touchscreen, and when you do that, the map is replaced with the contents of your backpack and the big screen shows your character rummaging inside it. This means that you can now see only a small area around you, making you extremely vulnerable to zombie attacks. Listening to their groans drawing inexorably nearer is one of many ways ZombiU forces your adrenaline floodgates open. You really don't want to be fumbling with your backpack while you're being chased.
Finally, you can use your Gamepad to scan the surroundings for points of interest and have them be marked on your map. This includes lootables, the infected, doors, mission items and more. While scanning, you can view the world around you on the Gamepad, and waving it about will make your character do the same, allowing you to see what he sees. The same goes for sniper rifles and stationary turrets. I can't say exactly why, but I personally love doing that. The virtual-reality-like feeling is the kind of immersion i enjoy tremendously.
With all that said, the atmosphere conjured by those aspects seizes hold of you immediately and really makes you worry about your survivor's well-being. Coming face to face with a zombie is much more terrifying than in other games of this nature, because you know that a single wrong decision can cost you your life. And while technically you only lose your stuff and can go get it back more or less easily, it still feels strangely sad to have your character die permanently and never be in control of him ever again. It makes me try all the harder not to die, which in turn causes my pulse to go crazy on a regular basis, and that's exactly what I expect from a game like this.
There's also a multiplayer mode here, and it's quite cool, though slightly unbalanced. One player is dropped on a map designed specifically for the mode and fights hordes of zombies using a Wii remote and nunchuk. While he's busy staying alive, he tries to conquer one of a number of flags on the map—this works by standing beside it and keeping zombies away from it. The player with the GamePad, on the other hand, views the entire map from a top-down perspective and uses his stylus to place the undead on it and keep the other player on his toes. There is a certain zombie type that is harmless but capable of capturing flags, and he has to protect those with other zombies so that his opponent doesn't get the chance to blow them to smithereens. Along with the challenge of managing resources—you can't just place zombies to your heart's content, of course—this is kind of like a real-time strategy game. It's extremely innovative and also a lot of fun, but unfortunately it seems like the survivor always wins, unless the zombie king is a much, much better player.
So that's ZombiU. An amazing game, and one that I'd recommend to any horror game fan blindly. What's left, then? The party game mix!
Nintendo Land
Oh, Nintendo Land. The great times of unadulterated fun you've provided in these last days already. Nintendo has really hit the mark with this one. It's a title that highlights many of the console's capabilities with a collection of twelve mini games, and it does that in an extremely awesome fashion. I've tried a couple of the singleplayer ones first and was mildly intrigued, went on to the larger mission-based ones and was completely hooked, and ultimately I brought some friends over and dipped my toe in the multiplayer pond, and that was when any last speck of doubt was washed aside. Tears of joy were laughed and the rematch button was pressed again and again. Some of these concepts are absolutely brilliant, particularly because they're based on having the Gamepad player take on all the others, and as far as we could tell, the gameplay never felt unbalanced—one party could win just as easily as the other.
So here's a quick rundown of the available games. I'll start with the singleplayer titles.
In Yoshi's Fruit Cart, you take control of a wooden Yoshi-shaped trolley. On the big screen, you see your start and finish position as well as some fruit and obstacles. On your Gamepad, however, only the start and finish are visible. With your stylus, you have to trace a path through the level and draw it over all the fruit while avoiding the obstacles. It's simple at first, but becomes quite a mental challenge as soon as everything on the screen starts moving around madly. The idea is neat, but I must admit I find it a bit bland.
Octopus Dance is a rhythm game in which you have to copy the dance moves of a porthole-headed instructor—with the left stick, you control your left arm, and with the right stick your right arm. Tilting the Gamepad to the left makes you stand on your left leg, tilting it to the right makes you stand on your right. You get the idea. So yeah, it's simple enough: Do what the instructor does and don't screw up. I screw up all the time, but I still find it very fun!
Donkey Kong's Crash Course simply drives you insane. You're transformed into a little cart with two wheels and a head. You can move it by tilting the Gamepad to the left or right, effectively making this one of those marble mazes stood up on its side. The controls are quite sensitive, so a single abrupt movement might send your cart careening into a wall or toppling over, and you'll be sent back to the last checkpoint. Better bring some serious fine motor skills, or this game will beat you up worse than a schoolyard bully.
In Takamaru's Ninja Castle, you slide your stylus across the touchscreen to throw shuriken at little cardboard ninja. It's as simple as that. With more and more ninja occupying the screen, you'll soon just be poking madly at the screen and provoking typist's neuritis to get out of this butchery alive. It's kind of fun, but a little monotonous.
Captain Falcon's Twister Race is very cool. The big screen shows your regular old F-Zero-esque futuristic racer, while on your Gamepad you can view the action from above. Again, the vehicle is controlled via tilting. The idea is that sometimes it makes more sense to look at the Gamepad to make avoiding traps easier, and other times you'll be concentrating on the big screen to see where the boosts are on long stretches of straight roads or to peek inside tunnels. Extremely responsive controls and some fun track design make me like this game a lot.
Another one of my favourites, Balloon Trip Breeze is very similar to the game it is based upon. You fly with your two balloons from island to island, dodge obstacles, collect more balloons and try to get as high a score as possible. The controls have been altered so that you don't use directional buttons to navigate the skies, but rather you employ your stylus to produce gusts of wind and push your little balloon guy around with them. This works beautifully and is huge fun.
So that's the smaller singleplayer games out of the way. Now there are three exhibitions that can be enjoyed alone or with friends, and they all feature both cooperative campaigns and competitive modes. They're all really awesome and would even warrant a purchase of Nintendo Land on their own. Here they are.
With the Wii, we were spoiled with a launch-day Zelda game, and it was glorious indeed. This time around, there's not even one near the horizon yet, so we have to make do with its representation in Nintendo Land in the shape of The Legend of Zelda: Battle Quest. Of course that's kind of like settling for a puny crumbling meatball in place of a juicy T-bone steak, but it still tastes nice and hearty enough! The objective of this game is to make your way through a number of levels, dispose of all enemies along the road and solve a couple of lightweight puzzles. Walking happens automatically, you only have to take care of the attacking and defending. The Gamepad player can see the world on his screen and use the right stick to draw arrows and fire them at opponents. The Wii remote, on the other hand, represents a sword and can be swung about to make the Mii on screen mimic the movements. The latter feels a bit arbitrary, until you come upon foes that can only be hit from a certain side. But the bow really is a blast, particularly because you have that same virtual reality effect as in ZombiU. I love standing in the middle of the room and spinning around like a drunk ballet dancer.
A game that has been strangely absent on the Wii (apart from the re-releases of the original two games with motion controls tacked on), the Pikmin return in Nintendo Land as the attraction Pikmin Adventure. Gamepad guy plays Captain Olimar and uses the stylus to tap the touchscreen and throw Pikmin at foes and breakable boxes. Wii remote guy plays a slightly larger Pikmin and can walk around on his own pummeling and jumping at anything that moves or doesn't. With this setup, you battle your way through increasingly difficult levels, and it's awesome. The competitive mode, however, is a convoluted mess of small things being collected, dropped, exploded or thrown around, and you don't really have the slightest clue what's happening. The winner seems to be determined randomly. Skip this and stick to the coop mode or pick one of the following games.
So. Good. More virtual reality splendour. In Metroid Blast, you can sit your behind in a comfy little spaceship and use the Gamepad to view everything around you. I have said often enough how much I love this, but Metroid Blast does it best. It feels so natural and satisfying to look around with your Gamepad as a window and use the analog sticks only to move your spaceship through the air. The campaign consists of missions where you have to destroy waves of enemies, collect a couple of items without dying or the time running out, and there's also a few great boss battles. Wii remote players can assist you on foot in ground combat, which is quite cool as well, but not as amazing as the spaceship. The competitive mode ditches the alien opponents and pits spaceship against ground troops in a fight for glory. I liked that gameplay quite a bit, though the others seemed not to enjoy it too much for some reason.
The remaining three games are pure multiplayer action. Two of them are so much fun that we played them for a long time, and the third one is nice enough and caused a few laughs but couldn't quite keep up with the others. Let's go then!
This is the one that's not executed too well. Mario Chase is basically a simple game of tag. One player runs away, the others try to catch him. The fugitive can see the position of every player on a map and attempt to keep away, while the others each have a distance meter on their portion of the screen, so they have an idea if they're running in the right direction. Teamwork is required to drive Mario into a corner, and on paper that idea is a rather good one, but there's hardly any replay value here. There's nothing here to spice things up, you're always just running after Mario or away from the Toads and that's that. I suppose some power-ups would have helped to keep things interesting (there is a power star that makes Mario temporarily invincible, but that only creates an unfair and unnecessary advantage). So yeah, this game can be enjoyed now and then, but I much prefer the following two.
Luigis's Ghost Mansion follows a similar principle, but it's infinitely better. Here, the entire map can be observed at once, but the ghost player is invisible. The ghost hunters
have to timidly shuffle around the place and occassionally shine their flashlight and try to discover the ghost with their beams of light. Doing so will drain the ghost's energy, but only for a
short time—after that, the ghost will speed up momentarily and get the chance to hide again. Great touch: The Wii remote will vibrate more
strongly the closer you get to the ghost; this causes a little panic attack every so often along with shouts of "Here! He's here somewhere! I'm the green guy, get over here!" All the other
players come over as quickly as they can and try to corner the ghost, and it feels awesome when this kind of teamwork succeeds. The ghost player, meanwhile, can see everything on his Gamepad and
is supposed to grab the other players from behind without them noticing him first. When that happens, that player is down and can be revived by the others by having light shone on him, which of
course is very risky but often a necessary strategy. The different maps each have unique extra features, which makes things even more varied. This is the game I like second best in this
collection, and my absolute favourite is coming up now.
My neighbours must have thought us crazy, the way we've been laughing our asses off. So this is how Animal Crossing: Sweet Day goes: The Wii remote players team up and try to collect a certain number of sweets. These sweets happen to be growing on trees and miraculously plop off if you step on switches near them. Trees with a single switch can be harvested alone, but with more of them, you'll need to team up. You can gather sweets with the press of one button and drop them again with the other. Why would you want to drop them? Well, every collected sweet makes you a little bit slower, and that's where the Gamepad player comes in. He controls two little guys, one with a giant fork, one with a giant knife. Each analog stick controls one of them, and each is assigned one shoulder button to make an abrupt lunge forward. The fact you can control both of them separately is both totally awesome and confusing. It's extremely difficult to coordinate them effectively, but it's a damn cool concept. Usually you're a bit slower than the sweet collectors, but if they're carrying a lot of them, the tides are turned quickly and the treats have to be let go to get away and not lose a collective health point. Dropped sweets lie around indefinitely and can be collected again later. There's ample room for strategy here, and that along with the hysterical air makes the game utterly enjoyable.
In each of these twelve games, you can collect coins that are accumulated after you're done playing and can be cashed in at the main plaza in a Plinko micro game for sculptures of things found in the attractions or musical pieces or some such. The inclusion of this is a neat little extra, though I would have preferred additional maps or items for the games themselves. More gameplay is always good.
One last noteworthy point is the aesthetics in Nintendo Land. Almost everything is designed in a way that makes it really look like an attraction at a fun fare. Many things seem to be made of wood, cardboard and cloth, which grants the game world a really cute look. It's somewhat reminiscent of Paper Mario or Kirby's Epic Yarn. In the Zelda game, you can even see little hills with zippers on their sides. There are tons of small details like this, and for that I applaud Nintendo.
Oh man, who's ever going to read all this? Well, I'm done now anyway! My verdict should be obvious: The Wii U rocks and you should get it, whoever you are. Go go!
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