AWKWARD ZOMBIE

So I couldn't find any solid pricing info for the WiiU in Finland so I did a bit of searching to look at prices in other European countries.



300€ for the base model? That's $380 or 130 bucks more than in the US? What the-



Holy shit. $394? It's like they want it to plummet in Europe.

Nintendo of Europe, for whatever reason (maybe fluctuating markets or something), decided not to put a set price on the consoles, and is letting retailers set what they think is a good price.

Though, Europe tends to take our price and just slap a euro over the dollar sign.

I've come to expect and accept a $1 = 1€ ratio but this is just pure theft. Why didn't NoE announce the price when NoA did?

They did. They announced that they were letting the retailers set the price when they had their big announcement on September 13th, when NoA did the big press conference.

http://www.joystiq.com/2012/09/13/wii-u-hits-europe-november-30/

Here's a short blurb on it.

But from what I see there, it is $1 = 1€. The WiiU is 300 dollars for basic and 350 for premium, last thing I saw.

Shit, you're right. For whatever reason, I remembered that the base model was $250. UK still gets the shaft though.

Nintendo's handling of their online system will make or break them this generation. This article brings up a good point: Nintendo's obsession with protecting the children rather than letting the parents assume responsibility has been a heavy obstruction towards Nintendo establishing a good online system.

Got to try the Wii U at wal-mart today, the controller feels pretty good, not awkward like I thought it would.

Played a demo of Rayman Legends where it was a 'musical' course playing Black Betty (with Rayman gibberish instead of the regular lyrics, of course).

I really hope that is a thing in the full game, maybe a whole world with musical courses.

I plan to pick up a Wii U eventually, probably in January.

Got my Wii U today, it's a blast to play.

What games did you get?

Only Nintendo Land. I've only played 4 mini games so far, F-Zero is the best.

I decided to throw a party today with my Wii U since I figured it'd be more fun to test it out with friends rather than being like, Bigtits Expert Man on all of the games.

First off, assuming you want everything set up, you're looking at about a 2-3 hour process just to get it going. Luckily, my friends understood and we watched some TV while we waited for things like the 3.2 GB update and the Wii file transfer.

Secondly, the system refuses to just spend all of it's effort on downloading games immediately. If you buy a game from the eShop, it'll dedicate part of the RAM to the download, and let you go on your merry way. You can't make it go faster, but at the same time, it's MUCH faster than the download later option for the 3DS. New Super Mario Bros. U (nearly a 2 GB game) downloaded in less than half an hour while we were off enjoying Nintendoland. The one minor flaw is that after you download it, it has to take a few minutes to install the game, in which it needs the consoles undivided attention to do. It was a bit annoying when all we wanted to do was create another Mii for playing.

Transferring Wii Data is the most awesome thing. As cool as it was to see the Pikmin carrying your DSi data to the 3DS, seeing them walk through mazes of walkways with fucking awesome music made the process enjoyable. It took a long time to transfer my data to the SD card, and about the same to pull it off the SD card and put it on the Wii U, but it was really fun to watch it go. Part of me thinks they wasted a lot of effort on something so trivial, but... Goddamn. Pikmin can move my data any day.

The Gamepad is SO fucking light. It's really weird. In addition, I think it's going to be hard for Nintendo to convince people to put down more than $100 on a second one when games that need two come out, mainly because it just feels too insubstantial, even though it's really neat.

All of the menu music is great, and if you think you're going to miss the Wii stuff, much like the 3DS, the Wii U emulates the menu of the previous console. So that familiar Wii screen won't be gone.

Your system is going to update a lot. After getting everything set up, and finally putting NintendoLand in, it told us that NintendoLand had to update before we could play it. Another slight problem: the time they give you is in an HH:MM format for time remaining. The first time this popped up, we thought it was counting down from 30 seconds, until it reached 8 and stopped going down. Really odd choice for how to do it.

Nintendoland is a lot of fun, and so far holds up MUCH better than Wii Sports. Only time will tell which games will dull quickly and which ones will have lasting power. As of right now, my group finds Octopus Dance to be funny but irritatingly difficult and not as fun as the rest. Might've needed a multiplayer "follow the leader" kind of game, though with 1 gamepad, that'd likely be hard unless you're passing it. The most enjoyed mini-game of the bunch that we played was Luigi's Ghost Mansion, thought Metroid Blast was a close second.

Pikmin and Zelda are really good, and while I haven't beaten them yet, I already know when I'm done, I'm probably going to want some more.

Monita was initially grating (and still is on occasion), but some of her dialogue is kinda funny. We had great fun imagining her as GLaDOS, and hoped she'd do something to backstab us. Didn't help when she kept throwing cubes at us.

Haven't played Mario U yet, but I've heard really good things from a friend.Got it all loaded up, and, barring any updates, I'll be hitting it soon.

Gotta say, I really like this console. It feels very polished, and the amount of settings and info you have in it is amazing. I actually got a bit giddy over the fact that it was super easy to sync the gamepad to my TV and cable box. I didn't think they'd have my brand of cable box in it, but they did, and it worked really well.

All in all, besides a shitload of set up time (I feel bad for parents that need to set it up for their kids this holiday), I'm really enjoying this.

Now, if I could just get the HDMI thing to work. I am bad at technology.

Something a bit concerning.

It seems to happen only to consoles that have updated. Mine got it about 30 minutes ago, but was fine after a reset.

It's apparently less to do with the gamepad freezing, but the console itself locking up.

According to other places, it seems this could be caused by Miiverse, which was down earlier, and apparently has a massive amount of data to pull to the consoles. We might be looking at a patch coming soon to prevent large dumps of Miiverse data.

Assuming that's the cause of this. It doesn't seem like a hardware problem.

Also, in case you feel like pulling out the power cord when you're updating your system, you're looking at an almost automatic bricking of the system.

Apparently this is one of the early bugs being caught by people who have had the power go out of their system in various ways.

So, don't do that.

EDIT: My Wii U just did the gamepad thing again. But I've found a workaround solution. If you can, press X on the gamepad to switch the Wii U menu onto the TV. Then, use a Wii Remote to access what you need. Keep in mind, some things REQUIRE the gamepad to function, and are still a part of the main part of the console, so those things might not be able to work (like checking the settings).

However, as of booting up Mario, the gamepad has cleared up all of the problems and is working with the gameplay.

So, it looks like the situation is a bit complicated and related to the main menu and related programs of the Wii U locking the gamepad up.

I've been looking quite forward to a WiiU recently, but stuff like this, this and this have been quite worrying. I'll still probably pick one up when it comes out in 12 or so days regardless. Since it is Nintendo.

Scratch that. All of the buttons on the gamepad work with Mario, but for some reason, the touch screen only worked at the beginning. I first chalked it up to not needing the touch screen for a single player game, but later when I was asked to use the touch screen, it wouldn't respond and I'd have to use the analog stick and buttons to hit options, if it'd let me.

This is really odd. One second the touch screen works, the next, it doesn't want to do anything.

In other news, Mario is gorgeous, and the excuse plot of the game actually started with some nice humor. I like that Nintendo is being a little less serious about the characters recently in the main series.