Hello there!

Because everyone and their dog is doing it, I thought I’d email my say
on the Wii U – and why it sucked.

I bought my Wii U 2 years ago, so I have quite a lot of experience with
the console. The hardware itself is perfectly fine, but the games are
completely different matter. Wii U had “off-TV play” in it’s early
marketing, which would be a great feature, but the games itself hardly
used it. Most often the Wii U gamepad is used as some sort of gimmick to
be used WITH the TV, and not instead – on top of that, you never really
knew what the developers had in mind, except for one thing; you, the
player, could not choose how to play the game. Also, requiring you to
switch your view between two screens sucks ass and is extremely
confusing. It works on a handheld, where the screens are in a fixed
position two centimeters apart but not when you’re required to turn your
whole head – if the game used the touch screen, this even required you
to let go of the controller to poke the screen.

Hardware was designed to “be better” than PS360; run the same games with
steady framerate without the need to upscale sub-HD resolution (as was
the PS360 standard), having a controller that had more features and
“could do anything”. However, the two screens required lots of extra
processing power, and half of the more-than-adequate RAM was used on
Miiverse (that was apparently running on the background all the time).

Virtual Console on Wii U is great; 60Hz versions of the games, you can
play either on TV or on the gamepad, you can choose the controller
freely (gamepad, Classic/pro, Wii Remote), and the same goes with the
Wii mode.

Wii U games where you could choose your controller and play two players
on different screens are scarce, all I can think of are Hyrule Warriors
and Mario Kart 8 (although MK8 sucks, its fun for a little while until
you realise how scripted the gameplay is). Xenoblade Chronicles X is
close to the best game on the system, it only lacks the multiplayer (and
now that Miiverse is shut, you can’t make use of the Miiverse – this was
the only game where Miiverse interaction was put to proper use) and
battle is a little ackward as you’re not “pulling the trigger” yourself
during the combat.

In the end: the hardware is good and controllers are great. Games
library sucks ass, although there are a handful of games worth trying
out. Even if Nintendo is interested in porting the best-selling Wii U
games on Switch, I’d be very careful doing so, because even the system
selling software was dissappointing, and I don’t think Nintendo wants to
associate Switch with Wii U. Even Wii did not have GC ports until a few
years into it’s life.

About Switch: I still don’t see any reason in getting one. We know next
to nothing about the online, the games are either uninteresting Wii U
ports or uninteresting Switch games. There’s Puyo Puyo Tetris, 1-2
Switch, Bomberman, Xenoblade Chronicles 2 that are the most interesting
games on the system (I have BotW on Wii U). Metroid Prime 4 might be the
next title I’d be interested in – but only if the game features pointer
controls similar to Metroid Prime 3 (frankly, I fail t see how Nintendo
could take a step backwards after Prime 3/Trilogy). However, if Nintendo
updates Splatoon 2 to use pointer control scheme, I’d propably would go
to buy myself a Switch tomorrow – I’ve been waiting for a decent online
shooter with pointer controls for a decade already! Also, we had MK8
port on Swich, which was the wrong game to port – Nintendo should’ve
ported MK Wii, another game (and actually fun, unlike MK8) I might go
and buy myself a Switch for.

The concept of Switch is just great, all we need now is games that are
actually worth playing.

I just bought Fire Emblem Warriors today for the Switch. It’ll be a while before I play it. I suspect it is the best game for the Switch aside from Zelda BoW “Wow!”.

One really great game is coming soon: Octopath Traveler.