The Wii U is in the news so much recently that it is probably time to give a nice, hard and long look at the new features that the Wii U touts that will probably end up giving the competition some reason to go back to the drawing board before they unveil their next generation consoles. The first thing to look at is very, very easy, I think.
The Wii U GamePad — You know what, this is nothing new, it is just done extremely well. I remember my first “second screen” by the way of Sega Dreamcast’s VMU. The VMU (Visual Memory Unit) had a tiny screen, 48 dot by 32 dot LCD and could display information from the game as well as house minigames that you could play on the VMU itself. I remember in Resident Evil Code: Veronica having my health meter on there or in Virtua Tennis a tiny display of the court on there. A lot of times it was just a greyscale pixel art logo or game character on the VMU screen, but it was still a great idea that was underutilized.
Sony has been dabbling with the multi-screen stuff with the PS3 and the Vita, but the main problem with it is that it is a peripheral, an add-on, not included with the system. The Wii U GamePad is standard, it comes with the system and isn’t its own expensive system. It is just a display with some input functionality, doesn’t require its own expensive innards and because of it being standard, we’ll see more developers make use of it. I wouldn’t be surprised if Sony continued down this path and came up with their own GamePad concept, honestly. Microsoft has their “SmartGlass” that they are dabbling with, but once again, it requires a second device to be used.
Clearly both Sony and Microsoft have this on their mind, but have failed to implement it like Nintendo has. Nintendo went “all-in” with this, just like they did motion control, and we all saw how Sony and Microsoft reacted to that; both releasing peripherals that failed to make a huge impact on either system or really enamour developers.
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