Nintendo's pre-E3 Nintendo Direct stream

Nintendo will have their proper E3 Press Conference on Tuesday, June 5th 9:00am-10:00am PT, but in addition to that they also decided to have a short Nintendo Direct Stream about the WiiU controller as well as some of the online functionalities of the console. Satoru Iwata stated that the reason for this was simple, there will now be more time for actual games on the actual conference. Sounds reasonable.

The controller has changed some from the prototype they showed last year. It appears even larger than before (I didn't think it would be possible), and the biggest change is probably that the 3DS like circle-pads have been replaced with more traditional looking analog sticks. Players can keep playing a game with just the controller, if TV happens to be unavailable, apparently there is no lag between the two. They will also offer a WiiU Pro controller for more traditional control methods. One thing to note about both of the controllers is that the right analog stick is above the face buttons. That's going to be a little weird, isn't it?

The rest of the stream was about the online features, but in truth they didn't really reveal a whole lot. They talked about Miis and Miiverse (that's Mii Universe if that eluded you), the home screen which is populated by Miis and stuff. Mii this and Mii that. Smiley faces. I kind of tuned out at that point. The message they were probably trying to get across is that "hey, we understand online now", but I guess that remains to be seen. There was no mention of friend-codes or system wide accounts or anything like that. And that was more or less it. Check out these images about the things I just wrote about. You know, the things.

Posted in Gaming by Kilu on June 03rd 2012 at 10:12pm