Wii U and the two player conundrum

It's fair to say that there has been quite some confusion about Nintendo's new console, Wii U, since it was first shown to the press and public at E3 last week. Nintendo themselves admitted that the confusion as to whether the new system was a hand held or a console was their fault, there were precious few shots of the new console leading people to believe that the controller was the Wii U itself. That confusion was cleared up quickly by Nintendo but unfortunately there's one other, rather important, question that has arisen from the E3 conference which Nintendo have as of yet not quashed or confirmed. Is the Wii U a single player console?

Speculation is sometimes a wonderful, if rather pointless thing. All the shots and videos of the Wii U in action last week were of a single Wii U controller being used in conjunction with the console. Does that mean that only one of these touch screen controllers will work with the Wii U at any time? Is there another multi button controller that will be compatible with the Wii U, that Nintendo are yet to announce? Or is it just that they didn't have any multi player games to show off two controllers working at the same time? whatever the reason behind it all Nintendo have confused us all yet again.

Personally the only reason i can see Nintendo only giving you one touch screen controller is simple. Cost. It's common for consoles to only supply one controller as standard these days, and with the high cost of the Wii U controller is it that hard to believe that in order to keep cost down, Nintendo will only supply one with every console? I very rarely play multi player games on the same console any more so why do i need more than one controller anyway?

From a technical point of view there is no reason why the Wii U couldn't support 2 touch screen controllers, Even if both were streaming information to their touch screen displays. PS3 has to process two seperate images at the same time in order for it's 3D games to work properly and the Wii U is as reportedly as powerful if not more so than both the PS3 and the Xbox 360. In theory it could stream both players POV's to their individual controllers, or in some games where you inhabit the same screen, such as FIFA or the upcoming Street Fighter x Tekken, you could have extra control's and information streamed to your screen instead.

Michael Pachter, an analyst for Wedbush Morgan was recently quoted by IGN as saying that Reggie Fils-Amie, Nintendo America's President claimed that Wii U would support two of the touch screen controllers if required.

"They were particularly unclear about whether the console would support more than one of their tablet-like controllers; Mr. Miyamoto said no, but Reggie said yes (to me in a meeting). Obviously, they intend to ship the console with only one of these controllers, so it is unlikely that anyone will develop games that require two, but they were not clear whether the capability exists."

So developers are making two player games for the Wii U but not games that support the use of two touch controllers? Doe's this mean that another controller, sans touch screen, will be available for the console? despite all Wii hardware working on Wii U i wouldn't want to play Tekken using the wii-mote or even the classic controller. Not enough buttons and not anywhere near as comfortable to use as either of it's competitors controllers.

Whatever the answer to this conundrum you'll find the answer here, as long as Nintendo actually know the answer...

Can the last waggler please turn off the console on their way out...

When the rumours of Nintendo's new console began to circulate, it was interesting to note that the one thing missing from the list of design concepts and technical details was the mention of any form of movement control. In fact the only details released about the next gen Nintendo's controller was that it would include a touch screen that could stream game content in real time.

Bearing in mind that the actual technical details of Project Cafe are all rumours at this point, and that the company have only gone so far as to confirm the existence of a new machine, it has to be made clear that this is mostly guess work on my part, but that notwithstanding here's my take on what this all means.

Movement based control is dead in the water.

Bye bye waggle, Don't let the door hit you on the arse on the way out...

Okay, it's true that Xbox and Playstation are still supporting the concept, but look at how many games out there for the Sony and Microsoft machines actually need either Kinect or PS Move in order to be played. Now compare that to the number or titles where move control is just a fancy extra thrown in because the developer could.

The move away from move based game control isn't really surprising when you think about it either. Nintendo stopped making a big thing out of the Wii Motion controller a long time ago, most of their major releases use very little of the Wii Motion controller's potential in their game play, instead relying on the old button and d-pad combo. Eurocom's version of Goldeneye, released last year, eschewed motion control altogether and actually came packaged with a Gamecube controller for better all round game play.

It's clear that Xbox and Playstation developed their take on move control as a direct response to Wii's domination of the family console market. That domination was originally because of the innovative controller that came with Nintendo's souped up Gamecube 2.0 along with some clever marketing towards families on the Japanese company's part. Now that Nintendo seem to be abandoning the move market in favour of something a little more current generation the big question must be asked - Why should Sony or Microsoft try to compete in the move market any more?

I'll be honest, i can't think of a decent reason.

Project Cafe - Nintendo's new console?

On Friday 15th April, French site 01.net claimed to have unconfirmed details on Nintendo's next console, codenamed Project Cafe. The rumours were then published by Develop and later by IGN. Now, a week later, IGN.com claim to have further information regarding the new console. Let's take a look.

First of all we should tackle the most important thing to get right on any console, the controller.

Image courtesy of IGN entertainment

As many of you will see from this image, the new controller is expected to be very similar in form to the Gamecube handset with the addition of extra shoulder buttons and a 6" screen. In regards to the screen, it'll be a touch-screen and will be able to stream entire games directly from the console. One question that this touch-screen led me to asking - will you be able to play DS or even 3DS games on the system?

IGN sources with knowledge of the project claimed that depending on production costs the new console would retail anywhere between $350 and $400 and will be manufactured by Taiwanese company Foxconn starting in October. If Nintendo were willing to take a hit on their profit margins however the price could be further reduced. Release of the new hardware could be any time from late October onwards depending on Nintendo's desire to build a stockpile or not.

More likely is that Nintendo choose to wait until 2012, building up stock while also giving developers more time to deliver a range of titles for the new console.

At last it looks like Nintendo are joining the next generation. The internals of the new machine will be based on a new version of AMD's R700 GPU which should be able to outdo the PS3's NVIDIA 7800GTX-based processor. Project Cafe will, like the Xbox 360, have a custom triple-core IBM Power PC chip set, the difference being that it will have faster clocking speeds. Given the potential power of the system and the fact that each controller has an in built screen it's been suggested that you could actually have multiple players on the same console, each playing their own "virtualized" console.

Lovers of HD will be pleased to hear that the new platform will support 1080p output and should be more than capable of stereoscopic 3D as well, unlike the 3DS it's not been decided if this will be a set feature of Project Cafe games though.

One of the rumours that IGN reported on that really interested me was that the new machine could possibly resemble a modern version of the SNES, but will that be the US version or the European design? the EU version was a console that i always loved the look of. In terms of size the new console will be of similar proportions to the original Xbox 360.

The last piece of information reported by IGN is that a potential name for the console could be "Stream". Personally i'm not struck on the name but then i wasn't the biggest fan of "Wii" when that was announced. To be honest i'm still not.

There are a few gaps in this information that need to be cleared up of course, how much storage capacity will the hard drive have? Will there be a hard drive at all? Will the new system use DVD, Blu Ray or a proprietary storage format? It's still early days for Project Cafe/Stream/Wii 2, but it'll be interesting to see how this develops.