LogFAQs > #975992150

__starsnostars posted...

And do you know what Nintendo typically had going for it that their competitors didn't really emphasize at the time. Couch co-op and playing with friends in person. Do you know what doesn't make sense, designing a system around a controller that only one person can use.

You, uh... do realize that more than one person could play on a Wii U, right? Like, up to four more people could play using Wiimotes?

Couch co-op with the Wii U fuckin' owned bones (for the rare games that actually *did* something with the Gamepad in multiplayer, at least). Nintendo Land had a bunch of super-fun games that revolved around the idea, and even games like New Super Mario Bros. U let the one player have a totally different experience to everyone else (you were *supposed* to help your friends with the gamepad, but my buddies and I had far more fun trying to screw each other over, as it gave the game some real challenge and was hilarious to boot).

The concept for the Wii U was actually a great one; it's just that no one executed on it well after the initial burst of games, and the controller was reduced to, as adjl put it, mostly just freeing up HUD space and/or providing easy menu access (which was sometimes cool, but kind of a waste of potential in my eyes). I had the same complaint about the Wii, actually - far too many companies saw motion controls and, rather than do anything cool with them, just used them to replace a function that would be much more elegantly served with a button input (like Donkey Kong Country Returns making "shake the Wiimote" the controller input for a roll, which was dumb). The reason why everyone loved Wii Sports was because you actually got to pantomime the actions your character was doing; if you can't do that with your game, don't use motion controls.

It says something about the (lack of) innovation in developer ranks that all of the games that I thought made the best use of the Wii's motion controls and the Wii U's gamepad (Wii Sports, Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games, and WarioWare: Smooth Moves for the former; Nintendo Land and NSMBU for the latter) all came out in the first year of their respective consoles' lives and were all either developed directly by Nintendo or had their heavy involvement.