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Sascha Depold

Engineering Manager

Blog

Wii U: Some impressions

[Tokyoship](//commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Tokyoship "User:Tokyoship"), [Wikimedia Commons](//commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wii_U_controller_illustration.svg)
When I left the office on last friday evening, I was looking forward to unpacking the just arrived Wii U. On my way home it already bugged me, thatI didn’t manage to order an external hard drive for the tons of games I’m going to download soon via the built-in eShop. So I arrived at home and setup the cables for the Wii U. I nicely connected everything with each other, started the console and waited the next hour for an update of the next-generation Wii. Not super cool, but hey it was an update. Updates are good. So I waited for the progress bar to fill up.

While waiting for the progress bar to fill up, I was wondering if the also ordered game will arrive the same day or if I will end up playing only the demos of the store for the rest of the weekend. As we found out later, the game arrive the next day (saturday) when we weren’t available and that we can pick it up the next working day from the post office.

However, the update finally came to an end and we launched the eShop, excited about the soon to play demos. After figuring out how that shop is working, we found out, that there was exactly one demo available: FIFA 13. WTF? FIFA? On a console which is famous for it’s Marios, it’s Luigis, it’s Kirbies, it’s ton of funny multiplayer games, they decided to start the new generation of Nintendo TV consoles with FIFA Interesting As that was actually the only game we were able to play for the rest of the weekend (without paying additional bucks), I hit the download button and waited another hour for the download and another 10 minutes for the game’s installation (yes download and installation is separated, because uhm .. you know just because ).

As I’m quite OK with FIFA, I played some matches and powered off the console afterwards. This morning I also noticed that the already limited demo of FIFA is also only runnable for further 9 times. Isn’t that super stupid ? Why would you limit a demo in the times you can execute it ?

Imho it’s quite lame for Nintendo to deliver such a crappy experience for a just-released console.

However, there is also one nice thing about the console: It has a LoveFilm (a netflix-esque service in Germany) app. This is quite cool as until that point Lovefilm was only available for Sony devices. The bad thing about the application is the fact, that you cannot use it -.-” Starting it, it mentions, that another update is necessary in order to use it. Sadly there is no other update at the moment.

So far about the first experiences with the new Wii U.