Not to smack down any hopes
, but I've been doing some reading, and from what Nintendo is suggesting, only one of the new controllers will be able to be used at any given time on the Wii U, and because each system is going to include a single controller, it's likely that they won't sell the new controllers in retail… Albeit I'm sure the controllers would have been ridiculous as far as price is concerned, but it's a shame multiplayer and interconnectedness with the new controller in respect to other units probably won't be explored in the development process, at least for the time being. Still, I'm amazed!! The specs presented ought to have surpassed the XBox and PS3 if it's supposed to be "next-gen," and while the 1080p max resolution is a constant, the main processing difference seems to be in rendering small models sharply, more robust lighting, and texture/bump-mapping detail, which by the looks at E3 is comparable or exceeding the quality of even some high-end custom gaming PCs. The Zelda "HD Experience" thing seemed to be the best demonstration of that hardware prowess – I'm guessing I wasn't the only one whose jaw dropped when they said it was being rendered of the hardware
itself and not a video! The lack of latency with the controller seems to make it really practical peripheral too, I was like, dumbfounded when they showed Wii Golf and that one guy flicking a video from the controller on to YouTube on the console (though that might have just been because the macaw was singing the Mario Bros. theme, but whatever…). The only thing that I'm concerned about because they didn't make a whole showing of it is the potential online experience. I don't have a particular gripe with friend codes, as I'm usually fine with random matches and that kind of thing already, but Nintendo really needs to focus on making online play more seamless, where you can minimize the difference between playing multiplayer offline and online in terms of speed and features (Brawl for example has fine online play in terms of what you can actually
do, it's just the process of getting into a game that's really frustrating, as lag is almost omnipresent, it takes forever to search for opponents, and if someone drops out midway during a match, the game freezes for well over a minute, and then disconnects you from Nintendo WFC entirely). That being said I think Nintendo's proposed DLC will become an integral part of the overall online picture as has been accomplished by Microsoft and Sony, though ultimately the actual DLC comes down to the individual developers. If anything else I'm ecstatic the games can even handle all of this – Nintendo is apparently using their own proprietary version of Blu-ray, and each disc is going to have a capacity of around 25GB (games like Smash Bros. might even go for a dual-layer 50GB disc), so hopefully problems with content are out of the picture entirely.