The Wii U Experience Report: Sydney Edition

So I got to go hands on with the Wii U again last week at the Wii U Experience in Sydney, and while unfortunately it was mostly demos I’d already played, I got some good footage and got to try out some new Nintendo Land games.

The first one was Metroid Blast, which was one I was really excited to play. In it, one player pilots Samus’ ship with the GamePad, while the other players run around as Samus-suited Miis trying to take them down. There’s a few other modes available but this is the one we got to play. The GamePad player has to steer the ship with the left analogue stick, move with the right, and then tilt the GamePad to aim the crosshair on the screen. It sounds confusing, and it is at first, but you soon get the hang of it, and it makes for an interesting control scheme.

The other players control a lot like Samus did in the Metroid games on Wii, including the ability to roll into the Morph Ball and use the grappling hook to move around quickly by aiming at targets. The game seems mostly balanced, so long as the default health settings are used, but one of the maps lacked grapple targets which certainly gave an advantage to the ship. It was interesting seeing a shooter done Nintendo style, the game plays totally different depending on whether you’re using a remote or the pad.

With the ship you can move much more freely and access more of the map a lot easier, but you’ve got more enemies to keep an eye on, whereas when you’re a shooter your movement is limited without grapple targets, and you have a lot less life, so you’ve got to be more careful. Between the different maps, modes and switching between the shooters and the ship, I can see this being one of the longer lasting games in Nintendo Land, especially if the co-operative mission mode is fleshed out.

The other one was Mario Chase, in which players using the Wii remote to run around as Miis dressed as Toads, chasing a Mario costume wearing Mii controlled by the GamePad player. The Toads are restricted to a typical third person view in which they can only see what’s around them, while the GamePad user gets a top down map of the entire stage, including the Toads’ positions and their own.

Mario wins if they aren’t tackled by the Toads before time runs out, but the Toads win if any of them tackle Mario. It sounds simple and dull, but it’s actually a lot of fun and requires a surprising amount of strategy. There’s some unique features that add to this, like a camera constantly showing the GamePad user’s face (so you can gauge how close you are to them based off their expression) and a replay at the end of the match that traces the movement of each player over a whole match. I really like those two little touches, it added a bit of personality to the game, and can of course be used to strategic effect. And this seems to be the case with most, if not all, of the Nintendo Land games – they’re incredibly simple and anyone can pick them up and play, but there’s a strategic depth you can pick up if you know what you’re doing.

When we were playing Luigi’s Ghost Mansion (which is an old demo, but this build had a new map available, which was set in the mansion’s basement and was a lot more maze-like than the other one), we soon found out strategies like blocking off entrances to rooms where we were healing our teammates to keep the ghost out, and the sidestep button which allows manoeuvres like standing back to back with another player while moving through the mansion.

Even the ghost has tricks they can use, like the boost button which reveals their position on the map. This sounds like a bad thing, but you can use it to trick players into thinking you’re going one direction, and then heading in another. People are probably going to pass it off as a fun party game to bring out when the family are over, but I don’t think that’s doing it justice. Oh, and I got to quickly sneak in one round of the Zelda game while no-one else was playing, and it was pretty damn hard. Using the GamePad to aim a bow didn’t feel all that natural, but as I said I only got one round in so I didn’t get time to get used to it.

The other games there I’d already played, and they were demos you guys have probably seen countless times as well, but I got to see the scanner used a bit more in ZombiU to reveal hidden secrets and treasure, some of which I caught on camera. Not on camera was me finding a crossbow in a hidden passageway, and getting the pants scared off me by a zombie popping up to the screen when I went over to pick it up. The crossbow can be aimed using the GamePad, which uses a scope to zoom in, but only on the GamePad screen, the TV screen shows the normal aim. It’s hard to gauge how well this works as the pad was tethered to the console and wasn’t able to be moved around all that easy. But ZombiU’s looking like a lot of fun, and uses the GamePad in so many unique ways, though I’m probably a bit biased because I love survival horror and am glad to finally see a big release doing it well. I also got to play New Super Mario Bros. U again and… it’s pretty much what you expect, NSMB Wii with better graphics, new levels and powerups, and more griefing potential thanks to the platform placing capabilities of the GamePad. There were times where the platforms placed by the pad really helped, but most of the time it just seemed like a tool for griefers. It’s a good game, but to be honest I’m a little sick of the ‘New’ Super Mario Bros. series myself.

Hopefully that gives you guys a little more insight to the games available on the Wii U, and make sure to check out the footage so you can see the games in action, it’ll give you a bit more of an idea of how they work.

Thanks to Josh for attending this event for Vooks and writing and filming it. Appreciated.