Burny

Sure. Until they started showing the Zelda demo though, it was also entirely possible that the controller was in fact the console. Meaning it wasn't a home console at all, but a tablet that somehow interacted with the Wii. No matter which way you slice it, unless you were privy to some secret information, had unwavering believe in the rumors that the console was streaming to the controller or could identify the white box to be not a Wii, which Nintendo made hard by not showing it properly, you could have taken all kinds of things from that footage. Even if you believed it to be a new home console streaming to the controller, showing Wii-level applications and spouting "the new controller, the new controller, the new controller" doesn't exactly drive home the point, that you're presenting a "next gen"-machine, instead of a slightly overclocked Wii called "WiiU", streaming to a new controller. It was extremely confusing. Probably not. Consoles are never cheap though. Manufacturers simply accept that they're getting slim margins out of them or will downright take losses for a couple of years to even get them into that price range. And at the start of this generation "cheap" "high-end" consoles still meant 400€-600€ to the end consumer, with MS and Sony taking losses, even at those prices. Take this price (purely speculative) for instance. Who buys a 450€ Nintendo console? Parents searching for a Christmas present? Sure, there are parents willing and able to part with that amount of cash for a present which is useless, unless you spend another 50€ on an actual game, but it won't be many. Hardcore Nintendo fans? There aren't that many of them around, or the GameCube and N64 wouldn't have sunk as hard. Sony and MS fans, eager for a new, powerful machine? Probably aren't all too interested in Nintendo games and can expect to get all the games they want on their respective new systems. Those systems can be expected to be at least as or more powerful than the WiiU, even if Nintendo went all out. If in doubt, MS and Sony would probably just outspend Nintendo and accept to take more losses. On top of it, those people are probably invested in XBL and PSN, so there's little reason to switch. People actually interested in having the most powerful machine around? Those have been enjoying actual HD-games instead of the "high-end" console's <=30fps/<=720p parade on their PCs for some years and there's little reason to believe PCs will take longer than a year to overtake consoles again. That's provided consoles will even be able to overtake them, as there are limitations for consoles, that simply aren't there for PCs. A modern PCs graphics card alone can well draw as much power as a whole console.

First thing they showed was a Super Mario Brothers game, that could've just as well been a Wii game. Then they switched the game action from the TV to the tablet controller. Next thing they showed, was four Wiimote-players playing the game on the TV screen and one player playing on the tablet. The next couple of demos and applications they showed were either entirely doable on the Wii, or not game-related at all. All the while, there was a small white box lying under the TV, that could be easily mistaken for a Wii, having the Wii's white color, roughly same size and the already known horizontal position, as it was never even focused. So yes, they definitely confused the heck out of many people, until they started showing graphics demos clearly beyond anything the Wii is capable of and some footage of 360 games. That was at some point in the middle of their reveal video. At that point, they still had not mentioned that "WiiU", is actually the Wii's successor or bothered to highlight that this "WiiU"-thing isn't just a screen with attached buttons, but also consists of a box. Sure, at the end of E3, the point about the new console should've been clear to anyone. It should've already been clear three seconds into the reveal video though, which it wasn't.

It's not unheard of! If I remember correctly, Nintendo offered a patch for the game-breaking bug in Other M - the Nintendo way. You could send them your Wii, and they would somehow repair/replace your save.

@Rowan: @Cube provided a spoiler free "guide" to avoid the bug. You don't need to be afraid of highlighting it, unless you consider identifying areas and dungeons by the number of the sequence they occur in a spoiler. Like "third dungeon" or "second area". Edit: It's really ridiculous how such things sneak in. This is an extremely specific sequence of things you have to do in order to encounter the bug, but somehow it results in a broken save. Small wonder they didn't catch this during test-play... Now, if only Nintendo had had the foresight of making games patch-able.

Heh, admittedly I wasn't on any sort of information-black out until just before the game's release and he was shown in E3 demos, so I already knew how to beat him before I even played the game. Did that challenge for the last shield yesterday and had to do both, the first and the sixth temple boss fights and they were about the easiest. With the kind of sword you've got there and once you've figured it out, it's really just about reactions and precision. I messed up during the third temple's boss fight and the second version of the "toenails of evil". Last fight for the shield was the fourth temple's boss, which I started with something like 3,5 hearts and ended with half a heart remaining. Huzzah for the most bad-ass shield in the game!

I don't know where to put it otherwise, so I'll post it here. The 3DS has had a troubled year after all. This is the ultimate website for when the usual "doomed" debate arises again: www.isnintendodoomed.com (Look at the HTML-code! )

Has anybody posted anything about Fun! Fun! Minigolf TOUCH!, yet? Developer is Shin'en (F.A.S.T./Jett Rocket for Wiiware), so this might turn out decent. There's a trailer, too: It's weird seeing Mii-heads on Avatar-bodies.

And getting them involves traversing new areas and solving a couple of puzzles. What are the medallions/crystals/sages/flames you get in temples? They're the very definition of arbitrary things you have to collect. The puzzles to get them are just a bit larger. The Zelda series as a whole asks you to collect completely arbitrary things that are somehow required to save the world. They are just excuses to drive the player, set up puzzles and game mechanics and the whole story is concocted around these arbitrary things. Sages, powerful swords, the Triforce, map-parts, it's all just an excuse to present the player with puzzles. Stripping down Zelda stories to their core reveals how thinly the series hides this.

Oh, come on! Temples are fetch quests, too, you know? You go through them just so you can fetch some kind of relic at the end, that has some kind of meaning for the story. See OoT. First you fetch these three crystal things to get the master sword. Then you have to fetch the five medallions in the adult-temples. To enter them, you have to do more fetch quests. Getting the hookshot, the Lens of truth, you name it. The trick is: Everything is a fetch quest.

Complained about this earlier. Whoever at Nintendo thought this was a good idea needs a good whack over the head. It was already insulting when TP did this for rubies, but that game had extremely high text speed and didn't open the inventory every single time. I've seen codes to switch this and a couple of other annoying things off on neogaf though. They would require me to homebrew my Wii... I've been contemplating doing this for some time now. The convenience of copying my whole Wii-backlog onto an USB-harddrive and conveniently choosing the games from that fancy homebrew game-browser is enticing. But I've got a fair bit of WiiWare and VC stuff and there's no knowing how Nintendo will handle transferring these games to the WiiU. They might not at all or they might by means of a firmware update, which would probably screw with homebrew... I'm honestly contemplating getting a cheap, used second Wii and a dedicated USB hard-drive for this, but at the moment finances won't allow it.

Seems to be definitely true. Apparently it will also be possible to order the game from nintendo.com.

Yeah, the framerate dropped pretty noticeably for me when the crystals were activated. Didn't bother me too much, as the game takes control and plays this as a cutscene with little camera movement, but it was very noticeable sometimes. I'm trying to think back, but I can only remember having these drops in the area before the 3rd dungeon, not in the dungeon or in later areas. Maybe I stopped noticing them or they were less noticeable there.

That is a completely different argument than "Nintendo has been lazy/didn't get games out". Just because we might not like any or all of the games Nintendo released this year, they didn't develop themselves overnight.

Just take your time to understand the boss. And don't listen to Ronnie (Sorry @Ronnie ! Yeah, it's possible that way, but uncomfortable). Don't even try to out-pace the enemy's defenses with your sword positioning! After all a quick swipe with the Wiimote is supposed to be a slash and will likely register as such. Hint: The boss is lazy. In the first phase his "defense" will follow your sword tip. Hold the sword still for a moment and then move the tip again - he will stop following you. That's when you can strike. There are several ways to go about the second phase. The shield is probably the easiest one. I thought it didn't, but it does heavily. Notably, it automatically recalibrates Motion+ the whole time with the sensor bar. The shield is insanely powerful without being a sure-fire life insurance anymore. Use it correctly and you will not just block, but stun enemies. You will also be able to get more "convenient" shields later. Oh, and it can be used to obfuscate your sword movements! Try raising the shield and then reposition your sword: Link will keep the sword still on screen, but you can strike from any angle without enemies being able to follow you with their defenses.

Only if the games I listed above count as nothing. It doesn't matter if they weren't all "internally" developed, as these are Nintendo games and they were released. Acting as if there was no software all year, by not counting what software there was for asinine reasons, is just uninformed rubbish. There was little and unevenly distributed on top of that, but claiming there was nothing is factually wrong.

"Barely anything" includes Mario Kart 7, Zelda Skyward Sword and Super Mario 3D Land. Basically: one entry for each of their three biggest franchises. You'll be lucky to get anything remotely as solid from Nintendo as that next year. And that's on top of all the "lesser" games I listed above. I forgot the new Kirby game for the DS btw.. So yes, a whole lot of software for one company. What kind of expectations do you people have?

Acquired studios are as much part of Nintendo as EAD 1-5. They're not suddenly going to start developing XBox games. As such, Nintendo has developed Kirby & co.. Stop moving your goalposts! There was a decent amount of Nintendo software this year, if unevenly distributed, and that's it. No need to repeat Gametrailer's stupidity, as they're entirely capable of spouting that stuff on their own. If you are actually interested in knowing what some of the EAD teams are up to and believe Wikipedia, you might have a look at this article. That doesn't look like Nintendo is particularly lazy. In fact, most of these teams have either a big game out this year, or one in development, that'll probably be released in 2012. Those that just released a big game cannot be expected to have a high profile game ready for the WiiU by the end of 2012. I don't know why you're acting like these teams should be capable of releasing more than three high profile games each year, which happened this year. In fact, going by how unpredictable development times are, this year is already exceptional. As Nintendo maintains two platforms, naturally all of EAD's games will also be split between the handheld and home console.

Doesn't matter one bit, if the games are essentially commissioned or developed by Nintendo-owned studios (=first party) like HAL and Monolith Soft and appear exclusively on Nintendo platforms this year. Yes, Monolith Soft is a first party studio, as Nintendo owns 80% of them. If you want to apply that idiotic logic, then Uncharted 3 wouldn't count as a Sony game, as Naughty Dog is also an acquired studio. And calling Nintendo lazy is, well it's surprisingly stupid, really. Like Nintendo's internal teams are twiddling their thumbs all day, just because they don't manage to shower us with games all year every year. It's always baffling me in what dream-world people are living, who expect a big Nintendo release every other month. Even more so, as any fully fledged game released on the Wii this year, would have had to be in development since early last year at the latest. For anything where development started at a later point, it's sensible to move focus to the WiiU or the 3DS, which needs the boost most at the moment.

I said three high profile games. What do you suppose are Pilot Wings, Nintendogs+Cats, OoT, Starfox 64, Rythm Heaven, Kirby's Epic Yarn in Europe, Kirby's Return to Dreamland and Xenoblade, even if it was a 2010 game in Japan and wasn't released in the US? Then there is Wii Play Motion and Rythm Heaven for Wii, which only made it in Japan, but was released in 2011 nevertheless. I'd call them games. That's before taking into account games that weren't developed by Nintendo, but published by them, like "Mystery Case Files", the latest Layton game and Fortune Street, which will be released this year in the US. That makes a whole lot of games on top of the three high profile releases and I probably haven't even listed everything.

Nintendo themselves? Hardly. By the end of the year, the new high profile games from Nintendo will include Skyward Sword, Mario Kart 7 and Super Mario 3D Land. Even if one were to dislike any of these games, they weren't developed overnight and are as "high profile", as Nintendo games get. The real issue is that these are all released at the end of the year, partly on different platforms and that the individual platforms were largely a wasteland during long stretches of the year. And that's to be expected with as little third party support as Nintendo gets these days.

It's certainly not just you. After all, you start with six hearts instead of three, it takes the usual four heart-pieces to gain a heart and having the last two hearts is seemingly bound to equipment.