Posts by Cory Faller

As I went to output a couple mugshots from the Wii U Mii Maker for.... various uses... I was STUNNED!!!! to find that not only was my dumb old face notably higher res, but it featured some astonishing new elements. Check out that fuckin' beard! The power of polygons, bros and broettes. Got some sophisticated armpit rendering in there too, and a decidedly upgraded and proprietary hair-lighting engine to go with my freshly inked black frames.

Nintendo pulls as much paper as they can out of their manuals these days, but all those pretty pictures and fat infos have got to end up somewhere. And somewhere they have landed indeed! Hit the Home button on your GamePad while playing a game, tap the "Manual" button, and voilà. The Wii U manuals are actually extremely similar to the 3DS ones, which themselves were incubated on DSiWare titles.

Sorta!!! I've talked before about how if you really wanted to share an accomplishment on the Wii U, it was as simple as screen-shotting whatever you did and posting it to Miiverse. Which you can indeed do! But now that the Wii U is actually in our filthy little hands, a new feature has shown itself: tags. Look at that right there. Only New Super Mario Bros U and Nintendo Land use it so far, being the only titles that actually feature full Miiverse integration.

It's hard to load up a page on the Internet today without finding people goin' ham about this or that Wii U problem. But I've said my piece about that. It's time to lighten the mood. It's new hardware day! That brief glow where you first notice all those fancy little touches, and start to integrate new systems and ideas into your routine. Let's focus on those details. There are a ton of things about my first day with the Wii U that made me smile.

We're in the thick of it, bros and broettes. In the wind up to the Wii U's looming plop, people are gettin' tense. Each little glimpse we get of the various system features is accompanied by a cacophony of shrieks and wails, as if in our diabetic final throes we've found only saline in our syringes. It is time to CHILL OUT. I'll tell ya, I'm actually quite enthused about what I've seen from the Wii U so far, but others have been decidedly candid with their displeasure regarding Missing Feature A, or Flawed System B.

So we know the Wii U will feature a global achievement system called "accomplishments" when it launches in scant days. Oh, wait, we don't know that at all. This is one of the remaining Wii U mysteries—maybe there is a system there, or maybe there isn't. There have been hints, but there have also been plenty of things to suggest that maybe there is no such thing whatsoever, or that if there is, it's game-specific and not shared.

When Satoru Iwata first started to interrogate his staff for the amusement and enlightenment of the gaming public, it was the beginning of something magical. Until then, virtually all insight into the workings of Nintendo's development process was provided through the lens of "video game journalists." Mere men, slaves to their biases and desires, like any of us. We ask only the questions we want answers to, and tinge the "

I downloaded New Super Mario Bros. 2 on the eShop last night, at 11:02pm. Crazy! Now, scant hours later, I am like two-thirds of the way through the whole thing. Whups. I was a little worried about it beforehand, you know. Lots of impressions of this game have not been kind, writing it off as just a soulless retread that accomplishes nothing and serves only to dilute the Mario brand.

With New Super Mario Bros. 2 around the corner, I find myself looking forwards to grabbing as many coins as I can. It will be an accomplishment, this coin-mongering! It is an exceedingly score-focused game, all about seeing how well you can do, how much scratch you can accrue. And yet, I can't help but feel isolated by it—by the knowledge that any of the scores I compete against will be my own.

I didn't get a chance to attend E3 this year, so I was left to the devices of those lucky masses of internet journalists and their investigative sensibilities. Whatever they described or filmed was all I had to sate my obsessively detail-oriented curiosities. As expected, I was not satisfied. Can you perform a spin jump in New Super Mario Bros. U without shaking the controller? Does Pikmin 3 use MotionPlus for its aiming, like Shigeru Miyamoto mentioned in his on-stage demonstration, or infrared like reported in virtually every single media hands-on?