But perhaps I can give it a shot in my own special way OH YEAH!!!!!!!!!!! oh yeah!
Hey, did you know that the Wii U controller is wide? Like, really wide. It is shockingly wide, in fact! The very first impression that any part of the system made on me as I opened the box, this being the first time I had ever actually seen a Wii U in person—I managed to miss all its E3 showings and the US-only Wii U Experience things and there are no in-store kiosks here—was that holy moly, that thing is wide. I'm not sure what I was expecting, exactly, but there it is.
Wait, there is more!
After I had finished the roughly hour-long update process following Initial Boot, I set about downloading Nano Assault Neo from the eShop, because I love punishment and I wanted to continue waiting instead of playing games. I mentally blacked out while clicking the windows though before noticing that stuff actually downloads in the background automatically now, and had no idea where my stuff was! But once I found it in there it was cool.
Adding money to the account was really fast and easy, so I went ahead and bought New Super Mario Bros. U too, because it's annoying to buy discs and get them mailed to me here and phooey who needs discs. But then, once it was install time, I was shocked at the uselessness of the "time remaining" indicator. It said 14 seconds for a long time, then 13, then 12. Then horror set in as I realized the time format of the "time remaining" window is not actually minutes:seconds, but HOURS:MINUTES. When you're under a minute left it just says "less than 1 minute" so there is that. Fourteen minutes to install Mario, a 1.7 GB game. Is that slow or fast? Hard to say. The download was surprisingly fast, the install seemed surprisingly slow. But I was half asleep and time was melting so my sense of reality may have been distorted. When I think about it now, 14 minutes is a lot less time than like a week to get the stupid plastic wad mailed to me.
Both Nintendo Land and Mario, by the way, required yet another update after already downloading and installing, which was "exciting." I presume this was to enable the Miiverse features that were not yet included in the retail builds of the games, lying in wait for the system update to go live. But at least you can play the games while the updates download and then they install the next time you boot the game. Anyway, I went to bed last night having only just barely played my included copy of Nintendo Land and a challenge on Mario, unable to keep myself awake any longer. Again, in a tired stupor, I attempted to turn the system off from the GamePad, as you can with the 360 or PS3, by holding down the Home button. It wasn't working, I was confused. Could there really be no way to turn off the thing from the GamePad? I got up and pressed the button on the console.
I woke up early this morning, invigorated to play with my new Wu. The gruesome sight that awaited me as I entered the living room was horrific. I didn't take a picture of it but I should have. The slick, beautiful black controller, charged up in its stand, was a Rotted Cesspool of house-dust and animal hairs! Either my cat successfully imprinted on it while I slept or it is a mere fact of life that the pretty gloss black coating is going to look progressively more disgusting as time goes on. I did my best to slide the Wii U itself into my cabinet after first taking it out of the box without touching it very much, but that GamePad, hoo mama that thing is in for it. I plan on playing games only at night from now on, so it is impossible to actually see the surface that I am touching. Anyway, I turned the thing on to play some games. I turned it on using the power button on the GamePad, which obviously controls the system state, that being either "on" or "off." I made a mental note of this, and made it a point to chastise my night-before self for being so stupid as to not notice the GamePad had a power button on it.
Another thing that I was looking forward to, the sort of "dual sound" stuff that Cory mentioned where the GamePad fills in extra notes while the TV plays its music, was kind of ruined for me because for some reason my dumb TV introduces enough processing/display lag into the equation that the GamePad's music is like a half-second ahead of the TV. I tried to switch the set into "game mode" and all this other nonsense to no avail. Perhaps the only real solution is to go back from the LCD television I now have to a plasma once I go back to the U.S. in a few months. At any rate, unless both the GamePad and TV are working together to pump out tunes, it is a minor distraction since it's so easy to adjust the volume.
Speaking of adjustments, the GamePad picked up my TV on the first try when configuring the remote, and it's so nice to be able to adjust the TV volume with just a tap of that remote control button and a few volume arrow ticks.
I lugged the GamePad into the crapper today just to see how far I could take it, it's maybe 20 feet line of sight from my TV stand with the wall of the recessed cabinet and two cornered bathroom walls in between. It performed alright with occasional drops, and fully ate it after I walked the rest of the way to my front door (maybe 28 feet or so). I figure this might be able to be improved if I were to actually take the Wu out of the little internal shelf under the TV it's resting in, but I'm not sure how worth it that would be. Luckily enough the wall behind my couch is also the wall of my bed on the other side, so the signal works just fine from the bedroom, makin' some pre-sleep Doinking Of A Different Sort entirely feasible.
Nintendo Land is so fun, I really wanna go home and play it. And that Ninja Gaiden too, looks really neat oh and they have these DILK characters coming out for it soon. Oh, and that Miiverse, that is pretty neat too. I popped into the Ninja Gaiden Miiverse community to see what people were talking about, and there were a lot of pictures of Momiji's giant chest torpedoes and also pictures of soldiers squirting fountains of body ketchup all over the place. It was kind of interesting to see this G-rated Miiverse for a hard M-rated game. People were all like "Hi! Please observe this beautiful woman's rack. :D" I could, and did, dig it.
Speaking of beautiful women, one of the things that was the most awesome that I totally expected to not give a shit about at all but ending up giving some shits about anyway was the Internet browser, most specifically when using YouTube. I loaded up a 1080p video of some of my favorite Korean dance-star hoochies and then sent it from the GamePad (where it had automatically started playing in a special full-screen interface) to the television by pushing the button to "draw back the curtains." It was totally awesome and moved really smoothly and great. Sometimes when I watch streaming videos on computers or phones or something it seems kinda jittery sometimes, like a frame tear or a drop or something? But this was so good and awesome that I posted in the YouTube channel for it on the Miiverse and got three Yeah!s from other like-minded scoundrels. I can already imagine the fun that could be had with this thing, where one person in a room of others privately uses the GamePad to load up a video without the others seeing what they're searching for, then drawing back the curtains and lettin' er rip for maximum surprise and impact.
Ultimately the most overarching bit I can say is that the GamePad is somethin' special, it defines the experience of the entire system. I tried to imagine how I would feel about this whole deal if it really was just an HD Wii and we used a plain old controller and I only would use the television, and it made me feel sad, really sad. It's kind of crazy, all that. But there it is. The GamePad is all kinds of fun, and I understand now why they focused on it in all the promotional stuff and the events. The Wii U is a box, an ecosystem, a holder for these different objects. But the GamePad is indeed "how [we] will play next," and I really had to get my filthy, disgusting meatclaws on it to realize that.
now release bayonetta 2 already