Posts with tagged with "miiverse"

Not long after setting up my Miiverse information for the first time, I decided it was time to spruce up the decor a little bit by jazzin' out my profile message. While I was fond of the original "Do, Re, Egon" greeting, it was time to push the envelope a little bit. With the assistance of my favorite linguistic website, I pieced together a polite and affable greeting I'd be happy to show you, your girlfriend, or your grandmother's girlfriend: "

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.

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.

I suppose it's not necessary for me to summarize this morning's new Nintendo Direct presentation, which focused entirely on Wii U a mere week and a half in advance of its American release—plenty of other websites have that useless task covered. But I think I should at least call attention to a few of the neatest little bits that other places probably aren't going to talk too much about.

Shigeru Miyamoto plays Angry Birds. That means he has a smart phone. Someone else at Nintendo probably has a phone too and on that phone they’ve downloaded a gaming app and seen online leaderboards or asynchronous multiplayer. Heck, they’ve probably seen live multiplayer. Someone over there is probably playing an online game right now. On a phone. So why is it, in 2012, that Nintendo still doesn’t seem to understand how to develop appropriate online systems for their own consoles and games?

Before you can try a demo, you need first to discover it. Today we discover games by word-of-mouth, a positive magazine review, or a passionate blog post. Later this year, we can add another method to that list: Miiverse. Miiverse will encourage discovery of software through Miis who will congregate around popular games on your Wii U home screen. Once you've taken notice of a game, the next step is finding out if that game is relevant to you.