What, no thread about the official Wii U release date and prices?

[TheLump]

Afaik there's not that much difference for BluRay between peak and non-peak. There's not even really a layer penalty, although the Wii U only supports single layer BluRay at the moment, so that point is moot anyway.

Any more info on these funny rounded-edged discs? I know it was assumed they were blu-ray (but without the licence to use the name, file system etc) but do the fact the discs look different mean they might be somthing different than expected?

 

[Arwin]

Any more info on these funny rounded-edged discs? I know it was assumed they were blu-ray (but without the licence to use the name, file system etc) but do the fact the discs look different mean they might be somthing different than expected?

Very unlikely - there may be some oddities in the filesystem structure, but it can't be very special as Nintendo did anything to keep the price low, and then as standard a bluray implementation as possible is the only thing that makes sense.

But anyway, the combination of twice the RAM for games as well as 22MB/s for optical drive speed means that most multi-platform games should perform well in terms of load-times versus Arcade model, and for those very few multi-plat titles that rely on storing some data on HD storage when available (Battlefield 3 and Rage, basically?), they'll probably not be ported in their current form anyway, and it will remain to be seen if it is even necessary for them to rely on a harddrive like cache. The flash in the Wii isn't likely to even be much faster than the optical drive in anything but seek-times.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Afaik there's not that much difference for BluRay between peak and non-peak.

Depends if its CLV or CAV, no? I can't find the actual official announcement of the drive speed for Wii U in case some of that was a given, but you're right, it may be the average speed as well. If it is the average, the peak won't be higher though (in all probability).

 

[Arwin]

Depends if its CLV or CAV, no? I can't find the actual official announcement of the drive speed for Wii U in case some of that was a given, but you're right, it may be the average speed as well. If it is the average, the peak won't be higher though (in all probability).

I don't know of any BluRay implementation that doesn't use a constant read speed though. This is one of the biggest differences between BluRay and DVD

 

[Grall]

Depends if its CLV or CAV, no?

CLV wreaks havoc with access times, no optical (data) drives use it anymore. Wuu's 99.99999+% certain to use CAV...

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I don't know of any BluRay implementation that doesn't use a constant read speed though. This is one of the biggest differences between BluRay and DVD

That's for film, no? CAV is used for data access. A spot of Googling finds this drive spec sheet with all CAV for reads. As already mentioned, Nintendo tend to be conservative on specs these days, but it'd be a significant departure from the norm to have such a high CLV transfer rate.

 

[TheLump]

Very unlikely - there may be some oddities in the filesystem structure, but it can't be very special as Nintendo did anything to keep the price low, and then as standard a bluray implementation as possible is the only thing that makes sense.

I see. Doesn't explain the weird rounded edges on the discs though. Could that just be an anti-piracy measure?

 

[Arwin]

That's for film, no? CAV is used for data access. A spot of Googling finds this drive spec sheet with all CAV for reads. As already mentioned, Nintendo tend to be conservative on specs these days, but it'd be a significant departure from the norm to have such a high CLV transfer rate.

Is it really that high though? A pure BD-R disc can be fairly reliably read these days at up to 10x? The only variable in BD-R data reading speed is that it takes a little while to get up to that speed.

22MB/s should be something like 5x, which sounds like a reasonable average. Data generally performs better, as during video playback, AACS is active and that typically slows things down.

The rounded edges, sure, could be an anti-piracy measure. No idea about that one.

 

[TheLump]

Bit of weird news, but ONM (Official Nintendo Magazine) posted a preview of their review issue, and Sonic All Stars Racing received a 62% score. Now the other versions on other platforms ahve been gettin great reviews and from the previews and demos the WiiU version was shaping up nicely (frame rate solid etc)....What the heck could they have messed up so badly in the WiiU version??

Interestingly, they've now pulled the review claiming "they werent supposed to publish that one until the US launch of the game". Oops.

We'll have to wait for the mag to come out on 21st Nov to see if theyve changed their score based on the other reviews - or if they are sticking by it then what the reason for the lowish score might be? (I'm suspecting its down to the reviewer looking at the game through Mario Kart tinted glasses...)

For anyone interested, Fifa got 80%, Mario got 86% NintendoLand got 90% TTT2 got 88%. And althought their official association with the Big N makes people think they're biased - they're usually pretty open with their criticism of games and I've found them quite accurate in the past.

 

[Blazkowicz]

CLV wreaks havoc with access times, no optical (data) drives use it anymore. Wuu's 99.99999+% certain to use CAV...

That's for film, no? CAV is used for data access. A spot of Googling finds this drive spec sheet with all CAV for reads. As already mentioned, Nintendo tend to be conservative on specs these days, but it'd be a significant departure from the norm to have such a high CLV transfer rate.

Interestingly on that sheet, access time is 200ms for BD-ROM (160ms for CD and DVD). It's unchanged from the 1990s. my 2x CLV CD-ROM drive said it did 300ms.

 

[Grall]

The rounded edges, sure, could be an anti-piracy measure. No idea about that one.

Not anti-piracy I think, as I don't know how an optical drive would reliably sense the rounded edges. Also, as a DRM device it would be real easy to circumvent. I see it more as an anti-counterfeiting measure, most likely. It's unlikely a counterfeiter would bother to press discs with rounded edges just for wuu games, so if you stumble on a wuu game with straight edges you know it's a forgery.

...Not that the average person is likely to care if the edges are straight or rounded, but it might make things easier for nintendo and law enforcement officials.

 

[Blazkowicz]

Bit of weird news, but ONM (Official Nintendo Magazine) posted a preview of their review issue, and Sonic All Stars Racing received a 62% score. Now the other versions on other platforms ahve been gettin great reviews and from the previews and demos the WiiU version was shaping up nicely (frame rate solid etc)....What the heck could they have messed up so badly in the WiiU version??

Interestingly, they've now pulled the review claiming "they werent supposed to publish that one until the US launch of the game". Oops.

We'll have to wait for the mag to come out on 21st Nov to see if theyve changed their score based on the other reviews - or if they are sticking by it then what the reason for the lowish score might be? (I'm suspecting its down to the reviewer looking at the game through Mario Kart tinted glasses...)

For anyone interested, Fifa got 80%, Mario got 86% NintendoLand got 90% TTT2 got 88%. And althought their official association with the Big N makes people think they're biased - they're usually pretty open with their criticism of games and I've found them quite accurate in the past.

An easy answer is the game sucks, and an "official" magazine has always had to pound on a game once in a while and give a it bad review, to maintain façade credibilty.

So, such an editorial choice was made but then management found out it was a fuck up, given Sonic has turned into kind of a Nintendo franchise. I don't remember which game had the Sonic mascots.

 

[Blazkowicz]

...Not that the average person is likely to care if the edges are straight or rounded, but it might make things easier for nintendo and law enforcement officials.

There's a little funny thing in this, that straight discs have an infinitely rounded edge so I'm very curious to see how Nintendo made them more rounded

 

[babybumb]

Wii U buzz on Google vs Wii..

Worldwide
http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=wii, Wii u&cmpt=q

US
http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=wii, Wii u&geo=US&cmpt=q

 

[TheLump]

There's a little funny thing in this, that straight discs have an infinitely rounded edge so I'm very curious to see how Nintendo made them more rounded

Lol. It's the actual edge that's rounded. Like if you look at a disc edge on horizontally, the edge is straight. Wii Us are supposedly rounded off for some reason. No idea why but it's somthing some previewers have noted....

 

[MystWalker]

BTW, there is a thread on neogaf now, from websites that have the final game, that the Wii U port of ME3 is looking crap too and sufffering "technical issues" compared to the the 360 version.

More and more I must hold fast to my recent position, at this point the Wii U has absolutely not proved itself more powerful than the PS3 or 360.

Will the WiiU ever prove itself more powerful than PS3 and X360? Or maybe a better question is, can the WiiU ever prove itself more powerful than PS3 and X360? It is very difficult, impossible even, to look at a WiiU game and say, "The Xbox360 and PS3 could never have done that." I mean for all we know NintendoLand could already be beyond what the HD Twins are capable of. It doesn't appear that way as an outside observer, but without having actually developed the game and without knowledge of what is going on under the hood, we can't say for sure.

Graphics are very subjective as well, and this can be seen by the way people are viewing games like Nintendo Land. Many seem to take the opinion that Nintendo Land is less demanding hardware-wise because it has a cartoon-ish art direction. In reality however, the game is 720@60p, with a number of the mini games rendering a separate framebuffer to the pad, while sometimes rendering split-screen on the main display, and having a mix of realtime and baked shadows and decent texture filtering. (In the final game shadows seem to have even been up'ed in res. since early builds, or at least filtered better) This is not likely out of the reach of the PS3 or 360, but definitely not worthy of comments like, "How could this possibly not be in 1080p!"

 

[Sonic]

Will the WiiU ever prove itself more powerful than PS3 and X360? Or maybe a better question is, can the WiiU ever prove itself more powerful than PS3 and X360? It is very difficult, impossible even, to look at a WiiU game and say, "The Xbox360 and PS3 could never have done that." I mean for all we know NintendoLand could already be beyond what the HD Twins are capable of. It doesn't appear that way as an outside observer, but without having actually developed the game and without knowledge of what is going on under the hood, we can't say for sure.

Graphics are very subjective as well, and this can be seen by the way people are viewing games like Nintendo Land. Many seem to take the opinion that Nintendo Land is less demanding hardware-wise because it has a cartoon-ish art direction. In reality however, the game is 720@60p, with a number of the mini games rendering a separate framebuffer to the pad, while sometimes rendering split-screen on the main display, and having a mix of realtime and baked shadows and decent texture filtering. (In the final game shadows seem to have even been up'ed in res. since early builds, or at least filtered better) This is not likely out of the reach of the PS3 or 360, but definitely not worthy of comments like, "How could this possibly not be in 1080p!"

One way of determining if the Wii U is as or more capable than PS360 would be to go by hardware specifications and if we had actual information on the specific CPU and GPU in the machine. With this information we'd be able to have a much better understanding of what the thing is capable of. Without it you are right as we are still left with this kind of speculation right up to the release of the system. Of course we are not the devs and programmers ourselves so do not have direct knowledge of their experiences working with the hardware but that is only true for those specific developers. When a general consensus forms from what many devs have say then we will also have a good idea of the machine's capabilities.

And it's rather simple enough. If games end up being noticeably better graphics wise on Wii U, especially exclusives, than that will also answer the question of it being more powerful. But still, to me, it's a moot point because Nintendo is too late in the game to be competing with PS360.

 

[DuckThor Evil]

As for noise, I expect the console to be very quiet seeing as Nintendo are talking about its low power, although with more heat than Wii with the same size fan, I wouldn't be surprised if that was louder.

The Wii U fan is bigger than the Wii fan. It will be very quiet device, probably close to the Wii level and should not be an issue.

 

[TheLump]

Here's some good news:

Frozenbyte talking about WiiUs/Nintendo's new Indy friendly approach. Should mean good things.

http://www.ign.com/articles/2012/11/18/nintendos-steams-up-the-wii-u-eshop

"We started working with the Wii U back in March, right after Nintendo contacted us for the first time," said Mikael Haveri, a marketing manager at Frozenbyte. "We had the port of Trine 2 working in about two days and then after that it was just about getting the game to look nicer and to implement the touch screen related features."

"That's what we love about the new eShop," said Haveri. "We have the power to price our products as we please, with just some basic guidelines from the big guys. The step to this is purely from Nintendos's side and they clearly see that [their] previous installments have not been up to par. We can set our own pricing and actually continuing on that by setting our own sales whenever we want. It is very close to what Apple and Steam are doing at the moment, and very indie friendly."

"They have pushed away all of the old methods that have been established before," Haveri told me. "Simply put they've told us that there are no basic payments for each patch (which were pretty high on most platforms) and that we can update our game almost as much as we want. For indie developers this is huge."

 

[babybumb]

These load times on menus and games look really something..

How does it load tens of seconds in menus and apps? Also firmware is multiple gigs?