So I did the thing I said I wasn't going to do. I bought a Wii U on launch day.
Nintendo put the thing out yesterday here in the US: Deluxe set, $349.99, the black one with Nintendo Land already in the box, 32 gigs of storage that Nintendo will not let you forget is "premium." I got to Best Buy around 7pm, no line to speak of by that point since the actual line madness happened that morning, grabbed the last Deluxe unit on the shelf, and drove home feeling like I'd won something. I hadn't won anything. I'd bought a $349 doorstop for the next hour and change.
Because here's what nobody really tells you until you're the one sitting on your couch at 8pm on a Sunday: the Wii U's first act, before it does anything else, is a mandatory system update. Not a little one. I plugged it in, hooked it to the TV, went through the setup screens, and then it just parked itself on a progress bar. I made a sandwich. I checked email. I came back and it had moved maybe 15%. All told it ate close to an hour of my evening before I ever touched a game, and I've read enough forum threads since last night to know I wasn't the only one staring at that bar wondering if the console had quietly died.
Once it's actually running, the thing itself is kind of wild in a way screenshots dont capture. The GamePad is bigger and heavier than I expected, closer to a small tablet than a controller, and streaming full gameplay to that screen with basically no lag is a genuinely neat trick — I had Nintendo Land running on the TV and then just walked into the kitchen with the game still going on the pad in my hands. Thats the pitch, and on night one it delivers.
But the battery life on that GamePad is rough. Nintendo's own number is something like three to five hours, and after a couple hours of Nintendo Land and poking around ZombiU I watched the little battery icon go from full to worried faster than I wanted it to. My DS from a decade ago lasts longer than this thing does, and that's not a great look for the centerpiece feature of a brand new $350 console. I've already ordered a second charging cable so I've got one permanently living by the couch, which, fine, whatever, but it's an extra $20 I shouldn't need to spend in week one.
ZombiU is the launch title I actually care about and I've only put maybe 45 minutes into it so far, mostly because that system update ate my evening. What I've seen so far is properly tense — you die in that game and you're just gone, playing as a new random survivor while your old corpse (still carrying all your loot) wanders the map as a zombie you have to go hunt down if you want your stuff back. Thats a genuinely good idea for a horror game and I want to give it more time this week.
The eShop, by the way, was basically empty last night. A handful of things populated, most of the storefront felt like it was still being built in real time, which, again, fine, it's launch day, but if you were hoping to browse and buy a bunch of digital stuff out of the gate you were mostly out of luck.
I dont regret buying it. I do regret not eating dinner before I plugged it in, because that update bar had other plans for my evening. If you're thinking about picking one up this week, my actual advice, the specific thing I wish someone had told me: set it up, let it update, and then walk away and do something else for an hour rather than sitting there watching it. Go make the sandwich first. Then come back to Nintendo Land and the GamePad and all of it, because once you're past that first hour it's a pretty fun little box.
Anyway. Back to ZombiU. I've got a corpse to go rob.