So I finally have a Wii U sitting under the TV, and I have Complicated Feelings about it.
Launch day here was Sunday, the 18th. I did not camp out, because I am not twenty-two anymore and it was 41 degrees out, but I did drag myself to the Best Buy on Route 9 at 7:40 in the morning because a guy at work swore they'd have "at least a dozen" deluxe units. There were four. FOUR. I got there behind eleven other people and watched the two guys ahead of me get the last ones while an employee in a red polo just kept saying "we might get more Wednesday" like that was supposed to make anyone feel better. I did not want to hear about Wednesday. It was Sunday and I wanted my $349.99 worth of black plastic right then.
Ended up finding one at the Target out by the mall around 4pm that afternoon, same deluxe bundle, 32GB, the one that comes with Nintendo Land baked in. Paid full price, no shame, tax included it came to just over 372 bucks and I did not blink.
Here's my actual complaint though, and its not really about availability, because launch shortages are just what happens with these things every single time and everyone acts surprised anyway. My complaint is the GamePad battery. Ive had this thing four days and the battery on that controller is genuinely rough — Im getting maybe three and a half hours before it wants to go back on the charger, and thats with the screen brightness turned down from where it defaults. Three and a half hours! My phone does better than that and my phone is doing a lot more work. If youre planning a lazy Saturday of couch gaming, budget for a charging break in the middle of it, because you will need one.
Nintendo Land, the pack-in game, is fine. Its a theme park built entirely out of tech demos for the tablet controller and some of the minigames are genuinely clever (the Luigi's Ghost Mansion one where four people with regular controllers hunt the person with the GamePad in the dark is a legitimately good party game, my sister and her husband played it with us Sunday night and there was a lot of yelling). But calling it a "game" the way Wii Sports was a game feels generous. It's more of a tutorial for the hardware wearing a cardboard Mario hat.
What I keep coming back to is that a year ago on this very blog I was writing about how the original Wii was basically done as a platform and everyone should just go buy a 360 or a PS3 if they wanted anything graphically interesting. And now here we are, a full console generation later for Nintendo while Sony and Microsoft havent even announced their next boxes yet. Thats a weird position to be in as a company. Youre either way ahead of the curve or youve jumped the gun by a year, and honestly I dont think anyone will know which it is until this time next year.
Small tangent: I also tried to set up the Wii U's browser to sync bookmarks over from my regular computer and gave up after about ten minutes. It technically works but its slow in a way that makes you remember why we stopped browsing the internet on television screens in the first place. Not every device needs to do everything.
Other than the battery thing and the browser being sort of pointless, Im actually enjoying it more than I expected to. The transition between TV and GamePad-only play, where you just switch to the tablet screen and keep playing while someone else takes over the television, is the one feature that made me go "oh, okay, I get it" out loud in my living room, alone, like a crazy person. My roommate wanted to watch something on Hulu and I didnt have to pause anything. Thats a genuinely small, genuinely nice thing, and I dont think screenshots or reviews really convey how normal it feels once youve done it twice.
Anyway. If youre still hunting for one before the holidays, I'd call around instead of driving store to store — the Target near me apparently got a small restock Tuesday morning and it was gone by lunch. Good luck out there.