So it's been about nine days since I stood in line at the Best Buy on Route 9 to pick up my Wii U Deluxe Set, and I think I'm ready to talk about it without just complaining, even though complaining is basically what this post is going to be.
Quick recap for anyone who's been ignoring the internet: Nintendo launched the Wii U on November 18th. Two versions, a $299.99 basic white one and the $349.99 deluxe black one that comes with Nintendo Land and a bit more internal storage. I paid full price for the deluxe set because I am apparently incapable of learning from history (remember what I paid for a launch-day 3DS?). Nintendo Land came in the box and it's actually pretty charming, the Luigi's Ghost Mansion mode had four of us yelling at each other in my living room for like two hours on Thanksgiving, which almost never happens with a "party game" that isn't just Mario Kart.
But I need to talk about the GamePad battery, because its bad in a way that nobody really prepared me for. Nintendo says three to five hours and that is technically true if you count "five hours" as a theoretical ceiling that exists only in a lab somewhere. In actual use, with the screen brightness at a normal level and the thing doing anything more demanding than the menu, Im getting something closer to two and a half. That doesnt sound terrible until you realize the GamePad is supposed to be this whole selling point, the thing you carry around the house and use for asymmetric gameplay and off-TV play, and it needs a nap after one movie-length gaming session. I had it die on me mid-round of Nintendo Land on Thanksgiving night with actual family members watching, and had to plug it into the wall while we waited, which is not exactly the "future of gaming" moment Nintendo was selling in their commercials.
The eShop is also just slow. Not broken, not crashing, just molasses-slow in a way that makes we wonder if their servers werent quite ready for how many of these things they actually sold. Browsing anything with more than a screen or two of content has a lag to it that the 3DS eShop never really had, at least not this bad.
Anyway, that's the console talk. The other thing worth mentioning is Cyber Monday, which was yesterday, and which absolutely wrecked several websites I tried to use around 9pm. I dont know if it was record-breaking in some official sense yet (Im sure someone will publish a number in a day or two and every blog will run the same headline), but from where I was sitting, trying to check out an $89 pack of rechargeable GamePad batteries plus a couple of other things, Amazon hiccupped twice and a smaller retailer I wont bother naming just gave me a blank white page for about four minutes straight. I ended up abandoning one cart entirely out of impatience, which is a very on-brand thing for me to do and probably cost that store a sale over something dumb like a loading spinner.
None of this is a huge deal in the scheme of things. I still like the Wii U. The GamePad's second-screen stuff is genuinely neat when a game actually uses it well (the Nintendo Land minigames that put the map only on the GamePad are the best part of the whole package), and the fact that my kid can keep playing on the TV while I check something on the little tablet-looking controller is a trick the Xbox and PS3 just cant do. Im just annoyed that the battery situation feels like something a company with Nintendo's resources and, frankly, decades of handheld experience should have nailed by now. They've been making battery-powered gaming devices since the Game Boy. This isnt new territory for them.
If youre thinking about picking one up over the holidays, my honest advice is buy a second GamePad charging stand or just accept youll be tethered to an outlet more than the marketing implies. And maybe dont try to buy anything else online during a Cyber Monday sale unless you enjoy staring at a spinning wheel wondering if your card actually got charged twice.