Miiverse Detailed in New Nintendo Direct
Community features in the palm of your hand.
Nintendo has explained the Wii U's online connectivity functionality in a fresh Nintendo Direct straight from Japan. Company president Satoru Iwata took viewers through the Miiverse, and detailed the various benefits that the gaming social network has for players.
When you power on the Wii U, you're presented with a screen that will look familiar to anyone who's used the Mii Plaza on their Wii consoles. Called the WaraWara Plaza in Japan, this screen will show any friends and players and their current online activity. The Wii U GamePad handles general options such as loading games and arranging applications. You can, of course, switch the screens so that the Plaza appears on your GamePad and vice versa.
Up to 12 users can register an account on one Wii U system, each containing save data, game settings, internet bookmarks and play history. Networking services such as video chat will require a Nintendo Network ID - buying a game from the eShop with one account makes that game available to all users on the system.
During gameplay, you can pause your session and use the GamePad to seamlessly scour the Internet - probably to look up GameFAQs? - and engage in conversation via the Miiverse. The Miiverse in itself seems to take a lot of cues from Twitter, with a timeline featuring notes, drawings and comments from your followed friends. You can follow friends without having to swap Friend Codes (yay) and you can also choose to automatically hide spoiler posts.
Miiverse comments can also be posted at certain points throughout a particular game. New Super Mario Bros U was used for this purpose, with notes from Miiverse users popping up whenever a user died at a particular point. You can write frustrating comments about a particular enemy, or helpful hints about how to get past that segment... whatever you like, it seems.
Nintendo has also partnered with Japanese karaoke company Joysound to produce an application for Wii U that turns your console into a glorified jukebox. You can use the GamePad as a bona fide Japanese song selector, and generic videos will also play out as you croon along to your favourite tunes. This will probably be left for the Japanese audience, sadly.
You can watch the whole thing here.
When you power on the Wii U, you're presented with a screen that will look familiar to anyone who's used the Mii Plaza on their Wii consoles. Called the WaraWara Plaza in Japan, this screen will show any friends and players and their current online activity. The Wii U GamePad handles general options such as loading games and arranging applications. You can, of course, switch the screens so that the Plaza appears on your GamePad and vice versa.
Up to 12 users can register an account on one Wii U system, each containing save data, game settings, internet bookmarks and play history. Networking services such as video chat will require a Nintendo Network ID - buying a game from the eShop with one account makes that game available to all users on the system.
During gameplay, you can pause your session and use the GamePad to seamlessly scour the Internet - probably to look up GameFAQs? - and engage in conversation via the Miiverse. The Miiverse in itself seems to take a lot of cues from Twitter, with a timeline featuring notes, drawings and comments from your followed friends. You can follow friends without having to swap Friend Codes (yay) and you can also choose to automatically hide spoiler posts.
Miiverse comments can also be posted at certain points throughout a particular game. New Super Mario Bros U was used for this purpose, with notes from Miiverse users popping up whenever a user died at a particular point. You can write frustrating comments about a particular enemy, or helpful hints about how to get past that segment... whatever you like, it seems.
Nintendo has also partnered with Japanese karaoke company Joysound to produce an application for Wii U that turns your console into a glorified jukebox. You can use the GamePad as a bona fide Japanese song selector, and generic videos will also play out as you croon along to your favourite tunes. This will probably be left for the Japanese audience, sadly.
You can watch the whole thing here.
Companies:
Nintendo
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