Nintendo Wii U - review

[kryss]

Yes, when I transferred data from my Wii to my Wii U I was surprised how... bad stuff on the Wii looks, jaggies and lowres. I guess it's maybe because I went straight from HD to SD, but it was far from eye candy :/ Tried Galaxy 2 too without seeing any particular improvement, but I'll let Kryss chime in with his opinion.

Pretty much the same here, looks as good as ever but nothing more.

Also I seem to have borders on the picture when I play Wii games.

[koopatroopa90]

My AVR does that with my Wii and PS2 when outputting to the TV via HDMI, think it is due to the upscaling. I use the component output from the AVR for component inputs for full screen instead, even if the picture is very slightly less sharp.

[sj33]

Pretty much the same here, looks as good as ever but nothing more.

Also I seem to have borders on the picture when I play Wii games.

Sounds like this is because Wii games were designed to assume the TV has a certain level of overscan, resulting in borders when people correctly have their HDMI setup to show the entire image. Strictly speaking, it is actually correct for the Wii games to display the borders because the Wii games have presumably been designed with this border in place.

[JSR]

What Shakey said. If one tries to get rid of the borders by cropping the picture on the TV, the picture quality will definitely get worse as that adds another junction of scaling.

[Kit]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtIIl28Lnj4

Colours look a little muted on the Wii U.

[capcom_suicide]

I was sure there would be upscaling. Dolphin shows the galaxy looks 360 quality when at 1080p. I think the HDMI colour space issue will be fixed in a fw update, but my understanding was Ninty has opted not to upscale wii games, which might be tactical if they look too good....

[JSR]

It DOES upscale. It does NOT rerender at a higher resolution. Rerendering the games would require a unique emulation environment for every game for it to work borderline properly. In other words a very costly procedure, which no console manufacturer has done so far. And releasing a game in HD is a lot more work than it seems people think.

[yesteryeargames]

How do virtual console and wii ware titles look running on hdmi ?

[Shozuki]

pretty much the same as they did on Wii - there's really no improvement or change to the overall image.

[originalbadboy]

It DOES upscale. It does NOT rerender at a higher resolution. Rerendering the games would require a unique emulation environment for every game for it to work borderline properly. In other words a very costly procedure, which no console manufacturer has done so far. And releasing a game in HD is a lot more work than it seems people think.

It really isn't that difficult to re-release a game in HD. Dolphin Emu is proof that quite a few Wii games already have decent texturing etc its just they are outputted at a crappy res.

Updating something like Jet Set Radio , yes, because you have to retexture eveything.

All Nintendo need to do is take the engine that drives a particular game, and tweak it to work with the WiiU. As both the Wii and WiiU use OpenGL I don't see it being that difficult.

[Brad]

Re: Nintendo Wii U - review

The WiiU upscales like your tv upscales i.e. Your tv is expecting a particular signal so the wiiu is obliged to provide that signal. In short, expect Wii games on WiiU to look like Wii games on Wii. Unless something changed from the last Iwata interview I read.

Regarding universal improvement like Dolphin provides, wiiu is nowhere near powerful enough to do that. You need a 4ghz cpu to do that properly. If Nintendo wrote their own emulation to do that I guess it'd be possible but there's no incentive for them to make that investment. I mean it'd sway me if it did it but they wouldn't sell me any more games. I'd just visit the Wii back catalog and that's not what they're after.

[Daragon]

All credit to Nintendo for releasing this at the correct time of year (unlike with the 3DS)

I'm still rather disappointed by the sound of how little they've actually done with the machine though - seems it's the minimum for passing as an HD console where I keep saying that this late into the game it should be hitting every mark at maximum. 6 year old tech should not have problems with slowdown or long loading times. A loss on hardware costs too? That was money well worth spent then!

[originalbadboy]

Regarding universal improvement like Dolphin provides, wiiu is nowhere near powerful enough to do that. You need a 4ghz cpu to do that properly. If Nintendo wrote their own emulation to do that I guess it'd be possible but there's no incentive for them to make that investment. I mean it'd sway me if it did it but they wouldn't sell me any more games. I'd just visit the Wii back catalog and that's not what they're after.

So therefore remakes with HD versions (which shouldn't be too difficult) would be the best option, emulation obviously was never on the cards.

[sj33]

Has it been confirmed what type of discs the WiiU can use? I keep reading that WiiU discs can hold up to 25GB, but if this is true, has anyone discovered what format these discs are based on? It's not going to be Blu-Ray or HD-DVD for licencing reasons (the same reason why GameCube and Wii discs are non-standard discs derived from DVD), so maybe CBHD?

Of course, the current WiiU games might all come on DVDs anyway.

[teddymeow]

God, they better not mark as easily as HD-DVDs. Those were a nightmare to keep scratch free no matter how careful you were with them.