Nintendo Wii U review

For the past six years, the Nintendo Wii has been a bit of a joke compared to the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. Its novel use of motion controls helped it sell by the bucket load when it was first released in 2006, so much so that nearly everyone and their mum has one. But ask anyone whether they still play it now and it’s usually either been relegated to the back of the cupboard or traded in for one of its considerably more powerful rivals.

But Nintendo’s new console, the Nintendo Wii U , hopes to rectify its predecessor’s shortcomings by delivering a gaming experience like no other, and one that Nintendo fans in particular have been missing out on for these past few years. Nintendo has finally gone HD, with brand new hardware to rival, and supposedly surpass, the rest of the current competition - an IBM PowerPC 750-based three-core processor for its CPU, 2GB of RAM, and an AMD Radeon High Definition GPU.

The console itself looks like a rounded version of its predecessor, no bad thing given its compact size

Such specs will most likely pale in comparison to Sony and Microsoft’s next console offerings, but as anyone who’s stuck by Nintendo will know, the heart of any Nintendo console has never really been about nitty-gritty numbers and processor clock speeds. Instead, it’s about packing as many fun and bizarre features into the hardware as possible, and if anything truly exemplifies this, it’s the Wii U’s new controller, the Wii U GamePad.

When Nintendo first revealed the Wii U back in the middle of 2011, they rightly chose to show off the GamePad first, because it’s here where most of the magic happens. Measuring 259x135x23mm, it’s almost like a giant Game Boy Advance. Despite its size, though, it’s incredibly lightweight to hold in your hands, and its contours have been perfectly moulded to the shape of your hands. Its four trigger buttons sit very comfortably underneath your index and middle fingers, and its smooth curves offer the perfect amount of grip.

The tablet-like controller is very clever, but the resistive touchscreen is a bit of a letdown, and may hamper some kinds of games

Its most unusual feature, though, is its 6.2in touchscreen - which sits in between two clickable analogue sticks, a d-pad, four face buttons, an NFC reader and two small start and select buttons. The screen features the same resistive technology as the 3DS, so it needs a firm tap for your touch to register, rather than the merest brush of more common capacitative screens. It does come with a stylus which slots neatly into the back of the controller just in case you don’t want to smear your fingers all over it. Its 854x480 resolution provides a crisp and vivid display, making it the perfect companion for the Wii U’s other unique feature, Off-TV Play.

Not all games support Off-TV Play, but those that do allow you to play the entire game just on the GamePad. You don’t have to have the TV turned on in order to get started, as all the Wii U’s menus can be accessed through the GamePad. It also means you can continue playing if someone else wants to watch something on TV, which easily makes it the most family-friendly console ever made.

We tried out the Off-TV Play feature on New Super Mario Bros. U, and the experience was just as seamless as playing it on the big screen. There's no processing power in the gamepad itself, the console is still doing the work, and then wirelessly beaming the video to the device.

We had no lag whatsoever between inputting our controls and having them fired back at the GamePad display, but we did find its transmission reach to be slightly restrictive. We could comfortably sit in the next room while playing on the GamePad, but the signal started wearing thin when we moved anywhere with two walls in between us and the console, and we barely made it to the top of the stairs before the signal cut out altogether. Still, we managed to get a good ten metres away from the console, so depending on the layout of your home you might just be able to get away with the all-important 'playing it on the loo' test.