Okay Geek Farm
Nintendo launching Wii U in late 2012, might get a name change
Ezra Quintana
Nintendo’s 2011 E3 reveal of the Wii U was anything but impressive. Aside from the “real-time” gameplay of Zelda Wii U (read as: PR talk), there seriously was nothing to get excited about the Big N’s next console. It was definitely a huge contrast to the type of reaction the Wii first originally got, with wait times to try out the thing no where near the 6 hours people sacrificed to first demo the Wii. Well, Nintendo is hoping to shed off some of those bad memories and it’s optimisitic about its future, despite a continuous plunge in overall sales. Satoru Iwata, the company’s CEO and President, announced earlier yesterday that the Wii U is set to hit retailers sometimes in late 2012. Oh, and there’s talk of it getting a new name.
Reuters reports that Nintendo President and CEO, Satoru Iwata, announced that Wii U will launch, most likely simultaneously worldwide, in late 2012:
Nintendo will launch a successor to its Wii game console in the U.S. and other key markets in time for the crucial year-end shopping season later this year, Nintendo President Satoru Iwata told reporters on Thursday.
And while Nintendo may have done a horri-bad job at unveiling the Wii U at last year’s E3, Capcom veteran and Street Fighter producer, Yoshinori Ono, has told people to not count the console out yet:
“It isn’t something like Kinect or similar accessories, it’s something different.
[…] I can’t tell you more about it because, if I do, Nintendo will send assassins to finish me! But let’s say that Wii U will be a console with so many unique possibilities that it will be difficult to show them in the box they are going to sell it in, or be published in magazines and other media.”
Is Nintendo changing the guts of the hardware? Will it run faster, better, and stronger? No word on that yet, but it does seem to have developers happy, which is always a good sign of things to come if you look at the trend of critical acclaim amongst dev’s and outside-the-box tech; such as Kinect and the Wii.
