Two tidbits about the Wii U’s Friend list: you can register up to 100 other users, and you can block people.
And yes, if you missed this news the first time, friend codes are most definitely gone on Wii U. You register friends by inputting their Nintendo Network ID.
Wii U’s first update is big. It adds a ton of functionality. Unfortunately, you may need to wait around quite awhile before the process is complete.
Kotaku is reporting that it has taken over an hour for the firmware to be applied. Of course, the Wii U can’t be used while this is taking place.
In the past, Nintendo has had quite a bit of control over the pricing of indie titles on its digital stores. With Wii U, the situation has changed significantly.
Frozenbyte marketing manager Mikael Haveri says developers can choose their own pricing when it comes to indie games on the Wii U eShop:
“That’s what we love about the new eShop. We have the power to price our products as we please, with just some basic guidelines from the big guys. The step to this is purely from Nintendos’s side and they clearly see that [their] previous installments have not been up to par. We can set our own pricing and actually continuing on that by setting our own sales whenever we want. It is very close to what Apple and Steam are doing at the moment, and very indie friendly.”
Another encouraging piece of news concerns patching. According to Haveri, there aren’t any “basic payments for each patch”. That allows the studio to “update our game almost as much as we want.”
“They have pushed away all of the old methods that have been established before. Simply put they’ve told us that there are no basic payments for each patch (which were pretty high on most platforms) and that we can update our game almost as much as we want. For indie developers this is huge.”
You can find additional commentary from Haveri here.
Nintendo sure cut things close, didn’t they? There was some doubt that the Wii U’s update wouldn’t be prepared for launch, but the download was finally made available a short while ago.
You’ll want to get this update as soon as you receive your Wii U tonight or tomorrow. It adds a whole slew of functionality. Without it, your console will be pretty bare bones!
It’s been known for some time that the Wii U Internet browser will offer support for tabs. This is the first time that a Nintendo system will be making use of the functionality.
There is a bit of a limit that users should keep in mind. The browser supports up to six tabs in total.
This may seem like a small amount for some, but it’s certainly better than no tabs at all, right?
The SNES Donkey Kong Country games have magically disappeared from the North American Wii Shop Channel.
Europe will be receiving the same treatment, as the titles will be taken down on November 25. But in North America, there was absolutely no warning given about the removal of the Donkey Kong Country games.
And no, we still have no clue why Nintendo has decided to do this.
