Dan Adelman, Nintendo’s former head of digital content and development, has weighed in on the current status surrounding Wii U.

Responding to a fan on Ask.fm, Adelman noted that he believes the console deserves to sell better, in part due to the game’s available. However, the GamePad’s value has yet to be “justified”, and Adelman believes the Wii U name is “abysmal.”

Wii U is not selling as well as it deserves to. It has a lot to offer with great games you can’t get anywhere else. The value of the GamePad hasn’t been justified. But the name Wii U is abysmal. I think that cut sales in half right there.

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The Hyrule Warriors Direct will begin one hour from now (11 PM ET / 8 PM PT). Our last couple of formats have worked pretty well, so we’ll post tidbits from the presentation below. If there are major announcements (like new characters), we’ll make separate posts as well.

Note: today’s presentation will be roughly 26 minutes.

Updates to follow below…

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Kotaku has obtained documents from GameStop that reveal imminent plans to revamp the retailer’s trade-in service.

Customers won’t need to delegate money towards pre-orders/promotions in order to get the most value any longer. Instead, you’ll instead be able to take advantage of flat rates. The only variations will be for GameStop Power Up Rewards members and whether you decide to receive cash instead of store credit.

GameStop’s “average base value” of games will increase by 20 percent.

Check out this excerpt from one of the GameStop documents:

“By eliminating the higher end price of products we buy and raising the lower end, we are able to raise the overall value the customers will receive. With this program, we will not have complex multi-tiered trade promotions for the associates to remember and less math for the customer to understand what they are getting for their games.”

Another excerpt details how GameStop will be asking its employees to interact with consumers with regard to trade-ins, and how they’ll be looking to use the terms “buy” and “sell” instead:

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Arc System Works confirmed plans to bring BlazBlue: Clone Phantasma to the North American 3DS eShop well over a year ago. The good news is that the game is still coming. The bad news is there’s still no date, and a European release isn’t planned just yet.

Arc System Works told Siliconera:

“As far as I can tell you, we have just reached the stage to release it for the U.S., so we have not discussed releasing it in the EU area yet.”

Another tidbit from Arc System Works: there are no plans to localize their series of Escape Adventure 3DS games.

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Nintendo has released the latest system update for Wii U – version 5.1.1.

Of the update, Nintendo said, “Further improvements to overall system stability and other minor adjustments have been made to enhance the user experience”.

The previous update for Wii U, version 5.1.0, released late last month. It added the ability to transfer content between Wii U systems and included more control options while browsing the eShop.

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Did you notice that the recent teaser trailer for Falling Skies: The Game lacked a Wii U logo/boxart? Well, we certainly did! A mention of Wii U has also been missing from recent press announcements surrounding the game. We dug a big further and noticed that retailers such as GameFly and GameStop have pulled their listings for the Wii U version.

So, what does this all mean? Has Falling Skies: The Game been cancelled for Wii U? I’m inclined to say “yes” at present based on the evidence available to us.

Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to obtain an official confirmation regarding Falling Skies’ status on Wii U. We tried reaching out to Little Orbit last week, but have not received a response.

More: Falling Skies: The Game, Little Orbit

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A feature published on Famitsu’s website late last week details three weapons in Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate: the Charge Blade, Dual Blades, and Heavy Bowgun. For information about each of these, check out our summary below (translations from Siliconera):

Charge Blade

– Can switch between sword and axe forms
– Lets you charge up energy to unleash powerful attacks
– In Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate, the weapon gets a new feature with a shield thrust attack while in Sword mode, and a powerful spin-attack in its Axe form

Dual Blades

– New Archdemon mode in Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate
– This is the one that activates after Demon mode with a full gauge
_ Archdemon allows you to use your finishing move, but instead of experiencing the normal delay, you’ll be able to keep on attacking with continuous combos

Heavy Bowgun

– Additional bump in Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate
– This only applies to weapons of six-star rarity and higher
– New Heavy Bowgun feature lets you unlock the weapon’s limits that allows you to use a FireWyvern shot, and then attack with other shots while reloading the FireWyvern ammo
– Weapon’s downtime while waiting for the reload decreases as well

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More: Capcom, details roundup, Famitsu, Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate

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Tic Toc Games will be rebooting its Adventures of Pip Kickstarter later this month. The developer confirmed on Twitter a few minutes ago that a new campaign will go live in sixteen days.

Tic Toc wrote:

Adventures of Pip originally hit Kickstarter in May. Unfortunately, the campaign fell well shy of its $100,000 goal having raised only $35,510.

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