The Wii U's Impact on PC Gaming

Nintendo's Wii U announcement has been pretty much impossible to ignore and more or less dominated the entire day. Joystiq's site lets you filter news stories by platform; PC gaming news was limited to a handful of posts discussing XCOM, Borderlands 2, some Steam deals, and a soccer title from Konami.

I watched the Japanese reveal last night (and understood none of it) in addition to the North American presentation earlier today. The Wii U is definitely intriguing - the Nintendo TVii feature looks pretty cool and I'm wondering how well it'd work with my Comcast DVR set top box. As someone who owns an aging laptop and doesn't have a tablet, I found the prospect of the GamePad's screen adding to the TV viewing experience pretty interesting. My Wii system has been collecting dust for a while now, so the idea that the Wii U could potentially function as a multimedia hub for several years makes me wonder if it might be worth the $300-350 price tag.

As far as actual gaming is concerned I'm still on the fence about the Wii U. Tom's Hardware posted some rumored technical specs yesterday that make me wonder about the Wii U's staying power.

CPU: "Espresso" CPU on the Wii U has three enhanced Broadway cores
GPU: "GPU7" AMD Radeon-based High Definition GPU. Unique API = GX2, which supports Shader Model 4.0 (DirectX 10.1 and OpenGL 3.3 equivalent functionality)
Memory: Mem1 = 32MB Mem2 = 1GB (that applications can use)
Storage: Internal 8 GB with support for SD Cards (SD Cards up to 2GB/ SDHC Cards up to 32GB) and External USB Connected Hard Drives
Networking: 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi
Video Output: Supports 1080p, 1080i, 720p, 480p and 480i
Video Cables Supported: Compatible cables include HDMI, Wii D-Terminal, Wii Component Video, Wii RGB, Wii S-Video Stereo AV and Wii AV.
USB: Four USB 2.0 Ports

Alt-Tab: Wii U Launch Announcement Ustream

Alt+Tab posts discuss things not directly related to PC gaming. Hey, it's my blog, so deal with it.

I just watched Nintendo's live-streamed Wii U launch announcement. It was entirely in Japanese. I sat there with XE.com open in Firefox, furiously converting every 4- or 5-digit number that appeared from Yen to USD.

Thankfully, the Verge/Polygon guys had a comprehensive post online about 2 minutes after the stream ended. The Wii U launches December 8th in Japan; two bundles will be offered for roughly $405 and $337.

The "Wii U GamePad" controller/tablet retails separately for ~$173; one is included with the console and (don't quote me on this) the console supports using two at the same time.

The Wii U North American launch announcement is scheduled for later this morning at 10am; it'll be interesting to see if the launch date is roughly the same or if everyone else will be waiting until the Spring.