Seanobi here, with another opinion piece that’s sure to get you all brandishing your hate-sticks at my doorstep. The topic today is the Wii U. I know, Nintendo is, well, kind of sacred in the gaming world, and while they don’t always make the splash with their hardware that they aim for, they can still make one hell of a game (as long as it falls within one of their established franchises, at the very least).

But this Wii U, with the console and the controller-that-is-also-a-console-or-some-shit, hits me two ways. The kid in me loves the fact that the screen in the middle of the controller opens up a world of possibilities, but the grown up in me thinks that Nintendo taking another big risk with a completely new approach to gaming so soon after their last attempt, one that could seriously hurt their already weak third party affiliations, is just going to be the nail in the coffin for the Big N.

Why? Well, I mean come on, you don’t have to be a developer yourself to wonder just how much extra effort will be put into making the most out of such an intuitive new design. Going back just one generation to the Wii, with something as currently mundane as motion control, it was obvious that the only people who really “got it” were Nintendo themselves, and even they weren’t able to really use the technology to its full extent without additional peripherals like the Wii Motion Plus. When I think of motion-controlled gaming I think of something like the movie Gamer (or at least what seemed to have been implied in Gamer) with less boobage, of course, because it’s Nintendo.

I had visions of lightsaber duels dancing in my head all the way up until the point that I first waggled my way to a 7-10 split in Wii Bowling. And let me tell you, I went into that game with a gusto previously unseen, fueled by the perception that my every move would be registered by the game. It took me less than fifteen minutes to realize that I didn’t even need to stand up and wind back to get the results I wanted, as a careful flick of the controller was all that was needed.

The Wii has been on the market for six years now and I still don’t have my lightsaber game. Hell, there isn’t even have a regular sword fighting game of any kind, really, that I would consider to be worth the price of Wii admission. Totally wiik. See what I did there?

But the Wii did have some advantage over its competitors in one area, and that was in its price. If you walked into a store with price as your sole consideration for buying a console – unlikely for the most hardcore among us but likely quite common if you’re a parent or grandparent buying a console as a gift – then you’d end up walking out with a Wii. Can we honestly expect that to be the case with the Wii U? That controller, it’s an iPad with analog sticks for F’s sake (F stands for friendship), and that’s not going to be cheap. Consider that a standard Wii controller is around $30 without the nunchuck, a wireless Xbox 360 controller is around $50, and a Sixaxis controller for the PS3 is about $5 more than that in all its palindromic glory, we can safely assume that a GIANT CONTROLLER with a FUCKING TV in it is going to be priced a wii bit higher. Did you see what I also did there?

So there are two areas where I see the Wii U being a failure: price and developer support. Anyone else think that those might be major hindrances to this system being a financial success? It just makes me wonder: Wii Y?

Seriously, are you seeing what I am doing there?