I just found this story from back in Sept. about broken Gamepad replacements:

The news today is that Nintendo will in fact offer replacement GamePads to those who require one.

But it's not going to do it for free - a new Wii U GamePad will cost "a fee," according to Nintendo, and there are some guesses as to what that fee could be.

Nintendo hasn't confirmed what it will charge for replacement GamePads, but the standalone tablet controllers will cost ¥13,400 in Japan, or around $172 (£106).

Nintendo may not charge full price for a GamePad to those whose controllers have been lost, stolen or broken, but chances are it won't come cheap.

http://www.techradar.com/news/gaming/consoles/nintendo-wont-sell-standalone-wii-u-gamepads-unless-you-break-yours-1098340

I seriously hope Nintendo doesn't try to charge me ANY fee at all on this, because I will laugh at them and tell them to send me the broken controller back so I can return it to the store and get my money back. I can see chanrging people that smash it against a wall, but not someone like me whos controller just decides to stop working on its own. That's THEIR fault, not MINE.

Ravenprose said:

Okay, I dicked around with the controls (RE5), and got a scheme that works a lot better for me. The game goes out of its way to piss you off, but at least it's playable (barely) now.

You can set it to control exactly like RE4...its just not as interesting of a game. Still good though.

Ravenprose said:

Yeah, that's how it's set now. The real-time inventory is annoying as all hell.

You weren't playing it in the RE4 scheme? wow. RE5 controls better than RE4, it is identical but with better melee and real time weapon switching.

Man Dragons Dogma is kind of frustrating.

The difficulty balance is all fucked up...you'll be doing fine then go in a cave and get your ass whipped like nothing. Its not really what I was hoping for...seems ok, but kind of like Elder Scrolls ugly cousin. I may just give up on this one and move on.

Dvader, what are your thouughts on the Patriots/Dolphins game?

ZombiU is my first finished Wii U game. What a great game, you better be stocked up for that final hour, so heart racing. That said this game has the strangest end, I guess I did not see the true ending as you can die after the credits. If you do the game is locked, you must start all over again just to get there again.

Dvader said:

ZombiU is my first finished Wii U game. What a great game, you better be stocked up for that final hour, so heart racing. That said this game has the strangest end, I guess I did not see the true ending as you can die after the credits. If you do the game is locked, you must start all over again just to get there again.

Asshole..I should have had it done too! Fucking Gamepad.

Dvader said:

edgecrusher said:

Dvader, what are your thouughts on the Patriots/Dolphins game?

We should get some lube cause Brady is going in hard.

_Bear said:

It lasts about an hour longer that Wii U's from my exp. so far with Wii U.s.

Is that with the wireless on?

Archangel3371 said:

Isn't Nyco releasing a battery for the Wii U pad that lasts like 10 hours? If so then I think Nintendo should have had one for their own system that lasts longer then 3 hours.

Normal GamePad use

- 3 to 5 hours on a charge

- this will depend on what functions you're using

- 2.5 hours to completely refill the battery

Nyko Battery

- Rechargeable Lithium Polymer Battery

- Play longer with your Nintendo Wii U controller with Nyko's U Boost and get up to double the Battery life.

- Rechargeable lithium polymer battery for up to double the play time

- Uses existing Wii U Gamepad AC adaptor

If Bear/Vader/Edge are saying the battery is only 3 hours then the Nyko battery would only give you 6 hours. And you have no idea how much it may cost. Nyko don't have to worry about balancing the cost of making a whole system with many different components.

Nintendo has the console price equation to deal with. If money was no object they could have done a lot of things better, an HD gamepad screen, multitouch capacitive touch screen, better graphics, a larger HDD etc. This console is expensive enough for me to buy and they are already making a loss on it. I can live with it lasting and charging as often as a dedicated handheld. Also I think you guys are seriously underestimating the technology inside the gamepad. Read the Polygon story on it or Michel Ancel's comments etc.

In terms of wireless video streaming tech this product is on the frontier.

edgecrusher said:

Considering the battery compartment is twice as big as the battery that they put in there, it almost seems like they planned on a bigger battery then at the last minute decided against it. Probably something to do with cost, knowing Nintendo.

At least when there is a bigger battery released you wont have that lumpy shit hanging out the back like most of these suped up batteries. $172 (£106) for a replacement in Japan? You can see that it's not just a cheap shell as people assume.

Dvader said:

The cape is the worst Mario powerup ever. It controls like ass and if you do so happen to master it you can use it to basically break the game. Its a terrible item thankfully never brought back. Raccoon suit so much better.

Wow you are nuts.

edgecrusher said:

Man Dragons Dogma is kind of frustrating.

The difficulty balance is all fucked up...you'll be doing fine then go in a cave and get your ass whipped like nothing. Its not really what I was hoping for...seems ok, but kind of like Elder Scrolls ugly cousin. I may just give up on this one and move on.

Weren't you the guy cussing everyone for not playing it?

edgecrusher said:

All these stories about 3rd-party games having problems on U because of the CPU are a real letdown. I hope its not going to be one of these excuses for inferior games on the console just because developers don't want to optimise on it the way its supposed to be done. Launch games I can understand since they don't have much time, but that shouldn't be an excuse going forward. People have already said you can get around the CPU bottleneck and make superior software on the console when you do it the right way, so I don't wanna hear this as an excuse for the next 2 years.

It's pretty sad at the moment. The problems aren't huge. Digital Foundry were saying that U BLOPs 2 had some pretty large frame drops in the campaign but Lens of truth (a comparison website) did a frame rate comparison and said on average it was only 3 FPS slower and still close to 49 FPS for the majority whilst the PS3 version was 52 FPS on average. The 360 version was 56 on average.

But the U version had zero screen tearing whilst the other versions did. Which means they enabled V-sync on the U version which eats up power and is something the other systems could not do with BLOPs 2, or Arkham Asylum for that matter (according to Digital Foundry at E3)

You have to remember that these games are made for the 360 then ported to other systems. PS3 has a faster CPU than 360 yet it still runs BLOPS 2 slower. I think a lot of the criticism is overblown, I read about Darksiders 2 longer load times, I watched the gamesradar comparison video and the load times on Wii U are literally about 2 seconds slower per load, it probably took longer than that to read this sentance. I'm sure there are more moments of slower loading but some people act like few seconds of technical assery ruins an entire experience.

Also the video showed that the U version had a longer texture draw distance but everyone wants to ignore that. Other games have mitigating factors, NG3 one of the sites said there is a lot more going on in the U version with dismemberment, body parts rolling about everywhere with physics and blood flying everywhere too. The Arkham Asylum comparison videos and info I have seen shows the U running the cutscenes in realtime whilst on 360 it was Bink video and it is doing 720 + 480 p to the gamepad. The NWR review said they only noticed about 8 seconds of admittedly bad slowdown during the entire game and it was during cutscenes. It was still better looking than the PS3 version overall.

Digital Foundry said in their BLOPs 2 comparison:

"Treyarch have had years to optimise the COD engine for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 and would not have had this luxury in preparing the game for Wii U. Furthermore, on a basic level, Black Ops 2 itself would have been designed with no regard for the Nintendo hardware."

This is what people are not factoring in. Wii U is not so much more powerful that it can flip and switch and have things run better so easily. People are harping on about the weak CPU and ignoring the balance of the system. The purpose of a general purpose GPU is that it frees up the CPU by taking away tasks as does the DSP. If a MS engineer said a DSP frees up 50% more CPU power if 360 had one. Well do the math, the Wii U CPU could be 50% slower than Xenos, but with the DSP all things would be equal anyway. And they need to modify their in order code for an out of order CPU. Shinen was saying that they made 6X code optimisations. Shinen said "The CPU and GPU are a good match. As said before, today’s hardware has bottlenecks with memory throughput when you don’t care about your coding style and data layout. This is true for any hardware" so if devs haven't been mindful of their coding style - they have problems. At the moment devs are using code made for heavy CPU use, when the U's architecture means you are supposed to assign lots of that stuff to the GPGPU.

Also Digital Foundry in their ME3 breakdown was talking about the RAM. People are blank face staring at the speed of the RAM like its completely retarded but DF is saying that the system loads the video output via the blazing fast eDram. And it's a matter of texture fetching, which feeds from the RAM to the eDram then to the video output. You might get certain bottlenecks if things are not managed well but if this is the loading process it mitigates the slower RAM anyway. I'm sure some games will have faster texture fetching then others.

Again what I would say that some exclusives are 60 FPS, multiplatform ports sometimes struggle for 30? Eurogamer said that Nintendo's U tool chain was fighting them every step of the way. Perhaps the middleware still isn't up to scratch?

edgecrusher said:

Well I played 4 missions of the Black Ops 2 campaign...not sure if anyone here even has it.

I don't see anything lacking at all with this game on the Wii U. Graphically, this is easily the best looking game in the series. And I haven't seen any framerate problems yet.

Well that's weird, because everyone who says the game has framerate problems say they are worst in the first two missions. How are the shadow maps? Some are saying they are pixellated till you get up close.

HOLY SHMOWZERS! EDGE! DID YOU GET THE LAST STORY?!

It obviously doesn't play the same, but the deja vu while playing it is uncanny!!