Nintendo's Wii U will only support one touch screen controller per console
Nintendo's Wii U may be capable of a lot of things, but support for more than one of its impressive new controllers won't be one of them.
That news comes from Nintendo senior managing director Shigeru Miyamoto, who confirmed yesterday Nintendo's newest console isn't designed to interact with more than one of the new controllers at a time.
"Our basic premise is that you can use one with a system. If we got to an idea of having multiple (controllers) it might be just more convenient for people to use their Nintendo 3DS and have a way to connect that," Miayamoto told news.com.au.
While disappointing, Miyamoto's confirmation should not come entirely as a surprise considering that Nintendo never indicated otherwise during the Wii U's unveiling. Instead, as shown in the photo above, the new tablet controller (WiiPad?) was always shown accompanied by a number of Wii Remotes. This shows that the Wii U's multiplayer capabilities will mostly be variations on the 3-versus-1 minigame demonstration that Nintendo showed during E3.
This is likely due to the Wii U's technological capabilities which, while impressive, are unlikely to be able to support streaming content to multiple Wii U controllers simultaneously.
As if that wasn't already clear, Nintendo has separately confirmed that it would not sell the Wii U controller apart from the console itself. Is this a deal-breaker for anyone? I suppose we will find out next year.
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