By Nelson Schneider - 11/30/12 at 02:44 AM CT

I have officially owned a WiiU for exactly one week. Unfortunately for me, the shipping on the two extra games I ordered online was a little slow, so I haven’t had a chance to play them yet. Fortunately, my WiiU is the Deluxe Set that came with a “game” right in the box: “Nintendo Land.” After playing the pack-in game and messing around with the WiiU’s other features for a week, here’s what I think of the first Generation 8 console.

The fact that Nintendo is selling the WiiU in two configurations is nice, but ultimately meaningless. The price difference between the $300 WiiU Basic Set and $350 WiiU Deluxe Set isn’t enough to make anyone say, “Gee, I can’t afford $350, but I can totally swing $300! Let’s do this!” Especially because the WiiU Basic Set doesn’t come with any games or demos, meaning anyone buying a Basic Set will have to drop $60 for a game (or $40, if they’re buying “Sonic and All-Stars Racing Transformed”), making the end cost identical. In addition to the pack-in tech-demo game, the Deluxe Set also includes FOUR times as much internal flash storage, a charging dock for the controller, and some little plastic feet that allow the rounded console to stand on its side. Considering that charging docks for other game consoles regularly run between $20 and $30, even if the Deluxe Set didn’t come with “Nintendo Land,” it would be the only sensible choice to purchase.

The hardware itself is pretty nice to look at, though the glossy black plastic accumulates fingerprints far too easily. Like the original Wii, the WiiU sports a front SD card slot, but unlike the Wii, also sports 2 front USB ports (along with the standard 2 back USB ports) in order to provide plenty of places to plug-in the almost-mandatory USB hard drive for digital purchases. The GamePad controller that seems to be the WiiU’s raison d’etre is pretty huge, but feels light and comfortable when held in-hand. The screen’s brightness is fully adjustable, which helps extend the battery life somewhat, but still doesn’t take it past about 3 hours. Fortunately, I found that plugging in the GamePad while playing enables it to recharge incredibly fast.

The downsides of the GamePad are the fact that Nintendo won’t replace controllers with dead pixels and the button configuration. The GamePad is a large controller, yet its face buttons are all sized between the buttons on the DSlite and the buttons on the Wii Classic Controller Pro. If they were the same size as the CCPro’s buttons, they’d feel pretty good, but as they are, they feel a bit on the small side. Nintendo also flew in the face of convention with the nonsensical decision to put the right analog stick above the face buttons rather than below. I imagine this unorthodox stick placement will cause so-called “hardcore” gamers to flee the WiiU in droves and play multi-platform shooters on platforms with standard controller layouts (good riddance).

One of Nintendo’s big bungles with the WiiU is the mandatory day-one software update. Out of the box, a WiiU will play any of the launch games a person might stick into the disc slot. However, the much-hyped online functionality of the Nintendo Network all comes down the pipe as part of a massive update. I don’t know exactly how big the update is, but reports place it anywhere from 800MB to 5GB, which is excessively large, especially when EVERYONE who connects a WiiU to the Internet will be pounding Nintendo’s servers at the same time. After unboxing my WiiU, the update took about an hour-and-a-half to download on the MeltedJoystick HQ’s impressive 20Mbps connection (I didn’t even want to try it at home on my 1.5Mbps “best effort” goodness from Windstream). While there have been plenty of rumors flying around about WiiUs getting bricked by interrupted downloads, I can confirm that these rumors are patently FALSE. My WiiU’s connection to Nintendo was interrupted constantly during the download due to Nintendo’s servers buckling under the load. Instead of bricking, my WiiU just told me the download had been interrupted and presented a button for me to press on the touchscreen to resume the download. The WiiU’s updates use a TRUE resume feature too, which is very nice, as it allows interrupted updates to start where they left off instead of restarting from the beginning. Regardless, it was incredibly annoying to have to babysit the WiiU while it updated and press a button every 10 minutes to restart the download. The installation of the update was somewhat slow, which is where the danger to the impatient occurs, as cutting the power to ANY electronic device while the firmware updates will brick it, leaving the WiiU no better and no worse than its competition in that respect.

The Nintendo Network update adds a whole slew of video services, including YouTube, Amazon Instant, Netflix, and Hulu Plus, to the WiiU System Menu as well as Wii backward compatibility and Nintendo’s own take on social networking: The Miiverse. Miiverse doesn’t really strike me as a social network so much as it does a Nintendo-centric message board. There is currently no form of portable network ID for Miiverse, comparable to Xbox Live or PSN, that can be used outside of the WiiU, leaving Miiverse trapped on a single device, at least for the time being. However, Nintendo seems to want to make Miiverse central to the WiiU’s existence, as a Miiverse hub appears on one of the two screens (the TV or the GamePad) as long as the console is idling on the System Menu (this can be switched at will, at least in the System Menu). From this hub, it’s possible to see what games are being played by what portion of WiiU owners (it’s kind of hilarious that 90% of WiiU owners have been playing “New Super Mario Bros. U” while barely anyone has touched the WiiU version of “Call of Duty: Black Ops 2”), represented by the number of Miis gathered around each game’s icon. These Miis randomly spout comments made by their owners. I’m not exactly sure how Miiverse decides which comments to randomly display, but it seems to have something to do with the number of “Yeah!”s given to a comment, which are the Miiverse equivalent of Facebook’s “Like” button.

Miiverse is heavily moderated to ensure that nothing dirty gets by (no naughty words or penis drawings), and to prevent spoilers. While naughty comments just get deleted, spoiler comments have their content hidden, but are still viewable with a single click. Perhaps the greatest feature of Miiverse is the fact that comments can either be typed or hand-written using the GamePad touchscreen. Almost all of the current comments seem to be hand-written, and most of those seem to be amazing drawings showing off the artistic talent (or tracing talent) of the Nintendo fanbase. My personal favorite use of Miiverse hand-written comments is the ability to include Rage Faces on every comment. Even people with no artistic talent whatsoever can manage a Rage Face, and the simple, strong emotions associated with those faces go hand-in-hand with videogaming in general.

The final feature added by the massive Nintendo Network update is the WiiU web browser. After using (trying to use) the abortion-in-a-microwave that is the PS3’s web browser, I was dubious. As a lifelong supporter of Mozilla, I’m also pretty picky about how I browse the web. That said, I have to admit that the WiiU web browser is pretty amazing. While it doesn’t support Flash or Javascript (and thus eliminates almost all browser-based gaming) [correction, according to MJ's web developer, it does support Javascript], it supports HTML5 (including HTML5 video!), seems to be rock solid and standards compliant, and is snappy and responsive… it even supports tabbed browsing, and is available from within any game by tapping the hardware Home Button. I don’t even know why the WiiU has a YouTube app when the WiiU web browser can play YouTube videos perfectly. If Nintendo added Flash and Javascript support, they would have the de-facto best gaming platform browser. Of course, adding those things would probably ruin the stability, so I guess it’s a wash.

Other than the online features, the WiiU is supposed to have a bunch of great TV-related functionality built-in. Unfortunately for current WiiU owners, this functionality “will be available in December.” The only TV functionality the WiiU currently supports is using the GamePad as a TV remote to turn the screen on/off, change inputs, adjust volume, and do everything else a standard TV remote does. This functionality was remarkably easy to setup compared to the few universal remotes I’ve ever messed with, but seems kind of useless.

Overall, the WiiU still feels unwieldy and unfinished. Aside from huge updates and missing features, all of the WiiU’s existing features seem to creep a long at a snail’s pace. Doing something as simple as moving from the System Menu to the System Preferences app initiates a ridiculously long load time. Moving from any game or app into the Miiverse, the Friend List, the eShop, or any other built-in feature encounters similar loading lag. Aside from the sluggishness of the system software in general, the dual-screen setup doesn’t really seem to know what to do with itself. While the contents of the two screens can be switched on the system menu, at other times the two screens mirror each other, at yet other times the GamePad screen shows content while the TV shows nothing but a big WiiU logo, with no switching allowed. Is the WiiU a console or a handheld? Nintendo doesn’t seem clear on that at this point in time, leaving the WiiU with a bit of a bi-polar feel. In situations where a player doesn’t plan to use the GamePad, it’s still possible to turn-on the WiiU using a pre-synched Wiimote, but the GamePad turns-on as well. It seems obvious that the console and the controller are one-and-the-same, yet it remains unclear how the two halves of the WiiU whole will interact with third-party games. Based on “Nintendo Land’s” demo games, the WiiU will provide plenty of novel input methods and enable developers to do some interesting things with augmented reality, sub-screens, and custom buttons. Of course, developers will actually have to make an effort to include these features, meaning that all of the multi-platform games will probably ignore them.

The WiiU got off to a rough start, but I still think the console has potential. My biggest worry is that Nintendo will try to turn the WiiU into the DSXXXXXXXL and start incorporating the gimmicky touch controls that ruined the DS ‘Zelda’ games into everything… of course, they’ve had enough time with the DS and 3DS that hopefully they’ve gotten that nonsense out of their system. Nintendo needs to remember that the WiiU is a console. People who buy consoles and hook them up to TVs generally want to play games on the TV, not on a handheld. If the WiiU uses its handheld functionality as a supporting feature instead of a main feature, I think it can create a niche for itself in the console market. Hopefully the next major firmware update will add some clarity as to the direction Nintendo is planning to take WiiU owners.