We are now just four days away (at least here in the US) from the launch of Nintendo's latest piece of hardware for the living room, the Wii U. And once more, we have yet another last minute video that details some fairly important details.
This one is again hosted by Nintendo's president, Satoru Iwata, but unlike previous clips, it’s not translated. More than likely, everything covered here will be regurgitated by Bill Trinen in just a few, but why wait any further for vital information?
Thankfully, some of the denizens of NeoGAF, from which the video above was found, have people who understand Japanese. The meatiest bit pertains to USB storage; even those who decided to splurge and got the Deluxe set might want to know the following.
Pretty much any kind of hard drive is supported. Though it's best to use something that is powered by an outlet. Nintendo says that they cannot functionality for self-powered drives. When it comes to capacity, upwards of 2TB can be supported.
But the drive must be formatted for the Wii U and the Wii U alone. Meaning, it will not be useable when connected to a PC. At launch, you'll only be able to connect on USB hard drive at a time, but that might change in a future update.
SD cards will be supported as well, and can contain Virtual Console games, WiiWare, and save data for all those things. But not Wii U save data. That's for the system only, it would seem.
Another important subject covered was backwards compatibility. As everyone knows by now, Wii Games, WiiWare titles, and Virtual Console games cannot be played on the GamePad. They must all be played on your TV, in something called "Wii Mode".
But there are plans to have a Wii U Virtual Console that will be compatible with the GamePad. Whether this will allow the Wii's legacy offerings to be playable on the go remains to be seen.
