One of the things I'd always wanted to do with my Wii U was to mod it. I even bought the ds games that were supposed to help with breaking open the os before they shut down the store. I just never got around to it.
Things have changed drastically since then and I think this might be even easier now with way more to do including getting the wii u online services running again.

I'm just waiting on a power cable to see if that's what the problem with my wii u is. The cable I have seems to have some fraying on it so I'm hoping a simple replacement will get the thing working again.

Lock-down hit St. Kitts about a week and a half ago. Just curious as to what you guys have been doing.

Exercise
Everyday I have a workout routine I've made for myself that I keep track of with the jefit app on my phone. It's a 5 day split where everyday I work on a different part of the body.

Games
I've been playing minecraft with my brothers off and on. They've added so much to the game since notch left. quite something. Aside from that, I've been playing some Wii U - Hyrule Warriors, Ducktales, Xenoblade Chronicles X. I think I'm going to hack my wii u too. It's way past end of life and apparently the softmod is easy to do.

TV
I've been watching the punisher series on netflix, I still have to finish the expanse and I've been watching way too much youtube.

Movies
I've been trying to clear out a backlog of movies, usually sci-fi and action movies since I haven't been able to watch them for the last little while. So far I've watched Upgrade and underwater. Upgrade is a fun movie with a surprising ending, underwater has to do with Cthulhu. Both decent and if you're looking for a fun movie to watch, I suggest either.

Wow, that's awesome. But it comes with some bad news, Ubisoft is saying that the console last mature game from them will be watchdogs, something i plan on picking up just not sure for which system.

His videos on video games are quite something. He doesn't play games, doesn't pretend to know anything about video games and mocks people who do play games. He makes fun of the things that we take for granted in games now, things that are just so normal for us but to someone who doesn't play games it just looks ridiculous.

I wonder why they don't release a demo version of Smash Bros publicly.

I figure with so much news and trailers and whatnot, maybe we should have one central location for all of the stuff we find interesting. Andy, you remember that time we had a LAN party and Eric and I were trying to introduce Rainbow Six to the group but everyone wanted to play Counter Strike because Rainbow Six was to slow?

Take a look at the latest one:

I also own a Wii U so I think it's worth mentioning the new Zelda as well:

So there's this chatroom/forum board built into the wii u and all of it's games called miiverse. Load up a game, hit the home menu and open the miiverse. It pauses the game you're playing too so you don't need to quit doing what you're doing. It can be implemented pretty snazzily like in Wind Waker HD.
In Wind Waker you have a message in a bottle item, choose that and use it and you get to write a message. Link then throws the bottle. You find other people's messages all over the world in any body of water and washed up on shore. It's actually well done.
People can then like your messages or even reply to them. Social media in video games on nintendo's own network.
I think you don't even need to own the game, you can just browse all the games or forums Nintendo has open.

Anyway, in an almost 4chan kind of turn of events, people have overrun the raving rabids miiverse with willem dafoe posts.

Check it out.

Nintendo made some pretty large announcements yesterday, showing off certain games and promising more to come with playable version during this years E3.

Here's the full Nintendo Direct, if you don't want to sit through the entire thing, I go through the interesting points below.

Let's start with Mario and Mario Kart. Nintendo said that up intil now there has been a release of both game for their recent consoles and handhelds since the GBA days and they promise to keep up that trend with the Wii U. The same team behind Galaxy are going to be behind the new Mario (not sure if that's a good thing as I like Sunshine better). No video or images provided.

Also promised a Super Smash Brothers game, though this would be co-created with Namco-Bandai and would possibly be influenced by the Tekken franchise. 3DS would be integral to this game, which reminds me of the old Gamecube Gameboy Advance hookups...

Next, Yoshi's reentry into the gaming space. I found a video of someone dissecting the entire video of Yoshi's game.

Yarn Yoshi takes elements of yoshi's island (super mario world 2 which was a FANTASTIC game), Yoshi's story (N64 game, somewhat childish but still fun) and Kirby's Epic Yarn.

Big announcement about Monolith Soft. the game is not called Xenoblade 2 but rather Monolith's current project. At any rate, a Xenoblade 2 would be a welcome addition as Xenoblade 1 is absolutely fantastic. Loving every minute of it.

Here's a rundown of the trailer by the same people.

Iwata also mentioned a new Zelda and takingthe series back to the basics. Meaning in recent Zeldas the games have been somewhat linear, forcing the player to go to one castle after another. The original Zelda wasn't like this at all. If you could get into the castle, you could try and finish it. It's a long development time though, so in the mean time Aonuma is going to re-release Wind Waker with HD graphics and some new quests. The game looks phenomenal.

Here's the introduction of both Zelda news.

And now some stills.





Finally, I wanted to show something. It shows the dedication of Nintendo to release top quality products. There's an Wii emulator for Pc that will upscale wii and gamecube games to 1080p. Why would you want to do that? Well, the emulator, Dolphin as it's called, not only up-scales, but can change textures and even add anti-aliasing. Now I bring this up after Zelda because there was some noise about how Skyward Sword looks on this emulator. The following three videos show off what the original game looked like and what the up-scaled versions look like. We'll go by release date, so Wind Waker first.

Make sure you go to at least 720p to get the full effect.

Now Twilight Princess.

And finally, Skyward Sword.

So, with all this, Nintendo clearly could of just up-scaled and re-released, but they decided to retexture and update the lighting and add more quests. Well done Nintendo, well done.

So today was the big day for Nintendo. They finally released some info on their much anticipated but very stealthy Wii U console. There's some very surprising news coming out of this event, but we'll focus on the individual items one by one.

Specs

In a surprising move, Nintendo will be releasing two variants of the console. A standard model and a pro model. From what has been said so far, the only difference between the two is the colour, the standard is white while the pro is black, and the internal storage, the standard comes with 8gigs while the pro comes with 32.
This is unlike Nintendo. None of their previous consoles had variants with different internals until an update to the line. They would usually only continue producing the latest model though, ala NEW vs round NES.
There's no word on anything GPU or CPU related. The most I've been able to find so far is just speculation, either educated guesses based off of what technology is available now or what the dev kits have in them. The GPU appears to be based off of ATI Radeon 5000 which will share ram with the system. The card is capable of pushing DirectX 10.1, so a pretty powerful piece of machinery.
On the CPU side of things, it's been suggested that the CPU is once again a PPC processor, yay :). I love the PPC chipset, it's a real workhorse. They're saying 3 cores at 3ghz. So basically it's like an updated version of the 360 with morre RAM and a better GPU. Nice.
Enough rumors and speculation, the one thing that is known for sure, the Wii U packs 2 gigs of RAM, 1 dedicated for games and 1 for whatever else. This is 2-4 times as much as the 360 and PS3.

Games and Launch Title

Here's where things are a bit murky for North Americans. The released list is for launch window, which ends March 31st 2013. The list is nice an long though.


So some big names in there. Assassin's Creed 3, Rayman, Darksiders 2, Aliens Colonial marines, Batman Arkham City, Ninja Gaiden 3, Tekken U, Trine 2, Mass Effect 3, ZombiU, Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate, Black ops 2, Epic Mickey 2.

That's not even Nintendo, that's 3rd party. Nintendo has Pikmin 3, Nintendo Land (I was kind of saddened by this at first but the new videos below have kind of changed my mind), New Super Mario Bros U. There's bound to be a Metroid, Zelda and Mario in development, but they probably won't make the launch window.

Now the somewhat shocking thing. It seems Nintendo is becoming much more aggressive for exclusives and have signed exclusive rights to Bayonetta 2. Not sure if it's a timed exclusive or what, but I'm impressed with them. It's a step in the right direction by targeting 'mature' games and popular games and hopefully there will be more to come.

Videos of Games

Nintendo Land

Here are the minigames in Nintendo Land.



Bayonetta 2
More of a trailer than anything, no gameplay whatsoever...

Price and Release Dates

Probably the most anticipated information aside from actual specs is the price. North America will get the console on the 13th of November 2012, the standard will cost $299 and pro will cost $349US.
Australia and EU will get the console on the 30th of November 2012, the standard will cost $349 and pro will cost $429AUS. The pricing for the EU was not confirmed and Nintendo said to contact your local retailer.
Japan will get the console on the 8th Decemeber 2012, the standard will sell for ¥26,250 and pro for ¥31,500.

The pro model also comes with a subscription to the Nintendo Network Premium which is a rewards program. Buy games through the network, at 10% discount, and earn points towards other games.

So one last thing that I find amazing is that North America will get the console before anywhere else.

This supposedly was to be for internal use only. Not sure how true that is.

Anyway, looks fun and absolutely stunning visually.

I got my hands on nintendo's press media, it includes videos of games for the wii, 3ds and ds. No videos of the Wii U yet. the videos of all the games look like they could be 720, very nice. I'd post them but worried nintendo might take offence since they're not available on youtube just yet.

anyway, maybe i'll change my mind with a fast connection in montreal.

here's the spec sheet at any rate download pdf of Nintendo's E3 2011 Press kit

and for those who don't want to download the pdf here's the info.