The Wii U controller, which features a 6.2" touchscreen. Wii U will be released in 2012, Nintendo said on Tuesday morning at E3. Nintendo kept the actual Wii U console tightly locked down, with only the front face visible. It looks a bit bigger than the Wii, but not by much. Nintendo said it would use a proprietary high-density disc format. New Super Mario Bros. Mii is one of the bigger titles announced for Wii U. Players can enjoy it on the television or on the system's personal screen. In Shield Pose for Wii U, a player uses the touchscreen controller to block arrows being fired at him from a pirate ship on the television. Playing Battle Mii for Wii U, a player fires on his enemies from above, using the new controller's motion and personal viewscreen to fly a UFO. The player holding the screen controller in Chase Mii can see two views of an entire maze. The other players, using Wii remotes and looking only at the TV screen, must try to catch him. The Wii U controller, as seen from the back. Two triggers are on the top of the unit and two more on the back, to be pressed with your index fingers. The Wii U controller has a headphone jack and a volume slider, so you can listen to the soundtrack alone when playing games on the personal screen. A wider view of a Shield Pose player, showing the pirate ship on the television. Members of the press line up to play with Wii U following Nintendo's Tuesday press conference.

LOS ANGELES – A massive 6.2-inch touchscreen that can display high-quality images will be the central feature of Nintendo's new videogame console when it debuts next year, the company said Tuesday at the E3 Expo. Much like the revolutionary Wii motion controller before it, the new console – called "Wii U" – is an attempt to radically change the way people play games in their living rooms.

[eventbug] The Wii successor's touchscreen controller can display anything: exactly what's on the TV screen, the same action but with a different camera view, or something else entirely. Since the controller also employs motion sensors, you can change the viewing angle or your aim on the touchscreen by moving your hands or your whole body. You can use the touchscreen as a controller, but since the device also boasts the same full range of buttons and joysticks as a standard gamepad, you don't have to.

Nintendo has unveiled some pretty crazy controller designs that have left gamers scratching their heads before, but this one – previewed by Wired.com in advance of Nintendo's Tuesday press conference here – runs away with the cake. It's huge: If not for the contoured grips and all the buttons, it would feel something like playing a game with an iPad. It's also imposing: While the Wii controller was designed to resemble the simple, harmless TV remote in a bid to lure casual gamers, the new touchscreen device looks like something off the bridge of the Enterprise.

But if Nintendo can develop some killer apps and communicate effectively to consumers, the addition of touch controls to home games could prove just as appealing to casual players as the Wii was. The best games for Wii U might be played with one finger.

Whether or not this turns out to be a good idea, the Kyoto gamemaker needs to shake things up. While Nintendo achieved unprecedented success with its 2006 game machine and its slate of hit games like Wii Sports and Wii Fit, the sales of the console and its software have dropped off. Sony and Microsoft both delivered motion-control games for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in Wii's wake, so Nintendo needed to come up with another totally new way to play games at home to further differentiate itself from its competitors.

Nintendo also needed more oomph. Wii's lack of high-definition output was a non-issue in 2006, but as of late it has become a real sore spot with gamers – and game developers, who want the most powerful machines possible. While Nintendo did not reveal much in the way of technical specifications or its targeted price for the upcoming console, it did say the Wii successor would deliver graphics in 1080p and feature HDMI output.

The new controller for Nintendo's next game system features a 6.2-inch touchscreen controller, the company said on Tuesday.

(Image courtesy Nintendo)

Hands-On Tech Demos ——————-

Nintendo got things off to a good start at its Tuesday press conference, unveiling a demo reel of some major concepts that will use the controller. A golf game could let you put the controller on the floor to see where your ball lies. A new Mario game, titled New Super Mario Bros. Mii, will let you play it entirely on the controller, no need for a television.

Giving Wired.com a sneak preview of Wii U, Nintendo didn't show either of these concepts, but ran through a variety of tech demos that showed how other new types of games might work. The one most likely to garner gamers' attention offered a glimpse of what classic adventure game series The Legend of Zelda might look like on the high-def new console, which Nintendo said it will release sometime between April and December 2012.

As Link duked it out with a giant hairy spider on the TV screen, we could see all sorts of secondary info on the controller screen: the dungeon map, Link's health bar, the items he was carrying. These icons no longer cluttered up the TV screen and got in the way of the high-definition visuals. The cool part was this: With one tap of an icon on the touchscreen, the images flipped. Suddenly, seamlessly, the game was running on the touchscreen and the map, etc., was on the television.

Two other barely interactive demos showed how the system provides what one of the Nintendo representatives called "a window into a game world that wraps around you." On the television screen, we saw a hummingbird flying between blossoming cherry trees, swooping down into a lake beneath a massive Japanese temple. The same real-time demo was shown on the controller screen, but by moving the controller around we could get any view we liked of the hot hummingbird action.

Another demo, called Panorama View, showed footage from a panoramic camera driving down the streets of Tokyo. The television displayed a standard view from inside the car facing front, but by pointing the controller around the room we could watch the buildings and people go by from any angle we liked.

The other three demos that Nintendo showed were fully playable mini-games. These, the company cautioned, were not necessarily parts of retail products. But they were fleshed out enough that I would be surprised if they were not released as part of a mini-game compilation close to the launch of the new machine next year.

The first, Chase Mii, plays almost identically to a game that Nintendo released for the GameCube in 2003 called Pac-Man Vs. In that game, one player took the role of Pac-Man and had a complete view of the maze full of dots while looking at a Game Boy Advance screen. The other three players played ghosts and tried to catch Pac-Man, but they could only see a small area around them. Catch Mii was quite similar, except it used Nintendo's Mii avatars and took place in a colorful circular maze. I had two views of the action on my touchscreen – on the right, I could see the full maze and attempt to avoid the other three players. On the left, I could see a smaller area around me – perfect for doing some quick moves to get out of the way if someone was about to grab me.

Meanwhile, the other four people in the room each had a Wii remote and were using it to control their characters on the TV. The new console will be compatible with all Wii games and devices, Nintendo said; the gamemaker will continue to sell Wii remotes as accessories for this new system for use in games like this one.

Another mini-game was called Battle Mii. Here, two players played a first-person shooter game on the TV, running around an arena and attempting to shoot down a third player, who flew above them in a UFO. Holding the new controller, Player 3 could see a wide view of the whole arena, zooming overhead in a UFO, trying to stay hidden and taking potshots at the other two players, who scurried about on the ground.

The final demo, and the one that really got me hooked, was called Shield Pose. Nintendo did not explicitly say the game was created by the same developers that created the clever, addictive Rhythm Heaven for Nintendo DS, but the demo clearly had their stamp on it. In the mini-game, you stand on a pirate ship while another ship fires plunger-tipped arrows at your craft. The pirate captain yells where the arrows will come from – left, center, right or overhead – in rhythm, and you hold the controller in those positions to "catch" the arrows on the lower screen, then toss them off by flicking the controller down. All this is done to the specific rhythm of a song, so it is quite a challenge.

Nintendo kept our preview session entirely focused on the play experience, and revealed very little about the specifications of the upcoming machine. The company said the games would come on "proprietary high-density optical discs" and that the new console would use internal flash storage for downloaded content, which would be upgradable with SD cards or USB sticks.

While the manufacturer said other playable game demos from Nintendo and third-party software makers would be on the E3 show floor, Nintendo seems to be leaving a lot to the imagination for now. We don't know how third parties will approach developing for the new system, or whether they will encounter the same problems selling software as they did with Wii. We don't know whether Nintendo will have such a killer app as it had in Wii Sports, which can make all the difference in the world.

But what's certain is that Kyoto is rolling the dice in a big way with its new game machine, hoping that lightning can strike twice.

All photos: Jon Snyder/Wired.com except bottom photo courtesy Nintendo

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