Wii U

I haven't written about the fact that I got a Wii U at the end of last year (I was too embroiled in my Britpop retrospective at the time to mention it), and it has pretty much overtaken my life ever since. I haven't been an early adopter of a console since the SNES (which I got on week of release, having got a paper round months in advance purely to save up money to buy one), normally choosing to wait a good year or more before diving into a major purchase, often waiting for the first update (like with the 3DS: I waited for the 3DS XL to come out before getting one) or until the prices of (second hand) games has started to come down for the system.

I got the 32GB ZombiU edition, which comes with the aforementioned game ZombiU, THAT gamepad, a pro controller, a Nintendo Network premium account (which effectively means that you get a £5 credit for every £50 you spend on downloads in the Wii U eShop), and a couple of different stands/cradles for THAT gamepad. This package cost £350 when I bought it, though the price of the various packages has come down a bit since then. I also got Call Of Duty: Black Ops 2 and Batman: Arkham City (Armoured Edition) at the same time for an additional £75.

When I got my Wii U, I was aware that there was a large system update already required. This meant that after I had set up a Nintendo Network profile (and later linked my Club Nintendo account to it), designed a Mii and connected to the internet, I had to download the update, which took a good hour or so. This might have been more annoying than it was had I not recently got New Super Mario Bros 2 on 3DS, which I played while the update downloaded. Still, an hour is quite a while to wait when I wanted to get straight down to playing my shiny new Nintendo system, especially when I have 300mbps broadband.

As mentioned, I got the 32GB (as opposed to the 8GB) version of the Wii U, like the majority of people. If you go online, of course, a lot of PS3/Xbox fanboys mock this as being ridiculously small; personally, I aren't that bothered, it makes the console cheaper (the forthcoming PS4 is rumoured to have a £400 launch price, much in excess of the Wii U) and I think/hope this will be enough for me; Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate aside, the only games I plan on downloading are retro Virtual Console games which don't take up that much space. In terms of DLC, I’ll probably only bother if it's cheap and doesn't take up much space anyway or if it's for the essential "AAA" games, i.e. Mario, Zelda etc. I personally find a lot of DLC to be fairly uninteresting-sounding and a bit of a rip-off. That said, you can get a 1TB hard drive on Amazon for just over £50 making it a not too expensive option to expand, and the good thing about Nintendo is that they allow you to use ANY external HD you want, rather than an over-priced "official" product *cough* Sony *cough*. A 250GB HD for PS3 is £65 on Amazon, the same price as a 2TB HD you can use on Wii U; a (Wii U compatible) 250GB HD would cost just £30.