Wii U Experience to the rescue. Nintendo is hosting a smattering of hour-and-a-half mini-E3s for their Wii U demos nationwide, and I got an invite to the Chicago one via Club Nintendo. Despite spending the majority of my time soaking in the huge quantity of 3DS StreetPass tags produced by the enthusiast attendees, I managed to put a little bit of time into NSMBU and Pikmin 3 to get my answers.
But seriously, have you ever been to an event populated so densely with Nintendo Nerds in this post-3DS era? The tags!!! I popped open my system after walking in, and had to spend ten minutes right there clearing them out, so I could be sure to get more. I brought my wife's system along so we could maximize our haul, and found myself sitting on a couch, choosing Puzzle Swap pieces with one hand, while making sure not to duplicate anything already present on the other system with my other hand. Between the two of us, we got something like 60 new puzzle pieces, including every single pink piece we had been missing up until then. Awwwwwwww yeeeeeeeeeah.
But hey how about those Wii U games, huh. Let's start with what I found in Mario. The sometimes-maligned shake-to-spin mechanic present in New Super Mario Bros. Wii was probably motion-mapped out of necessity, since the sideways Wii Remote control scheme didn't offer many options for button-pressing. Luckily, for me at least, I think the shake actually feels pretty good, and lets you perform the momentum-sustaining technique without having to move your thumb off the jump button. With the Wii U GamePad, though, the lack of buttons is clearly no longer an excuse. We know the shake is still supported, but can you press a button now as well?
Yep! I actually saw a hint of it in a video a few days ago, Mario gliding in the flying squirrel suit and a "ZR" prompt appearing above his head. As you might guess, ZR is indeed the button that lets you execute the spin move without shaking the controller. ZL does it, too. And since it's mapped to shoulder buttons, not face ones, you can still perform it without removing your thumb from the jump button. You'll still need to shake if you're using Remotes in multiplayer, though.
I don't know how to take a picture that isn't blurry.
That was really my one driving NSMBU question, but I was also a little curious about some less significant mechanics pertaining to the baby Yoshis and the flying squirrel suit. Through some fiddling, I found that the baby Yoshis don't do anything special if you feed them a lot. In Super Mario World you could grow a baby Yoshi to adulthood by feeding it enemies, but these babies seem to be permanently stunted, providing only a measly 200 points for each goomba eaten, without even a chain bonus for eating bunch in a row. I also found that the nice long-distance horizontal glides with the flying squirrel suit can only be performed if you don't shake the controller to gain height. Once you shake and fly upwards, you go into a flappy slow-fall and lose the ability to initiate a horizontal glide. You actually can't fall at a normal speed at all when you have the flying squirrel suit equipped, and will always flap until you hit the ground. Ground-pounding is your only option if you want to land quickly.
Next I dug into Pikmin 3. I had a lot more I wanted to figure out here, some of which came out while writing about Pikmin 2 vs Pikmin 3 a month ago. The big one was whether the cursor aiming was powered by MotionPlus or the traditional IR camera. Miyamoto confirmed some sort of MotionPlus involvement in his on-stage demo, but since so many media outlets described the aiming as using the IR camera, I figured maybe the MotionPlus was used for the "shake Remote to throw Pikmin" action that was also mentioned.
Well, it's definitely not that, since shaking the Remote didn't do anything during my play session. But when I placed my hand over the front of the Remote, cutting off the IR camera's ability to function entirely, the on-screen cursor was completely unaffected. So there we have it: aiming is MotionPlus-based, not IR. I bet it still supports IR for people without a MotionPlus-capable Remote, but it was definitely using MotionPlus during my demo, and almost certainly at E3. I can't fault showgoers for being fooled, though, as it felt nothing like the plodding aiming in The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, and was just as snappy as the aiming in the Wii versions of Pikmin and Pikmin 2. It's good to know that we're just looking at purposefully different gameplay styles here, not a limitation inherent in the MotionPlus technology.
Another curiously-missing motion technique was the "charge" move that was supposed to be mapped to the shaking of the Nunchuk. In my play session, shaking the Nunchuk actually performed an action I couldn't find a button for earlier: dismissing your Pikmin group. It feels pretty nice, actually, shaking the 'Chuk to dismiss the group. It's sort of a dismissive action anyway.
I played around with hitting left and right on the d-pad to roll Olimar and his entire Pikmin group to the sides, and found that it was occasionally useful when trying to maneuver some 'Min around corners if they were having issues with the pathfinding. This is the kind scenario where I'd use the c-stick or down-d-pad pointing swarm-movement technique in previous Pikmin titles, but since those seem to be completely missing in Pikmin 3, the rolling was really my only option. With the "charge" move that I had heard about not actually being present in the demo, I'm pretty worried about the fact that you can only assign Pikmin to tasks individually by throwing them, and have no swarm-assignment options. We'll just have to wait and see if there's no way to do that in the final product.
The last things I looked into were the conditions for the appearance of Pikmin 3's new targeting cursor. As I had suspected in my earlier Pikmin 2 / Pikmin 3 piece, the aiming reticule indeed turns into a target only when the item of interest is within the range of a thrown Pikmin. From far away it retains its standard shape, and thrown Pikmin will land short. Pikmin throwing actually felt slower in Pikmin 3 than in Pikmin 2, and I found that I couldn't launch as many as quickly as I was accustomed to. It's possible it was psychosomatic, though.
I didn't actually play any other games at the event, I just looked at a few other titles here and there, not feeling particularly impressed by the HD-ness of it all, but I blame that more on the tiny TVs than anything. I only managed to get my hands on the Wii U GamePad for about 60 seconds, so I don't have any real impressions of the thing, which is probably for the best from a consumer-standpoint—it'll be all that fresher for me when I finally pull it out of a box later this year. I find myself shunning pre-release gameplay these days for that very reason, I prefer my first time with a game or new hardware to be... special.
The event ended a little early, since they needed to reset everything for the next group of attendees. The hugely enthusiastic hosts gathered the throgs of human meat by the entrance, and dazzled them with a brief Wii U quiz while I desperately pleaded with an attendant for 20 additional Pikmin seconds to confirm the Nunchuk-shake functionality. She made sure I put on my wrist strap. Then we were funneled out, through a corridor of shrieking and high-fiving hosts, with the promise of an Amazing Gift at the end of our journey. It was a marshmallow mushroom on a stick.
But hey, at least I got to sate my curiosity re: piddling little video game details. Hopefully some of you were curious, too!