Let's get the superficial out of the way: The name is dumb. It's pronounced oddly no matter what tongue(unless you're imitating a siren), it too close to the "Wii" pronunciation as to cause massive amounts of confusion for proxy shoppers, and blatantly ignores the "We Too" and "Wiiii!" potential puns had it simply been called Wii II. However, that's no reason to condemn the console. "Viita" ain't much better.

Okay, with that out of the way, down to the serious matters:

The system has potential. There is no doubt a -bunch- of creative uses can be thought out using this mechanism. However, Nintendo, if they continue as they do, will sabotage it. Simply put: Nintendo hates non-Nintendo innovation.

They are the only one of the big four(Sony, MS, Nintendo and Valve) who's distribution is overtly averse to indy development. Sony may be pathetic at it, but they still have an indy channel. MS and (especially) Valve are -enormously indy friendly. Nintendo is actively hostile to indy development. The hoops one has to jump through to even develop a game for WiiWare involves an incorporated company name, a company profile and a record worth Nintendo's time to 'bless'. Then, after all that work, they'll STILL severely limit what you can do(space limitations, content issues, etc...).

Now, the non-indy companies these days are mostly averse to innovation. This is because, sadly, so is the apathetic public. If a giant megacorp is gonna spend gazillions(US gazillion, roughly 9/10 of a Canadian gazillion) on a product, they aim for safety. So we get Call of Duty #3768. And "Mostly Brown Bloomfilled FPS #6557" .

The major innovations this gen were for cheap platforms to develop for: Steam, DS, DSi, iPhone, XBLA, even PSN. The "big blockbuster" games could have interchangeable labels and no one would know.

These types of games couldn't care less if you're holding a wireless monitor. And when Sony and MS come out with what will surely be a more technically superior device in terms of raw numbers, these unoriginal megacorps will follow.

So who can create wild and wonderful new ideas for this visual peripheral-based console? The little guy. Look at what happened when the industrious reverse engineerers cracked open the communication protocols for Kinnect. The megacorps will follow once a little guy paves the way. But the little guy is the only entity willing and, arguably(and ironically), financially capable of blazing a new path.



But Nintendo historically has never cared about the little guy.



So yeah, Nintendo's gonna have all sorts of cool uses of their tech in their games. Zelda will look beautiful. Mario Party will have amazing tablet-based input on some titles. You'll be casting magic in Fire Emblem by flinging it literally off the screen and a real-life Pokedex will guide you through towns named after pantone colors.

But unless they help the little guy blaze new roads, we're gonna see just another Wii: Amazing Nintendo first party titles at a frequency of 1 or 2 each year, and a gigantic collection of whatever shovelware Ubisoft thinks it can crank out cheap and quick enough to cater to the 8 year old "I want a pony!" crowd.

Also....ummm...exactly how expensive is that controller gonna be anyways?!?