Hands-On: With Wii U’s Touchscreen Controller, Nintendo Could Radically Change Games | GameLife | Wired.com: 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.
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.