At a dinner with journalists, Xavier Poix (pictured), managing director of the Ubisoft France game studios for the French game publisher, said that Ubisoft believes that the “asymmetric gameplay” made possible by the Wii U’s unusual new tablet-like gamepad controller has inspired the company’s game developers in a variety of ways. Not all of the eight titles will be launched at the same time as the Wii U’s debut, but all are being targeted for relatively early arrival on the new platform.
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One of the games is Zombie U, a realistic zombie shooting game with a twist. In single-player mode, a player can fight with the tablet controller, shooting at zombies that appear. But in dual-player mode, one player users a Wii remote controller and the other uses the tablet. The one with the Wii controller shoots at zombies on the TV screen. But the one with the tablet can act as the zombie commander. The commander can pick up zombie attackers and place them on the map in front of the other player. That’s an innovative use of the new controller, Poix said.
The Wii U only comes with one enabled tablet controller, since it takes a lot of processing power to render graphics on the TV and render graphics on the tablet at the same time. So you can’t play traditional one-on-one games with the tablet controller. But that has forced the company to come up with good ideas for asymmetric play, Poix said.
Another cool feature of the Wii U game is that you can take a picture of yourself with the Wii U tablet’s camera. That picture can then be superimposed on a zombie’s face, so that your face appears as the face on the zombie characters in the game.
Nintendo is likely to announce a lot of other supporters when it holds its press conference at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) on Tuesday in Los Angeles. Poix said it is easier to support the Wii U now because the graphics quality of the system is similar to the graphics quality of the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3. As a result, Assassin’s Creed III, Ubisoft’s big game of the year, will also be coming out for Wii U. But that may not be a launch title.
Another Wii U launch title will be based on the cartoonish Raving Rabbids characters, but more details were not yet available on that title.