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Microsoft Preempted The Wii U Four Months Ago – Xbox + WP7

Just rethinking the demonstrations that Nintendo put on yesterday when they unveiled the Wii U. Well what they admittedly did was unveil the New Controller (some video footage they’ve acknowledged to have use Xbox and PlayStation images for because the Wii U is a year off). It’s a somewhat novel idea to have a touchscreen controller that at times is controller but it can also be used to be an alternative controller or show different views of information other than what’s on the tv. It’s not merely an iPad with a controller as there’s still a central console that the controllers interact with. Then it reminded me of what Microsoft already showed us. I mean we all wanted the Xbox and Windows Phone integration to be live come Mango and Microsoft hasn’t announced it so presumably it’s not ready yet. But if you recall they did show us this video about 4 months ago:

So because it’s an Xbox the primary controller is actually the person moving via Kinect and yup, the Windows Phone acts like the Wii U’s New Controller. It’s a secondary device that links to the Xbox in real time and has secondary interactions. Now except from this brief demo we weren’t shown off how far that will go but it’s pretty easy to imagine that the ways the Wii U uses the controller can also be mimicked with an Xbox and Windows Phone. And remember, in the video the controller is not getting a straight feed of what’s on the tv. You’ll notice the screen image is different from the stick figures to the layout so they already contemplated that the controller and the TV would show different images.

And being that the Wii U is a year off, Microsoft now has a deadline to get this out to the market in a polished form and give devs the ability to tap into this. If they preempt the Wii U then it may just prove to be DOA.

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