SDCC12 XTRA: Hands On the Wii U’s ‘NintendoLand’

At Comic Con, The Flickcast team got to finally get our hands on the Wii U and Nintendo’s minigame packed NintendoLand. Like we talked about in our E3 coverage, NintendoLand will feature a collection of mini games inspired by Nintendo franchises, past and present. In total, NintendoLand will contain 12 mini games with half of them already announced and five were playable for us in the Nintendo lounge at SDCC.

First we got to try out Animal Crossing: Sweet Day. Inspired by the stuffed animal-like art design of Animal Crossing, this mini game puts three players on a map where they must collect candies that are placed in various locations, sometimes requiring multiple players to stand on a location together to release the candies. The more candies the players collect, the fatter their heads get and the slower they move. At the same time, they are being pursued by a fourth player who is controlling two guards using the Wii U controller, independently controlling each guard with the different analog sticks and using the controller’s screen.

Communication is key between the players in their hunt for the candy as they need to warn each other about oncoming threats and gather at certain locations to unleash the larger stashes of candy. The player using the Wii U controller gets to really have the most fun though as they get to chase and troll the other players by using pincher style attacks to corner them.