Wii U Third-Party Demos Powered by the Competition

In the process of announcing the third-party support Wii U will see -- the likes of Batman: Arkham City, Ninja Gaiden 3, and Assassin's Creed will make their way to the new system -- Nintendo showed off the above sizzle reel during its E3 media briefing yesterday. The idea was to show that these games really will be on Wii U and they'll look every bit as good as their Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 counterparts. As it turns out, there's a very good reason why there was no denying the latter point.

After talking about the Wii U having the horsepower to allow the "best third-party content" to come to the system, Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime was asked by GameTrailers' Geoff Keighley if the footage seen in the reel largely came from Xbox 360 and PS3 versions of those games. Fils-Aime responded, "Absolutely, because we're talking about a year away from when the system is going to launch." He followed up by claiming the final Wii U versions of the games in question will look every bit as good as they do on Microsoft and Sony platforms, but he wasn't willing to say they will look better.

"In terms of how good it looks, it's going to be driven by what the individual developers do," he explained. "The system is going to be 1080p. It's going to be high definition. And so, again, tick that box -- that's done. Now it's about, what is the new experience that we're going to bring to bear?"

Having seen how nice Zelda in HD looks, it does seem clear that the system has some horsepower behind it, and there's really not much of a reason to doubt what Nintendo is claiming. It's not difficult to see why people might feel shafted, though, after Nintendo showed what was implied to be Wii U footage that was actually running on competing platforms. 

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