The Wii U Start-Up Screen Is Like Nothing Ever Seen On Consoles Before

“So like Reggie Fils-Aime?” I asked. Could he be making appearances on our systems?

Sure. “We could also do some messages directly from Nintendo to that point,” he said.

In addition to the Miis, Fils-Aime says there will be “what [they’re] calling ’tiles.'”

“These’ll be the key games that the community are playing, buzzing about,” he said. “Because of the deep linkage through Nintendo TVii with video services, these could also be movies. They could be TV shows, could be a range of different content, but it’s bubbling up through the community, with the exception of— I think the maximum of three tiles that we might be sending in terms of Nintendo thinking that something’s interesting.”

Fils-Aime: “We have spent a lot of time and invested a lot of money to get our connected experiences right.”

So that’s the start-up screen. To get to the rest of your content—like the game in your drive, the newly announced Nintendo TVii and the digital eShop—you’ll have to hit the home button. There are no channels on Wii U like there were on the Wii; instead you’ll have “options for where you wanna go from there,” Fils-Aime said. You could jump straight to Netflix, for example, or go into the separate Miiverse application for more social options.

This Miiverse application won’t resemble Nintendo TVii in terms of interface or options, but it will let you send messages, see what your friends are doing, and recommend games to the people you know.

As we’ve seen, New Super Mario Bros. U uses the Miiverse in an interesting way: as you walk through the world map, you’ll see messages from other people offering tips, complaining about how hard a given level is, or even bragging about how awesome they are. Fils-Aime says other games can integrate the Miiverse in similar fashion, “but it’ll be driven by the individual developer.”

They’ll be showing other examples of how games can integrate the Miiverse in the near future.

As for online networks? Reggie says the same thing: Stay tuned.

“And by that I mean, it’s gonna be best for us to show the specific mechanics, how it works, for me to sit here and try to explain it to you without some nice visuals is gonna take our entire interview time,” he said. “The key message I would communicate to your readers would be this: We have spent a lot of time and invested a lot of money to get our connected experiences right. And so when we highlight how the eShop will work, how the Nintendo Network is going to work, I think people are going to be very pleased.”

We’ll have more from our extensive interview with Fils-Aime in the coming days.