New Wii U owners unite! If you've got your hands on Nintendo's new console and you want some new friends for your Miiverse, get in here and post your Nintendo Network ID below.

The Wii U's release opened a floodgate of new releases today, and also made about a dozen early launches on the new console finally playable. Tuesday returns things more to normal, with Hitman: Absolution arriving on consoles and Assassin's Creed III coming to PC.

Kotaku thanks our bargain-hunting watchdogs Dealzon for assembling The Week in Games. Visit Dealzon for the latest in video game values, or follow them on Twitter.

Today

• Nintendo Wii U Console and GamePad
• Disney Epic Mickey 2: The Power of Two (Wii U, 360, PS3, Wii, 3DS)
• Sonic and All-Stars Racing Transformed (Wii U, 360, PS3)
• Call of Duty: Black Ops II (Wii U)
• New Super Mario Bros. U (Wii U)
• Wipeout 3 (Wii U)
• Tank! Tank! Tank! (Wii U)
• ZombiU (Wii U)
• SiNG Party (Wii U)
• Nintendo Land (Wii U)
• Tekken Tag Tournament 2 (Wii U)
• Transformers Prime: The Game (Wii U)
• Skylanders Giants (Wii U)
• Arkham City: Armored Edition (Wii U)
• Ninja Gaiden 3: Razor's Edge (Wii U)
• Warriors Orochi 3 Hyper (Wii U)
• Darksiders II (Wii U)
• Transformers Prime (Wii U)

Monday

• Angry Birds Star Wars (PC)
• Little Inferno (PC)

Tuesday

• Hitman: Absolution (360, PS3, PC)
• History Legends of War: Patton (360, PS3, PC)
• PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale (PS3, Vita)
• Assassin's Creed III (PC)
• Rise of the Guardians: The Video Game (360, PS3, Wii, 3DS, DS)
• Family Guy: Back to the Multiverse (360, PS3, PC)
• Persona 4 Golden (Vita)
• Hey Ice King! Why'd you steal our garbage (DS, 3DS)
• Scribblenauts Unlimited (PC)
• Mystery Masters: Bonus Collection (PC)
• Horse Lovers Ultimate Compendium (PC)
• Twisted Lands: Origin - Trilogy Pack (PC)
• Planetside 2 (PC)
• Borderlands 2 (Mac)

Thursday

• Iron Sky Invasion (PC)

As said earlier, Nintendo is serious about making Miiverse into an elegant online service for a more civilized age. They want to keep it safe, too, and make sure some adult in the house is aware of what the kids are doing on it.

The best way to accomplish that seems to be requiring a nominal fee, payable by credit card, to register a minor on Nintendo Network. The price is $0.50.

We put this to the test at Kotaku and while there is a means of lying about your age to get a Nintendo Network ID, Nintendo has at least tried to weave things to catch junior in a lie.

This is what happens:

When creating a Nintendo Network ID, the first thing the system does is spit out a warning that says if you are under 18 years old, you have to get your parent or legal guardian to approve your use of the service. OK. Sounds good. You button 'yes,' whether Mom or Dad really have said 'yes.' Either way, you're then taken to a profile screen asking for your birthday.

Answering that honestly then triggers the console's parental controls, if they aren't already active. This can be fine if a kid is creating an underage profile with his parents' consent. For those who aren't, they now have to either defeat the parental control or, if that hasn't been set yet, create the PIN and security question answer that establishes them.

Let's say junior then decides to set up the parental controls (which could, down the line, result in a parent asking why parental controls had been set on the machine already.) He'll still have to follow that up with the 50 cent credit card payment to create his profile on Nintendo Network, on the assumption most minors don't have a credit card.

Ah, you say. What if I'm 14 years old and just lie all the way through, and put in my birthday as 18 years old? You can do that. And you've created a profile that says you're 18.

It's not a perfect system, and can be defeated early on by a child determined to lie. But as I learned when I was a kid (well, I wouldn't say I learned as I persisted with the behavior) a second lie doesn't eliminate the chance to be caught, it multiplies it. And Nintendo's still performed its due diligence.

And, yes, you still need a credit card to buy something from the eShop.

Nintendo charging 50 cents to register minors on Nintendo Network [GoNintendo]

The Wii U's MiiVerse service is currently offline. Trying to access it spits out an error message like the one you see above.

It's too bad because Nintendo's ambitious social network for its new console is pretty cool. I've been messing around with it for much of the day. It lets Wii U users post typed or hand-written messages (and drawings) to message boards dedicated to various Wii U games and apps. It lets people reply to each other, upvote comments, follow each other and even post screenshots and spoiler-tagged spoilers.

Sadly, it's not accessible right now.

Launch woes!

UPDATE: As of 6:40pm ET the Miiverse is back.

We saw the first Grand Theft Auto V trailer recreated in the original San Andreas (GTA: San Andreas, to be exact). Then someone set it in Grand Theft Auto IV. So, with the second trailer's release earlier this week, it's natural we get that one rebuilt inside IV as well. This is by YouTube user underage117.

If you want to compare it to the original, it's embedded below. Or watch them side-by-side here (might want to mute the volume on one.) My suspicion is that this won't stop until Grand Theft Auto V is recreated in Grand Theft Auto IV, which will be a hell of a trick considering its map is, at most, about 1/7th the size of what GTA V's is said to be.

GTA V Trailer #2 remade in GTA IV uploaded by underage117 [h/t Adriaan V.]

Technically, ZombiU reviews can start hitting right now. Realistically, we won't have a review until early in the coming week.

Sorry about that. Too many Wii U games to try, to many system features to cover and too many snags with what could be a terrific, albeit imperfect game.

I can tell you some stuff...

I've been playing ZombiU on and off for several days. The short-short version is that the game is impressive and is, amazingly, something of a first-person Demon's Souls with zombies. It's very much a roguelike with lots of stat-building an perma-death. This is a very good thing.

You start the game as a survivor in a dark, disaster-struck London. You're running from the newly-undead. You get a cricket bat and a backpack and begin to receive instructions from a mysterious man who calls himself "The Prepper". His voice emanates from the GamePad. He's creepy, like the director from Rockstar's Manhunt.

As you explore this dangerous version of London, you scavenge for weapons, health items and tools. The Prepper motivates you to explore farther. He sends you on missions to turn the power on or to get to a weapons cache in Buckingham Palace. He talks about a previous plague that hit London. This new one, oddly, seems to have stemmed from greed. It's a financial crisis rendered as zombie apocalypse.

Zombies are everywhere in the game, and if you fight too many of them directly, you'll likely die. When you do, your character becomes a zombie. You start back at the safe house as a new character. If you find your old zombie self and kill him or her, you can reclaim items that were in your backpack. That's reminiscent of Demon's Souls. So is the special spray-can that players are given that can be used to scrawl messages in the game world. Those messages supposedly will show up in other players' versions of the single-player adventure. Another Demon's Souls-ish idea: other players' zombie selves can show up in your game. You can also track the performance of your zombie self/selves in games around the world.

Unfortunately, none of those features that required an online connection—the spray can, the crossing over of zombie characters from game to game—was accessible until a few hours before the Wii U launched last night.

Worse, earlier in the week I ran into two game-ruining bugs. The first occurred near the end of the game's first supermarket mission. I was told to get back to the safe house; I tried and was killed. I spawned as a new character... in the safe house. The game's voice-over suggested I'd made it back; the game's quest log thought I hadn't. I retraced my steps, but the game wouldn't fix itself. I had to wipe my save. The second time I reached the end of the supermarket quest, my GamePad froze and my console emitted a shrill noise. I had to unplug the Wii U to fix that. This didn't just set me back, but it got me worried about an otherwise-promising game. This morning, I loaded the game and immediately got a day one patch. Hopefully it will address these issues.

ZombiU has a lot going for it. Played with the GamePad, it controls as a twin-stick FPS, but it's bolstered by the screen in the Wii U's controller. That screen provides a lot of map data and can also display the contents of your character's backpack. You can move things around with your finger and drag backpack items into quick-select holster spots. You need to access your inventory a lot, but there's a catch. The game does not pause when you look down at the GamePad to, say, open up the backpack and grab a healing item. I a zombie is chasing you down (you can see them approaching your character on the TV), you'll feel a lot of pressure. It's a good kind of panic and shows how well the GamePad's screen can improve the experience of a horror game.

The GamePad can also be held up and moved around like a scanner as if you're suddenly inside the virtual world. This allows you to swiftly pan around a room your character is in to sniff out where new items are or aren't. This beats having to walk to each filing cabinet or shelf and poke at each thing to see what's there, Fallout-style.

The game is surprisingly full of good ideas and is designed for hardcore players who want a challenge. Death is a huge penalty, since you lose your items, most weapons and also any leveling up you did by using your guns. But respawning as a new character and trying to chase your old zombie self down is a lot of fun. Tense, nerve-wracking fun.

I've only played the game for a few hours, so I can't give it a fair review. I don't know if there will be more bugs, worse quests, better enemies, or even a whole new batch of good ideas. I can't yet describe how well the online systems integrate into the game. There's too much left unexplored, so for now, I hope these impressions help.

And in case you're wondering, folks, I can at least tell you this: ZombiU is way better than the first Red Steel, Ubisoft's equally hyped but immediately inferior launch game for the original Wii.

Last night, after attending the midnight Wii U launch event in New York City (which was a lot of fun!), I went home to download the big day-one firmware patch.

But. When I tried to connect the Internet, the Wii U told me it couldn't find my WiFi router. I played around with all the settings, entered my WiFi password roughly four thousand times just to make sure it was right, and spent about two hours trying not to take a hammer to my GamePad. Eventually I decided to head to sleep and see if someone else would find a solution.

Someone did. This afternoon, I googled around and eventually found this thread on the Nintendo tech support forums. Seems like other people have also run into issues connecting to their WiFi routers, and one helpful poster found the solution.

Here's forum user GAMEDEV:

Ok so far heres what works, entering in everything manually.

1. Go into connection types, Hit "Manual Configuration"

2. Input your SSID

3. Input the correct security type, this is key.

4. Put your password in properly

5. For ip address "Do not auto obtain".

6. open up cmd in your computer, type in ipconfig

7. Now input that ip address but add 10 to the last number so "192.168.0.1" will be entered as "192.168.0.11"

8. Enter the rest of your info inside such as subnet mask and default gateway exactly as you see it in your ipconfig.

9. Now hit next, hit configure now for your DNS. When asked about DNS hit "Dont auto obtain".

10. For the first server put in 8.8.8.8

11. For the second server put in 8.8.4.4

12. Hit Next, when asked about a proxy hit no proxy

13. Leave mtu as the default

14. it should work, if not check the ip and that it is the internet ip + 10. Good luck

Following his instructions worked perfectly. Now my Wii U is all Interneted up. So if you run into any WiFi issues, try this method out and it should help.

As of this writing there are at least 630 Wii Us listed on eBay for minimum bids or buy-it-now prices of $520 or more. Not a one of them has any takers. Even though it took less than a day for GameStop to sell out its preorder allotment, even though the retailer claims a waiting list of 500,000, even though retailers like Best Buy and Toys 'R Us are said to be canceling orders because they oversold their day-one stock, the console is commanding between a $50 and $175 premium in the gray market on day one, depending on the system.

That's still better than the price point the last time we looked at this—on Oct. 4, the highest bid on a Wii U preorder was $465. This morning, it was $517.99, though the highest bids for auctions ending this afternoon were coming in between $425 and $450 for the deluxe model. (One standard model auction, ending at 1:30 p.m. EST, was holding at $306.05, a whole $7.05 more than MSRP.)

Most of the deluxe consoles listed seem to be asking for $700 which, coincidentally, was the highest the original Wii went for on eBay during the 2006 holidays. (Though, here's some chutzpah for you: $2,999 for an 8 GB basic unit.) Maybe some folks are trying to recapture the magic from six years ago. Nothing yet points to the absolute mayhem of 2006, when the Wii was much more of a cultural phenomenon and the West—the world, hell—was buying things in better economic times.

Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime told us that he thinks supply will be better for the Wii U than it was for the Wii, not because demand will be softer but because Nintendo is doing more with their new console. "Certainly for the first two and a half years we were chasing demand [with the Wii], and while it's too early to say we won't have the same challenge, we are going to be putting more hardware into the Americas," he said.

This is, however, only the first day. Anecdotal reports coming over Twitter suggest that some people are even, crazy enough, walking into a store and just buying the console. It's possible that once everything really dries up—check back a couple weeks after Black Friday—those $700 price tags might be getting some action.

Wii U [eBay]

That's Samuel L. Jackson in a publicity shot for the Video Game Awards, which he'll be hosting in less than three weeks on Spike. I can think of a thousand things Jules might rather be holding, and so can you, probably. So let's get going with this week's 'Shop Contest, featuring a special guest exploitable.

Samuel L. Jackson, presenting the 2012 Video Game Awards.

Samuel L. Jackson, presenting the 2012 Video Game Awards (alternate)

Special guest presenters (non official).

Here are the rest of the guidelines for entering.

1. Create your 'Shop and save it to your desktop.
2. Go to the comments beneath this post and click "reply."
3. Click "Add Image" in the comment window.
4. Click "Upload an Image Instead." Then click the "Choose File" button. Browse your desktop, find the image, and click "open."
5. If you prefer, you can upload the 'Shop to a free image hosting service. I suggest imgur. Then click "Add image" in the upper right above the comment window. Paste the image URL into the field that says "Image URL."
6. Add editorial commentary (you can't post an image without some kind of text in the comment field), then just hit submit and your image will load. If it doesn't, upload the image to imgur and paste the image URL as a comment. I promise I will look at it.
7. This is important: Keep your image size under 1 MB. If you're still having trouble uploading the image, try to keep its longest dimension (horizontal or vertical) under 1000 pixels.

All set? Great. Now, Gentlemen, start your 'shopping!

That's a progress bar 1/8th full after 30 minutes—a four-hour process at this rate—for the Wii U's infamous firmware update, said to be 5 gigabytes (according to Geoff Keighley of GameTrailers TV, and repeated by numerous others). Sony, you are officially off the hook with the PS3's interminable, poorly timed and mandatory system updates.

It's not like Nintendo's just fixing typoes in the help file, either. This update lets you access online features, transfer data from a Wii, visit the Miiverse and use other online features. So, basically, you're bringing home an unassembled bicycle, and depending on your Internet connection speed, it could be between 1 and 4 hours before that battle station is fully operational. Expect this story to resurface again around Christmas morning.

When it does, expect it to bubble up where it did last night: Twitter, everyone's forum of first resort for complaining. We've collected some voices of frustration for your information and amusement, beginning with the person who supplied that picture above, @LouisLamarche

Fun fact, Louis, the San Andreas Fault slipped 0.17 millimeters in the time this update took.

This was the big scandal kicking off the topic. Ben Fritz writes for the L.A. Times. His update was so slow, evidently he thought his machine had frozen, so he shut it off. It's now completely inoperable, unless there's a recovery mode. Yes, that raises the question of what happens if the power goes out in the four-hour span of a Wii U firmware update. My advice: get a UPS and don't update during a hurricane.

Make that three, Ben.

Make that three, Julien.

Good thing they're not sharing this conversation over Miiverse. Oh, that's right, nron10 can't access Miiverse yet.

This guy obviously has a white Wii U. I hate to say it, my friend, but this is your answer, and it probably explains why NintendoLand is not offered to basic model owners.

Don't know how this guy is pegging it at 4.7GB—there seems to be no way to expose how big the firmware update is. But most Tweets put the size of this monster at 5 GB.

Your campout begins when you get home, @comet5o4.

Yeah, try talking to @LouisLamarche. Compared to you, he's getting 0s and 1s by carrier pigeon.

Yeah, well, that'll be me, whenever my machine arrives from Toys 'R Us.