I'm not a fan of furries. I just... the concept itself doesn't concern me. It's more the execution. All those big eyes, and weird proportions. Too weird.

It's slightly less weird, though, when you combine it with some awesome Skyrim armour. Then look at it in a gallery where it's joined by Mega Man, Link, Daenerys and, believe it or not 40K fans, Inquisitor Ordo Hereticus.

To see the larger pics in all their glory (or so you can save them as wallpaper), right-click on the "expand" icon on the main image above and select "open in new tab".

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Did you get a Wii U over the weekend? Good for you! You go enjoy that. This question is for those, like me, who did not.

I'm curious as to why you didn't go line up and get one at launch. Are you waiting for more games? Better games? A price-drop? Different colours? Or have you decided, in your infinite wisdom, to write off a console on day one, regardless of how amazing its future games and experiences may be?

Me, I never even flirted with the idea of thinking about looking into getting one. Not now. At that price, the pitch (it lacks the Wii's initial wow factor)—and launch lineup—needed to be a lot stronger. I'll be holding off until I can walk into a store and walk out with 2-3 games that I'm excited to play, not just be mildly enthused by.

Basically, a Zelda game normally does the trick.

PC Perspective, the same guys who tore a couple of Wii U consoles up on launch night, did so while taking some very nice pictures at the same time.

So if you're sick of all these glossy press shots showing the outside of the Wii U, here are some glossy shots (and video) showing what it looks like with its clothes off.

I don't know what it is about these teardown photos that make them so compelling. Maybe deep down we just like to see hardware suffer.

In addition to PC Perspective's shots, AnandTech have also done a teardown, even going so far as to pry the lid off the system's MCM (Multi Chip Module). Their pics, which are a little more sterile, can be found here.

Nintendo Wii U Teardown - Photos and Video [PC Perspective]

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This suit. Wow. When you try and create a replica of Kat's suit of armour from Halo: Reach, you have some choices to make. One is to half arse it, another is to give up. Another is to spend 10 months creating the most incredible suit of armour we've ever seen. LilTyrant from the 405th Infantry Division forums? She did the 10 month thing. And the end results are startling.

You know when you go and get measured for a tailored suit? And it fits better, looks better, and the end result is… better? That's basically what LilTyrant did. Except, instead of a regular suit, she fit herself for a goddamn suit of Spartan Armour. Then she handmade every single part of it and built it from scratch. Including a complete undersuit. This may be the most detailed Spartan armour ever made.

Incredible.

If you're interested in more details, I thoroughly recommend heading to the forum post where LilTyrant goes into the nitty gritty of how she put this all together. It truly is an incredible achievement. Well done.

Thanks to Warcroft for sending it in!

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In the past six years I've been through four Xbox 360 consoles and three PlayStation 3s. Which has been a pain, but each and every time I've been able to simply transfer my existing system account to the new console through the magic of the internet.

You'd think that would be something Nintendo could manage rather easily, but nope. Turns out that the Nintendo Network ID you create for a Wii U will, for now at least, is tied to that console. If you lose that console - for whatever reason - you lose the ID that went with it. If you buy a second-hand console, and want to import your ID, you can't. If you're at a friend's house and want to sign on using your account, you can't.

Here's the relevant statement from Nintendo's support page:

That "future" consoles thing is a little confusing, as it's unclear whether they mean the next console after the Wii U, or simply Wii U machines in the future, when this feature is patched in. We'll contact Nintendo and update if we hear back.

Hopefully it's something that can be patched in, because boy, if people lose their accounts and their consoles at the same time, they'll be pretty damn upset.

Can I Log Into My Nintendo Network Account on a Different Console? [Nintendo Support, thanks everyone!]

It's here. Nintendo's sixth console, bringing one new controller and two screens to your living room, hit store shelves early this morning in America. As you would expect, there are are successes, setbacks, and tons of questions for the newest piece of video gaming hardware. Kotaku is here to document them all.

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What's Inside:

Wii U: The Kotaku Review

The Wii U is the first new video game console in six years. It comes freighted with expectations, and must signal whether it will be a phenomenon like the Wii or a role-player like the GameCube. Nintendo isn't going anywhere, but the question is how far the next Wii can go.More »

Guy Reckons He's Accessed Miiverse Debug Mode by Accident, Can See Other People's Messages

A NeoGAF user claims that, after messing around with the Wii U's Miiverse, his console suddenly allowed him to access the service's debug/admin options. More »

Report: Wii U Cracked Open, System Memory and Speed Revealed

Nintendo, like many hardware manufacturers, was cagey about the final specs for the Wii U, choosing not to reveal the system's overall memory prior to release. Now that the Wii U is out, though, it hasn't taken long for someone to tear one apart and do the detective work themselves. More »

Some Wii U Features Load Fast. Others Do Not.

The Wii U's best trick is its lightning fast swap of the graphics on your TV and the graphics on the Wii U GamePad. The Wii U's worst trick is the absurdly slow loading time users have to sit through when accessing the machine's system menu or any of the applications in it. More »

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What to Do/What to Expect:

If Your Wii U Won't Connect To Your WiFi Router, Here's What To Do

When I tried to connect the Internet, the Wii U told me it couldn't find my WiFi router. Seems like other people have also run into issues connecting to their WiFi routers, and one helpful poster found the solution. More »

How To Transfer Wii Data to a Wii U (And Witness The World's Cutest Progress Bar Ever)

You can transfer most Wii data to a new Wii U. This is a good thing, but not nearly as good a thing as the animation that plays when you do this. As soon as it started, I had to grab my camera and start shooting this. More »

Under 18? You Need 50 Cents to Register on Nintendo Network

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. More »

Wii U Owners Bummed Out By Huge Firmware Update

Depending on your Internet connection speed, it could be between 1 and 4 hours before your Wii U 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. More »

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Day One:

The Wii U eShop Is Live and Stuffed With Games

The Wii U's eShop for downloading games just went live. This thing has a lot more games in it than I'd expected. More »

What's the Gray Market Like for the Wii U? Check Back After Black Friday

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. More »

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A New Community:

Nintendo's Miiverse Dreams of a Civilized, Spoiler-Free Online Community

Welcome to the Miiverse, the online community launching today with the midnight release of Nintendo's Wii U, but before you can access it, you must read through the Miiverse Code of Conduct, portions of which may have been paraphrased from Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. More »

I'm Adding Friends To My Wii U, And I'm Not Even Using Friend Codes!

The Wii U firmware update that just went live and will be mandatory for any of the system's online features has enabled me to start adding friends to my system. The system is pretty easy. More »

Hey Wii U Owners, Share Your Nintendo Network ID Right Here

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. More »

24 Hours Before Wii U Launch, Reggie Surprises The Nintendo Faithful in NYC

Nintendo of America boss Reggie Fils-Aime did the Jimmy Fallon show on Friday, got some dinner and then... he took a stroll to the Nintendo World Store. More »

Jimmy Fallon is No Match for Reggie in Metroid Blast

Before working the line at Nintendo World's Wii U campout, Nintendo of America Reggie Fils-Aime went back on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon to show off the new console and play a couple of games, Metroid Blast in NintendoLand, and New Super Mario Bros. More »

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Games:

ZombiU Is Like an FPS Demon's Souls With Zombies. That's A Great Thing.

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 and perma-death. This is a very good thing. More »

Ninja Gaiden III on Wii U: Well, It Sucks Less.

When I popped Ninja Gaiden III: Razor's Edge in I was surprised to find, well, an actual Ninja Gaiden game. The combat feels more like Ninja Gaiden I & II, and they even removed the awkward dad-murdering scene. Hey, thanks for that!More »

Nintendo Land: The Kotaku Review

Nintendo Land is no Wii Sports and it is no Super Mario 64. That's the bad news for people who hope Nintendo has once again made a day-one masterpiece for its newest console. The good news is that Nintendo Land is a fun collection of surprisingly well-made smaller games. More »

New Super Mario Bros. U: The Kotaku Review

New Super Mario Bros. U is an extraordinarily important game. It's the flagship title for a new piece of gaming hardware. It's the first-ever high-definition Mario. More »

The Wii U's best trick is its lightning fast swap of the graphics on your TV and the graphics on the Wii U GamePad.

The Wii U's worst trick is the absurdly slow loading time users have to sit through when accessing the machine's system menu or any of the applications in it.

I shot a video tonight of the Wii U at its fastest and slowest. This is the best and the worst the Wii U has to offer. Hopefully the slowness will be improved in the future, maybe through a firmware update. But it's impossible to know what's gumming things up and whether Nintendo will or even can fix it.

NeoGAF user Trike claims, after messing around with the Wii U's Miiverse, that his console suddenly allowed him to access the service's debug/admin options.

As you can see in the pictures posted above and below, he appears to have access to screens that let him monitor users, reset their passwords and even delete... something (whether that's delete a password or their entire account is unclear).

Now, you might be thinking that seems a highly unlikely thing to happen. Which it is. But then, this is Nintendo's first real try at this home console internet business. There's going to be missteps and mistakes. This might just be one of them.

I wonder what that Yoshi's Wii U thing is. Most commonly-used words on the service right now? Or, as is being speculated, something to do with Miiverse demos?

UPDATE - OK, fun's over, Nintendo closed the loophole. For the record, here's how Trike claims he accessed it:

Go to your Miiverse menu. Hover of the "X Close" button, and literally press X on the gamepad. Boom, you just became a master hacker. At least you would have been like 20 minutes ago when it was still working.

I think I either hacked the Wii U Miiverse or I am stupid. [NeoGAF]

The Wii U version of Skylanders Giants doesn't look noticeably better or worse than the Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 version. It plays exactly the same as well—the Skylander toys are placed on the USB-connected portal, they come to life in the game, adventure ensues. For the Wii U version of Skylanders Giants, the Wii U control pad makes all the difference.

For one thing, the game is fully playable via the control pad. Launch it, select the option to play on the controller's screen and the television or monitor goes blank, allowing player to indulge in some rather pretty portable portal mastery as long as they stay within range.

When the control pad is used in conjunction with a monitor, however, it changes the way I play in a small but significant way. While playing on the television the control pad displays the statistics of the Skylander currently in play.

Who cares about a stats screen? I certainly didn't while playing through the game on the Xbox 360. On that console the statistics were nestled within a menu, and I don't think I ever looked at them once. Even when selecting which collectible stat-enhancing headgear to wear, I just went with whatever looked nice.

Now that I have those statistics at my fingertips they suddenly matter a great deal more. Maybe Tree Rex would play better if I upped his Elemental Power at the cost of his Critical Hit—two stats that might-as-well not have existed for me at all before the Wii U version.

Tapping the button on the bottom left corner of the control pad screen swaps the stats for an objectives checklist, making it a bit easier to keep track of the items one collects and the dares one attempts to accomplish in order to completely clear each of the game's stages. Unfortunately the game skips over what might have been the most useful screen indicator—a timer counting down to the level's time-attack goal, an odd omission that makes the implementation feel rushed.

I was worried that ports of games released previously on other platforms would use the Wii U control pad as nothing more than a stats screen. Skylanders Giants proves that's not necessarily a bad thing.

When I was about 15, about the time you should begin to read serious books and challenge the accepted wisdom of your forebears, I got a copy of Total Baseball, an enormous, flaccid, yellow paperback about the size of the Manhattan phone book. I studied it at the foot of my bed next to the hardbound Macmillan Baseball Encylopedia which looked more like a social register from 1941. One was an annually changing volume; what truth it contained today may be, and likely would be, revised in the coming year. The other, at the time, was the establishment of names and numbers any decent person should know.

In 1990, Macmillan's stats read like the back of a baseball card; in order: games, at-bats, hits, doubles, triples, home runs, and so on. Batting average was down by your right hand. Total Baseball had the traditional measures, but also gave room to things like on-base percentage. It discussed concepts like Tom Boswell's "Total Average," whose fundamental bases gained/bases out comparison (with messy, stray numbers like being hit by a pitch or interfered with by the catcher) is more easily fashioned simply by adding someone's slugging and on-base percentages—the venerated OPS of today.

Yet when I fired up Hardball! on my Commodore 64, and I had a choice between hitting Rawlings or Joworzski in the sixth slot, I didn't dither on those concepts or look through the three-ring binder of stats I'd kept to parse them out. (And I had entire games scored, play-by-play. I could have done it.) I went with the generally accepted accounting practice of hitting: batting average.

It was safe. It was known. It was, to be shrewd about it, the most likely tip-off to how programmer Bob Whitehead had weighted each hitter's skill in that game (though once I figured out how to switch batting order, I came to suspect that greatly influenced how each player performed, too.)

Today, my tenure as a baseball video gamer far outstrips my brief time as a baseball player or a sports writer. Dad and I love to jaw about trivia ("most victories, career, no postseason or All-Star game appearances," or "most wins, no starts, no losses, no saves, single season,") but for me there's only one practical application to baseball stats: setting my lineup in MLB The Show or measuring my player's performance in Road to The Show.

And my approach in both of these instances is straight down the middle, an undecided voter in the kind of culture-war balloting Major League Baseball just went through on Thursday, when Miguel Cabrera of Detroit prevailed over Mike Trout of Los Angeles for the American League MVP. Cabrera and Trout were, like candidates in the presidential election America just suffered, not personal adversaries, but props in a campaign waged principally by ideological forces that hate each other, know each other, and deserve each other.

If you ask me who I favor as a thinking person, it's Trout. Runs batted in depends too much on the performance of others in the lineup; batting average is not as good a measure as on-base percentage, or OPS for that matter. Home runs are, yes, an indisputably true outcome. But Cabrera's candidacy was built entirely on offense, where Trout's excellence as a fielder and baserunner, and therefore as a more complete player, can now be quantified by newer measures.

New technology doesn't go away. Sabermetrics are part of the mainstream culture, and those who ignore or insult them are dinosaurs. Fight it all you want, there's no repealing the printing press or the reflecting telescope.

What Sabermetrics are not, in box scores, on-screen graphics or video games, are part of the shorthand that forms game-to-game or play-to-play expectations or advises a casual or intermittent observer who is worth watching. Pitching victories, RBI, fielding percentage are a vulgar language, but it's still one most people are speaking, because the game's institutions—broadcasts, box scores and fantasy baseball—don't try to make things like WAR or BABIP relevant in the daily conversation. Maybe they should. Maybe because things like WAR or BABIP depend upon statistical sample sizes much larger than a single game or three-game series, they're not useful in April or May. But it still shows, however accurate they are, how distant they remain from a day-to-day discussion essential to a season 162 games long.

MLB The Show has an advanced Sabermetrics stats service that, if I am not mistaken, is acquired for a small fee through the PlayStation Store (and because I don't remember buying it this year, if you've bought it in the past it may carry over.) In any season mode, it'll measure all the performers in the league by these stats. They are way, way, way down to the right on your season stats, along with 20-year-old Total Baseball standards like Range Factor, Basestealing Runs, Isolated Power and, yes, Total Average. But to sort according to them, or analyze a trade by them would take extraordinary persistence.

More likely, a gamer would just use something much more subjective and completely opaque—the rating assigned to a player in the game. Give Sony San Diego credit, however, in MLB The Show they don't just give a great player an overall 95 or a journeyman a 78. Everyone gets a rating expressed as a meter, and when you compare players, the meters are never one underneath the other, so you can say to yourself "alright, the game says this guy is better." Deliberate or not, it's a design choice that factors in subjective, eyeball appraisals with objective reasoning.

Deep down, I'd like to think that's why I haven't taken up arms for either side in baseball's great stats argument. It's not because I don't care. I do. But the baseball world I live in can have it both ways.

I can set my lineup according to something mind-bogglingly complex but ultimately, objectively correct, like an overall player rating. I can also look at my player in "Road to the Show" and see that, with 100 RBI by September, he's the middle-of-the-order, everyday superstar I want him to be at the end of such a long investment, even if he can't field a lick. (I'm terrible at that aspect of RTTS.)

Because, unlike a sports writer, or a statistician, my observations come as I am actually playing the game, making decisions within it, and bearing the consequences, processes that deliver their own understanding of what players are really the most valuable.