I followed the various video game unveilings at the Electronic Entertainment Expo avidly, but I had to do so online as I have not yet unlocked the power to hypnotize the editors of the Houston Press into paying for me to fly to Los Angeles and play video games for three days on their dime. Soon, though, soon.

The problem with that is that things get filtered through the lens of the Internet, and as we all know, the lens of the Internet is coated with ball sweat and rage. When Nintendo trotted out demonstrations of their next system, the Wii U, there was a lot of confusion and disappointment being expressed.

The Wii U, which will be backwards compatible with the Wii and use many of the same peripherals like the Wiimote and nunchuck, is getting flak from two main issues. The first is that the official Wii U remote has basically a tablet with a touch screen in the middle of it. It's easily the biggest and most awkward-looking controller ever, and it often requires you to look away from the screen to use it.

The other is the fact that the system is designed to be much more social network-friendly, and encourages a greater level of interaction between people such as in game text messaging. Being one of those people who never go multiplayer online, and having watched the frothy rage of folks who were forced to deal with server shutdowns during the Diablo III release despite the fact that they were playing alone and didn't want to be logged into the server in the first place, I can see why this is making folks irate.

Still, I see a lot of possibilities in the Wii U, and few people seem to be talking about them. Here's some of what I hope it leads to.

Currently my favorite Wii game is Xenoblade Chronicles, a massive mixture of the last two Final Fantasies that takes place on the corpses of giant freakin' mechanical gods. It's a fantastic adventure that sucks you in for hours just exploring.

It's got some really great features, like an affinity system between players and NPCs, and the maps are huge, meant to be roughly the size of Japan. But one thing modern console RPGs still have a problem with is that any time you want to check something, such as your position on the bigger map, you have to enter a sub screen. Since games went disc, that's always a pain in the ass because of load times.

The tablet controller can eliminate that forever. I would love to just be tooling along playing the game, and instead of listening to the obnoxious sound of a drive whirring while I wanted to look up a bestiary entry, I just have to reach across to the tablet, which would always have that information handy. Speaking of which...