Wii U Panorama View Double-Decker Tour

Genre: Application

Players: 1

.

Review:

Wii U Panorama View Double-Decker Tour, released on the Wii U in 2013, is a video Application that offers, for $2, a sort of virtual experience that uses the Wii U gamepad to put you in the middle of a brief guided tour. Or, to put it another way, Wii U Panorama View Double-Decker Tour is a $2 glorified tech demo that is little more than a glorified nine-minute 360-degree video. You know, the same sort you can access for free on YouTube and play on your phone or tablet?

This particular video has the viewer joining a double decker bus tour in London, being guided around popular tourist sites like the London Eye, Big Ben, and Parliament. The first portion of the video has players listening to the voice of the crowd on the bus as well as the tour guide speaking over a loudspeaker, while the latter half of the video has piano music playing over sped-up footage, with multiple cuts to have players viewing everything at different times of day. I should note that you see advertisements on other buses blurred out, something that may be necessary but that ruins the immersion somewhat.

Players are free to move around the Wii U gamepad, in 360 degrees, looking at everything around you and even the sky above if you choose (though there’s not much to see up there). Looking straight down makes for a blurry video distortion, as apparently the cameraman didn’t capture footage of his feet. Players can use the right analog stick to zoom in, use the left stick to slightly tilt the camera in any direction, and can press L or R to instantly see 180 degrees behind you, like a rear-view camera in a racing game. And at any time, you can press + to pause the video, and fast-forward or rewind to any point.

As a tech demo for the Wii U, I suppose this makes sense – it demonstrates the Wii U gamepad’s screen and motion-sensing capabilities. However, charging money for this, even as little as $2, is absurd, and not only because you can get the same thing on YouTube for free, for countless videos no less. The other issue this has is that the screen resolution is embarrassingly bad, with some absolutely nasty artifacting going on in the video. What’s more, there seem to be focus problems in parts of the video, leading to double-images. The Wii U is an HD console! How could you have not gotten this right!?

I suppose, if you’re looking to add a tech demo to your Wii U library before the Wii U eShop closes… well, this is that. But unless you have some deep interest in the topic matter and cannot be bothered to look up 360-degree videos on YouTube, I see no reason to spend your money on this.

tl;dr – Wii U Panorama View Double-Decker Tour is a 9-minute 360-degree video where the viewer joins a double-decker bus tour of London. Even at $2, this feels like an absolute ripoff when you can get a similar experience on YouTube for free, and even if this wasn’t the case, the fact that the people who produced this video couldn’t be bothered to record it with anything even remotely resembling a decent image quality is outright insulting.

Grade: F

^{You can support eShopperReviews on Patreon! Please click HERE to become a Sponsor!}

^{This month’s sponsors are Ben, Andy Miller, Exlene, Homer Simpin, Johannes, Talissa, Eli Goodman, Gabriel Coronado-Medina, Ilya Zverev, Kristoffer Wulff, and Seth Christenfeld. Thank you for helping to keep the reviews coming!}