The highlight of the GamePad is its 6.2-inch, 16:9 display, which is really the central interaction point for the Wii U. It's a decent screen — its 854 x 480 resolution (about 158 ppi) makes really small elements a little blurry, but it’s still totally usable, and Nintendo's graphics aren't exactly high-def anyway. It's a disaster of a touchscreen, though: the resistive display often doesn't register taps or swipes at all, and you have to really mash on the screen to get it to register. Gaming's all about fast-twitch reactions, and you'll miss a lot while trying to tap the screen. The included stylus is a little better, but not much.

There are black analog sticks on either side of the screen, which force you to grip the GamePad near the top. The four-way directional pad (which you'll only use very rarely) sits below the left stick, and the A / B / X / Y buttons are below the right, above the Start and Select buttons. The buttons themselves have great travel and good feel, but they're laid out in the common Japanese style, and to me it just seems... wrong. On Xbox, PlayStation, and most other recent consoles, the most commonly-used button (both in games and for advancing and selecting in menus) is on the bottom of the diamond. On the Wii U, it's the A button, and it sits on the right side — in dozens of hours of playing I never got used to that, and never stopped pressing B when I was trying to press A. The buttons are relatively far away from the analog stick, so I assume the layout was chosen to make the most-used button easier to hit, but Nintendo should have just found a way to get the buttons closer together. If you've ever played video games before, on any console, the Wii U's going to be frustrating to use for a while.

When it's used right, the GamePad is an awesome complement to the TV interface — I loved having it as my pocket PDA of sorts during Ninja Gaiden, or using it to draw routes for Yoshi in Nintendo Land. But every game implements the GamePad differently, and most don't do it very well. Some of the games in Nintendo Land take place almost entirely on the GamePad, so all you see on your TV is "Look at the GamePad!" Others are mirrored, so you're seeing exactly the same thing on the TV and on the GamePad – it's distracting to see things happening on both screens, and I wound up constantly shifting my gaze because I'd see some movement out of the corner of my eye.

When you go to the Wii U's home screen, by default it shows your available Miis (the animated characters that represent whoever's playing the Wii U) on the TV and all the app icons and menu options on the GamePad. That's the opposite of what it should be, if you ask me, and it speaks to a much larger problem: I never figured out which Wii U screen is the default screen. Both screens are always on — sometimes you're supposed to look at the GamePad, and other times the action's happening on the TV. I was always looking back and forth, in many games not sure where I was supposed to look. This isn't a systemic problem with the Wii U, but it's really prevalent in this first set of games — Ninja Gaiden 3 was the only game I played where I could focus on the TV and only use the GamePad when I needed to change weapons or access hidden features.

Nintendo Land reminds me a lot of Wii Sports — it's the game designed to show off all the unique features of the console. It's essentially an amusement park, full of Mario Party-like mini games, knick knacks, and fun ways to kill time. Some of the games are a lot of fun — my favorite is a Rube Goldberg-like Donkey Kong Crash Course, which involves everything from tilting the GamePad to blowing into the microphone hole. The game as a whole makes ambitious use of the GamePad, coming up with all kinds of wacky ways to use it — as a steering wheel, a bow and arrow, and oh so much more. But that creates a massive learning curve, and it felt like I spent half my time learning Nintendo Land’s individual games. Nintendo Land’s creepy robot assistant is very helpful, and the instructions are usually clear enough clear, but you’ll do an enormous amount of screen-switching, and even more listening to instructions.

Nintendo Land also makes heavy use of the front-facing camera on the GamePad, showing your face on the TV as you speed through Captain Falcon’s Twister Race. It’s a fun idea, actually — one of a few things Nintendo’s done to make the Wii U a better spectator sport. It doesn’t work all that well in Nintendo Land — your thumb might obscure the camera as you hold the GamePad in portrait mode — but I hope developers come up with fun ways to use the camera in games.

FIFA 13 and Ninja Gaiden 3 fall more in line with what I'd like to see from every developer going forward. In Ninja Gaiden 3, an insane fighting game involving more brutal killing than you can possibly imagine, the GamePad is totally supplementary to what's happening on the TV; it's where you switch weapons or use your Ninja Sense to find enemies in the dark. You rarely have to even look down, since the required buttons are big and in the corners. FIFA 13 does a lot more with the GamePad: you can change your lineup or formation on the fly, and even pass or shoot using the touchscreen. You could almost play the entire game on the GamePad, though it's a clunky experience on such a large field. But you really don't ever have to look down unless you want to — FIFA 13 is a much better experience once you learn how to fiddle with your team on the GamePad instead of pausing and digging into the menus, but you never need to do it and it doesn't interrupt the game at all.

Both games, by the way, are a huge step above anything I ever played on the original Wii. At their best, Wii U games can be as good as the Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3, though they're more often still a step below in quality. The console’s 1080p output is a huge improvement, but details still aren't always as crisp as on competing platforms, and I definitely noticed more stutters and dropped frames than I expected. The Wii U seems to offer a step forward for developers, but it at best equals the existing pack.

I'm ashamed to admit how much fun I had playing Sing Party 4. Not because it's a great game — it's not, thanks to clunky interfaces and too few song choices — but because singing and dancing games are fun. There's an external microphone accessory for the Wii U (inexplicably not a wireless one — it plugs into a USB port and has a monstrous cord attached), and you just sing. There's a multiplayer Party Mode, but it's oddly done: you don't get a score or even really compete, you just kind of sing while having to stare at the TV. Yet again, the GamePad is misused — it would be a great way to show lyrics while you move around and sing, but in nearly every mode you're going to have to sing at your television and not your audience.

Just Dance 4 is basically the same — it's a fun dancing game, but it's not a particularly great Wii U game other than a fun "Puppet Master" mode that lets you dictate moves the other players have to follow. The game also requires that you hold a Wii remote while you play, which made me realize how much I've been spoiled by the gadget-free experience of playing an Xbox game with Kinect.

I quickly realized that a Wii remote was not just a baton to hold while dancing, but actually a critical part of the Wii U equation. It's necessary for multiplayer in almost every game, and for anything requiring any kind of motion sensing. It's also important for playing games designed for the Wii, which are compatible with the Wii U and play as you'd expect. Oddly, no Wii U package includes a Wii remote, but they're easy to find and work fine with the new console. Just make sure you mentally add the price of one or two Wii remotes to your purchase of the Wii U.

Multiplayer is actually one of the odder experiences with the Wii U. For most games, one player uses the GamePad and everyone else uses Wii remotes. That by itself creates a sort of disjointed experience, like you're all watching the same thing but you're on your phone while everyone else watches it on TV. In many games, the player with the GamePad is the only one really playing, and the other players are like supporting actors — it's less like co-op and more like hero and sidekick. The one exception I found was Metroid Blast, in which you team up to, well, kill bad guys. In that game the GamePad and Wii remote experiences aren’t better or worse, just different — you’re in a vehicle on the GamePad and on foot with the remote, but both are fun experiences geared for their hardware. Once again, the potential is there — it’s just not yet fully realized.

The eShop is only navigable on the GamePad, and it's a predictably simple interface — you can browse or search for games, read about them, and buy them. It reminds me of the iOS App Store a bit, with its tabs for screenshots and ratings. There are 23 games available at launch in the eShop, including everything from Assassin's Creed 3 and ZombiU to Sing Party and Game Party Champions. It's clear that this store is going to be a hub for Wii U games, and that makes extra storage even more important — the store actually warns Basic owners to plug in an external hard drive before starting to download some of the larger games.

Nintendo did a pretty good job of tying everything into a single portal — you use the same account to buy games, video chat, and save data. That's seriously faint praise, since the Xbox and PlayStation ecosystems have offered superior online systems for years, but I'm sure Nintendo owners will take what they can get.

The addition of a web browser is nice in theory, but I'd bet good money you won't use the Wii U's browser more than a couple of times. It's actually surprisingly fast, but it often renders pages wrong, it has two omnipresent toolbars that take up a lot of the already-precious screen real estate on the GamePad, and it's incredibly basic. For a quick search, it's fine (and for that reason alone I'm glad it exists), but between the sub-par experience and the terrible on-screen keyboard, you won't want to use this much.

Nintendo claims this is the beginning of a network, and says it will offer access to the Nintendo Network services on smartphones and PCs. That would go a long way toward bolstering the Wii U's ecosystem, but given the company's somewhat lackluster approach so far I'm not holding my breath.

Nintendo’s also promising a first-party platform for uniting all this content, called TVii. TVii is a combination of TV guide, remote control, (the GamePad already has some universal remote functionality baked in, but it’s limited), and on-demand service. That’s not coming until December, though. Same goes for the Nintendo Network, the company’s bid to create an access point for downloadable content and online gameplay. Nintendo’s making a lot of steps in the right direction, but it’s playing catch-up to Microsoft and Sony, whose years-old consoles already have all these features.

The whole UI is also astonishingly slow and laggy, which makes little sense on such a low-res system. Every single time you go to the main screen, it takes 10 or 15 seconds to load — apps take just as long, even when all they do is throw up the "this doesn’t work yet" error message. Mario takes a solid 30 seconds to load, during which time it shows a static photo with no indication that anything is happening. Patience is a virtue, but so is processing power. I don’t have the first, and the Wii U doesn’t have the second.