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Unveiled today. Nintendo want to change the world of video games again and this time they’re trying to bring everyone with them. The DS and Wii opened up gaming to people that never usually played games but the Wii in particular managed to alienate lot of more hardcore players. The new Wii U aims to win them back, while still hanging on to the new audience of grannies, mums and game-haters that the original managed to get on board. The new Wii U home console was announced this evening at the E3 expo in Los Angeles. And we were amongst the first in the world to go hands-on with the machine and its early technology demos. The console itself looks more or less the same as the Wii but the all-important controller was the interesting bit. Completely unlike the Wii remote it’s a huge device almost the size of an iPad, and with a large 6.2” touchscreen built into the front of it. It also retains all the motion controls of the Wii remote, but makes them much more accurate and adds an in-built gyroscope too. The rest of the controls are like a normal joypad though, with two analogue sticks, and all the usual buttons and triggers of an Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 controller. The graphics are also just as capable as the HD consoles, if not more so, but the real appeal of the Wii U is in the way it uses all the features together to create games far more imaginative than the usual dour first person shooter. The first actual demo game we got to play involved deflecting arrows shot at you by pirates, by actually moving the controller around in front of and around you like a shield. You also had to dodge the arrows in time with the music and shake them off from your shield, your natural rhythm being tested as much as your reaction time. Another game had the person with the controller playing as Mii verion of Mario and hiding in a maze from the other players who only had Wii remotes. The touchscreen gives Mario an advantage by letting him see a top down view of the levels, while his pursuers have to rely merely on team work. A third game was a kind of third person shooter where two players with Wii remotes and nunchucks co-operate to take down a spaceship controlled by the player with the new controller. It seems many of the games will expect only one person to have the new controller (extra ones are likely to be expensive) and so will be designed around different players having different goals and abilities depending on what controls they’re using. Other demos only allowed you to move the camera and change the lightning (to prove they were in real-time) but they did show off the console’s high definition new graphics, with footage of Legend Of Zelda hero Link fighting a giant spider that was more than enough to get committed Nintendo fans drooling – and cynics to admit that the new machine really is the most powerful on the block now. One demo (shown in Nintendo's main event) shows a bird flying over a landscape, and it really looks stunning - almost photo-realistic, and undoubtedly better than the graphics on the PS3. The Wii U’s ultimate success, like any console, will still be dependent on its price and its games - and about the former we currently know nothing. Nintendo themselves haven’t announced any games yet, beyond Lego open world game City Stories, since the system isn’t out until next year - but other publishers have revealed a suite of hardcore, violent games including Darksiders II, Tekken, Batman: Arkham City, Assassin’s Creed: Revelations, Ghost Recon Online and Metro: Last Light. Not the sort of games that you’d expect to see on the Wii, but Nintendo want the Wii U to have a much wider appeal than that. Not only will they have the most powerful console in the world, but one with the most variety of games too – from Super Mario to Battlefield 3. Read more: Nintendo Wii U: hands-on with Nintendo's new console | Metro.co.uk