Resident Evil: Revelations Wii U Supports Off-TV Play

A few weeks ago Official Nintendo Magazine (ONM) teased that their next issue would contain news about a new Wii U title. That issue is now on newsstands and it turns out that the tease was much ado about nothing, because the big story is that Resident Evil: Revelations is coming to the Wii U — something that Capcom announced last month when it revealed that the 3DS game was getting a multiplatform HD port.

Surprise…

At any rate, the article does reveal a few bits of information about the upcoming game as it relates to the Wii U, although it’s nothing terribly Earth shattering. It looks like Capcom is developing Resident Evil: Revelations to support both off-TV play and the Wii U Pro Controller. Since Wii U Pro Controller support is pretty much an expected feature, the real news here is that Wii U owners will be able to enjoy a true survival horror Resident Evil on the GamePad while kicking back on the old porcelain throne.

The news of Resident Evil: Revelations off-TV play support also brings up an interesting Lion King circle of life-type situation. Capcom first developed and released Revelations for the 3DS handheld, then began work on upscaling it to HD so that it could be played on TVs via consoles. At this stage they also began work on getting it running on the Wii U GamePad so that it could be played as if it was still a handheld game. Thus completes the circle of life!

It’s also worth noting that just a few weeks ago Capcom claimed that the reason why they were not developing a Vita version of Resident Evil: Revelations was because they were focusing on getting the game ported up to “a large format screen”, which would really help “players get sucked into the horror vibe and enjoy the game to its fullest extend”. Ironically, while making that statement the were also focused on getting the game running on the Wii U GamePad’s touch screen, which is notably smaller than “a large format screen”.

Resident Evil: Revelations launches on May 21, 2012 in North America (May 24th across Europe) for everything but the Vita (Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Wii U, and PC) for $49.99.