Gearbox boss says impressive Wii U 'a really nice bridge' to the next generation

Nintendo's Wii U demo reel at E3 last year contained a clip of Aliens: Colonial Marines, but we haven't heard much about the version since then. Speaking with Gearbox President Randy Pitchford, we tried to surgically extract a viable specimen of information out of him, but he refrained from getting too specific.

"Nintendo still has a lot to announce with their platform, and it's not up to us to go ahead of them," he told Joystiq. "I think it's a great platform and I'm really excited about it, particularly with this game, there's a lot of exciting opportunities like, 'Wow, my motion tracker is there, and I can move it like this!'" he said as he moved his arms side to side. "There's just so much cool stuff."%Gallery-152244%

Brian Burleson, the game's producer, was a lot less forthcoming with details on the Wii U version, but he was still positive about it. "You'll have to wait," he told us. "But I play it all the time, and it's really good."

That's great for this particular game, but what about the system in general? How does an acclaimed developer like Gearbox feel about it? "There's a lot that we can do with that screen," Pitchford said. "It's a really cool system -- it's pretty powerful. I want to be careful, because I don't want to risk any sensitive information that Nintendo's not ready to share yet, but in our experience it's a great system. I think it's a really nice bridge to the next generation. I think people will be surprised. I don't know off the top of my head how many of the specs they've released, so I want to be very careful not to jump the gun, but we're very pleased with the hardware. And even since they gave us our first alpha kit, our very first 'pre-prototype' development hardware that they kind of let us play around with, they've done so many things to make the platform better. So it's getting better for us as developers."

To be fair, Pitchford is very passionate about gaming and gets really enthusiastic about a lot of things -- he professed extreme excitement for Duke Nukem Forever, after all. But his words, particularly about the system's power, might be encouraging to those who worried the Wii U wouldn't even stack up to the PS3 in terms of graphical capability.