It’s fair to say that the view we are currently afforded of Nintendo’s future products is rather lopsided.

We know quite a bit about new hardware. The 3DS is already in our hands and the Wii U was unveiled months ago. We have been made aware of the consoles’ technical capabilities, know a good deal about their potential as well as their limits, and, as a result of this knowledge, we can speculate as much as we want about their future applications.

But the software picture is a little foggier. The recent 3DS press conference has finally cleared up some of the questions surrounding upcoming 3DS games, but the roster of what we can expect on the Wii U has remained, for the most part, a mystery.

All we have to go by are the tech demos Nintendo displayed at this year’s E3 and a smattering of third-party port promises and developer testimonials. The demos, dubbed “experiences” by Ninty, were no doubt designed to showcase the hardware’s potential as well as sate our collective curiosity surrounding the first reveal of what is the eighth generation of the home console wars. Some were completely floored by the presentation. Others, flatly unimpressed. Most of us, however, seem to sit somewhere in the middle- pleased, by far- but clearly wanting to know more about what we will actually be able to play when the launch date rolls around and that dual-sticked tablet is firmly in our hands.

At the moment, there is no reason to expect any new landslide of information. The console’s launch is a year away, give or take. As with any new hardware, the kinks must be worked out and the possibilities thoroughly tested. From a business standpoint, it’s in the interest of a company to generate a thick layer of mystery surrounding a new product. And, as fans of an innovative company, we’re frankly lucky to have any information at all. If it were Apple, we’d know practically nothing.

So, barring the unlikely occurrence of a careless and inebriated Nintendo employee accidentally leaving his or her prototype Wii U console at a local Kyoto sushi bar with a first version build of Super Mario Universe still in the disc drive, we can, at the moment, only imagine the awesomeness that is, no doubt, to come.