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Gamers who buy Nintendo's Wii U will enjoy higher texture resolution that both the XBox 360 and Playstation 3, developer Gearbox has said.

Put simply, this means that the Wii U's graphics will look considerably better than it's current-gen competitors.

Gearbox co-founder and chief creative officer Brian Martel told IGn: "We've got the [Aliens: Colonial Marines] engine running on the Wii U, and as far as the console goes, you're going to see textures at a resolution that you haven't seen on [the current] generation."

He did admit that: "[We're] finding out what kind of final tech specs the Wii U is going to have.

But we like the system a lot. We think it's going to be a really cool stop-gap in between this generation and the next generation. We think it's really smart of Nintendo, and the fact that as a platform it's a lot more capable for hardcore first-person shooter-style gaming - for us that's fantastic."

More than anything else, though, it is the Wii U's new touch screen controller that has really got Gearbox excited, with Martel saying: "But the thing we're most excited about is: what can we do with the controller? So the obvious thing for us is that we can do the motion tracker [on the controller screen], or the sentry gun information - all that kind of stuff. That stuff is really sexy for us. Getting the information off the screen and onto this device is a fantastic idea, right? So can we have a HUD-less environment? Yeah, probably. That would be fantastic, right?"

The Nintendo Wii U is expected to be on sale in time for Christmas 2012.

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