A portion of a Vooks interview with Disney Infinity Producer John Day...

Vooks: Will the original Wii will still be able to handle all the same levels as the bigger HD consoles?

John: The Wii does have some limitations. The Wii is not nearly as connected of a console as the others so for example, the uploading and downloading of worlds does not work on the Wii because it has console limitations and what it can do on the internet and the Wii also, from a sheer technical standpoint, the Wii is not quite as sophisticated as the other consoles but we’ve adjusted some of the features of the game and some of the content but for the most part, on the Wii you still have the toy box, you still have a bunch of toys, you can still place a bunch of toys and you can still build the worlds that way so the Wii is maybe tailored a little more specifically for it’s hardware needs, but it’s pretty much the same game.

Vooks: Is that the same with the 3DS version as well?

John: The 3DS version is a companion product so the 3DS will support all of the toys and all of the power disks and all of everything, just like any other version of the game but the game is quite different. It’s a companion product that’s more suited to kind of the capabilities of the 3DS but there is a game on the 3DS that works with other toys.

Vooks: The Wii U version has the GamePad there so that’s got the toy box fully on that. So how did you find the Wii U to work with the GamePad?

John: The Wii U has some interesting capabilities and I think we’ve leveraged them pretty wisely. So, every character of course has an inventory of tools and packs that they can use and normally on every other console we’d have to press a button on the controller and then this opens up a menu and then we can select our tools and packs from that menu and scroll through this wheel of stuff and it works pretty well, but you do have to kind of stop what you’re doing, if you have a really large inventory, it can take a minute to kind of scroll through and find what you’re looking for whereas on the Wii U, on the gamepad, your inventory when you’re just playing is up on the touchscreen the whole time so you can easily switch between your tools and packs just by moving your thumb and touching what you want on the screen without ever stopping the action.

This is extremely useful – you can see what you’re doing and see so much information all at the same time because the screen is so big. You have like this extra screen and none of it clutters up the TV where you’re playing which is really pretty awesome. We also do support the takeaway play feature (Off TV Play) of the GamePad where you can use the gamepad as the screen and take it into an adjacent room or something. Now additionally, when you’re constructing in the toy box, you get something similar where rather then you script the interface off-screen to do all of your building and selecting all of your toys, you have all of the toys displayed on the touch screen on the gamepad and so it’s really easy to quickly select the toys that you’re trying to place on the Wii U. It’s a really great way to play the toy box.