I am sure others have found out what happens when the Gamepad battery dies in the middle of a game that doesn't require the gamepad... If not, nothing really happens if the game doesn't require it! I was playing Mario 3D World at a friends place last weekend, and I never bring the gamepad charger when I bring my Wii U to a friends place. I really don't feel like bringing two large power bricks in my backpack. For the most part the Gamepad battery lasts enough time to play a couple great games with friends. I usually turn off the screen when playing games that don't require it. So while playing a 2 player game using only Wii motes with the gamepad screen turned off, the battery completed died, and I didn't even notice until we were about to stop playing. Afterwards, I noticed that I was still able to navigate the Wii U Menu and such with no difficulties or any complaints about no gamepad connected. I then turned off the Wii U entirely and turned it back on to see how the Wii U would react to having a dead gamepad in the room... Well, for the most part it turned on just fine... However, I had my password enabled, which is what I usually do when traveling with my Wii U to protect my Nintendo Network account. So I was unable to enter my password without the gamepad, so I could no longer use the Wii U at my friends place.

So, this got me thinking... If I could play the Wii U without the gamepad when the battery died, that means I should be-able to play with the gamepad completely off, if I so choose to. Unfortunately Nintendo doesn't give you an obvious way of doing this. There is no "Turn off gamepad" option anywhere on the system, you are forced to either kill the battery or... place the gamepad in an area of your home where the Wii U cannot see the gamepad, and then power on the Wii U. This works perfectly! This means, that if you wish to bring the Wii U to a buddies place to play some multiplayer Mario or something on his nice 60" TV, you don't need to bother bringing the gamepad charger along for the ride. After all, the current Mario games absolutely do not require the gamepad in order to play them.

You can view a video of this in action and how to actually do it as well on my YouTube page here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYyH2EoAXEk

I just hope Nintendo makes this a feature in the next Wii U firmware update, as having the gamepad completely off while playing the Wii U is currently a somewhat tedious task.

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