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http://www.nintendo.co.jp/n10/e3_2006/wii/controll er.html Check out the classic SNES controller redesign on the bottom of the Japanese Wii page!

Nintendo reveals the "shell controler"
http://www.nintendo.co.jp/n10/e3_2006/wii/controll er.html
(at the bottom)

Yes, The Japanese can say 'We' (or Wii). In Katakana it's written 'U' 'I' and then a '-' indicating an extension of that final 'vowel' sound.

http://www.nintendo.co.jp/wii/index.html

There's as much difference in sound as an accent in NY vs. California (for the Americans on this board).Actually, since this is a Japanese company and since they've written it in their own phonetic script, shouldn't the gaijin out their learn to pronounce it *their* way?

I think there's a few of us getting pretty tired of Slashdot's ignorance of anything that isn't English.

Everybody here speculating about the japanese side needs to simply stop their crackpot theories about the japanese name of the console and whether it's easy to pronounce or write it.

The name is Wii in all languages, and the japanese don't go for the writing, they simply try to mimic the English pronuntiation and write it so that it reads "uii" (similar to "we" in English, as we already know), they even state it so clearly in their own Japanese website, that it's silly to be speculating at this point.

For those without Japanese skills, it says pretty much the same as the English side (albeit condensed), so I'll spare a full translation, but here's the important part: "In the image of the English 'we' word , [...] we believe the concept of the unique controller [yadda yadda]"

The name of the new console is "Wii" globally, unless Nintendo suddenly changes its mind. Deal with it.

The codename which we have used for development, "Revolution", has come to express our objective [of the project]. This name, "Wii", is the answer.

Based on the English word "We", "Wii" expresses the concept that anyone in the family can enjoy it. Also, the double "i" in "Wii" symbolizes both the unique controller and the likeness of people gathering together to play.

Interestingly, the Japanese version isn't nearly as verbose as the English one. I guess they probably didn't feel much need to justify the oddball faux-English to the reader, since most Japanese products (and all of Nintendo's game consoles) use English-derived names.

There's none of the cockamamy rationale that "the whole world will understand the name" which is present in the English or French versions. However, there is a focus on the "family gaming" concept (and by association casual gaming -- games that even your mom or grandpa would play) which is missing from the English version. With Nintendo's recent incredible success in casual gaming with the DS, this marketing angle shouldn't come as much of a surprise. One could say that the Wii is basically the extension of the DS's pen-like interface into 3-d space: the living room.

One other interesting cultural reference is the way that the "ii" bows to the viewer at the end of the animation. That would be the standard body language to use in Japan, after introducing yourself to an audience.

It means nothing in Japanese, but if put into kana (Japanese phoenetic spelling) it will have the same spelling as the french word "Oui". Japanese people know that word, just like americans do, and that may be part of Nintendo's reasoning for the name.

Or, instead of guessing wildly and missing completely, you could just go to www.nintendo.co.jp and watch the Japanese version of the same flash animation. It's written (nyuuryokusiki) as uxi-, or wi-. (katakana "u", small katakana "i", enlongation mark).

Just as with the English version, it's based on the English word "we". "wi-" is also the same way that the English word "we" is transliterated into katakana. There is literally no Japanese person who does not recognize this very simple English word, which seems to be the rationale for considering the name to be globally recognizable.

You could also go to www.nintendo.fr and see from the French version that it has nothing to do with "oui". From the French site:

Mon nom est ... Wii
Comme on prononce "nous" en anglais
En anglais Wii ressemble à "we" (nous), et souligne que cette console est destinée à tout le monde.

My name is ... Wii
Like the pronunciation of "nous" in English
En English, Wii resembles "we" (nous), and emphasises that this console is intended for the entire world.

You are correct, sir. It is written in katakana as what would be romanized as "Wii" on Nintendo's japanese Wii website: http://www.nintendo.co.jp/wii/index2.html

We present the new direction of the game system code-named "Revolution". The answer is this name.

"Wii", imaged from the English "We", represents a concept that anyone in the household can enjoy, and the "ii" in "Wii" expresses the unique controller, and that people gather to play.

Then again, the Play-Yan is also only available in Japan, but you can get it through unofficial sources. Got mine yesterday, great little cart.

I'm pretty sure the Opera cart will be available too, if you search a bit. And if the Opera cart is anything like the Play-Yan, the only thing Japanese will be the credit screen (everything else is either icons or english text).

What would've been REALLY amazing is if the DS Lite had a built-in SD slot (with built-in Play-Yan micro capabilities) and built-in Opera browser (along with extra RAM built-in instead of on a cart). Throw in a PDF viewer (via the SD slot) and Nintendo would sell these to anyone... games, mp3, movies, ebook and browser on the go!

Well, now you do. AFAIK, Nintendo, in over a century of business, have lost money during only one quarter, because of the gamecube and a price drop. Usually, they're very shrewd, and do not try for market domination as hard as Microsoft and sDoRnMy do. Thus, they do not waste as much money on advertisement, they d not use state-of-the-art technology, but instead use tried and true technology... In a nutshell, they're pragmatic and price-conscious geeks. But leave it to astroturfers to yell that Nintendo's gonna die soon ;)

>The Gamecube had SRAM main memory with a latency of 1 to 2
>cycles (about 5 nanoseconds). It only had 24MB of it, but any
>speed problems you may encounter were not a result of memory
>latency. This is also why even the 1st generation Gamecube games
>ran with silky smooth framerates.

Bullshit. How can you compare cycles for GC (485Mhz) with those of Cell (3.2Ghz)? Besides on this official specsheet (http://www.nintendo.co.jp/ngc/specific/) the access speed of 1T-SRAM is 10ns, not 5ns.

How come this is so familiar to the announcements of a new iPod.

"Nintendo DS Lite will launch in Japan on the 2nd of March. Nintendo DS Lite will be less than two-thirds the size of the original Nintendo DS and more than 20 percent lighter."

Also they prolly were a step away from calling it DS Nano, but they decided to be "original" instead (picking "LITE", which misleadingly suggests cut down features and price, oh well).

Also see this picture which complements my statement perfectly:

http://www.nintendo.co.jp/n10/news/060126.jpg

iPod for games. Well it's worth trying, that's for sure. Hope it doesn't scratch easily.

Their press release can be found here.

I guess its about those things you see on TV too:
- answer questions about certein events in history
- guess Kanji
- build new Kanji out of other Kanji
- solve match problems
- solve other typical bran problems (fold paper, find differences in pictures).

Sadly I know nobody who has an DS, so I can't even ask them if they know it more ...

You can check out the japanese homepage: http://www.nintendo.co.jp/ds/andj/

Okay, after looking at the webpage, its 100% what I imagined :)

Here are some more pics of the controllers incase you are interested:
http://www.nintendo.co.jp/n10/tgs2005/gallery.html

Nintendo of Japan is already officially dropping support for the Play Yan on Sept 11th. It's going to be replaced with the Play-yan Micro, a unit specially designed for the upcoming Game Boy Micro. The new unit seems almost identical to the old one. Which one will America get?

Nintendo of Japan is already officially dropping support for the Play Yan on Sept 11th. It's going to be replaced with the Play-yan Micro, a unit specially designed for the upcoming Game Boy Micro. The new unit seems almost identical to the old one. Which one will America get?

When I saw the Revolution I thought "Great another vertical console, what's wrong with these designers? Damn you Sony!". It's good to see that the base is removable.. And the console, placed horizontally, is just f'n sexy. Nintendo just won best looking new console in my mind.

From Nintendo's Japanese site - haven't seen all of these anywhere else yet:
http://www.nintendo.co.jp/n10/e3_2005/revo/index.h tml
The second last one has what looks like ports for Gamecube controllers on top?? If so it adds weight to the new-controllers-are-weird theory - maybe you will need a gamecube controller to play gamecube games on it?

chances are Nintendo would today still be selling paper-backed playing cards

Tactile feedback can be similated by the phone's vibrator.

There's a game called Mawaru made in Wario (sorry, Japanese only) which has a motion sensor and a vibrator built-in. The result is amazingly good.

I am a GForge user, and I'm actually quite impressed with it. We have roughly 3,000 users, hosting about 50 projects. These users are in multiple countries all over the world, and this software allows us to collaborate seemlessly, as if they were in the cubical nextdoor; and its also great to control from a project manager's point of view. Case in point, one of our projects has developers in Japan, Canada, and the US, and the project manager is in Japan. Using previous systems, a project of that size would take maybe years to get as far as it has... using GForge, its taken us a mere month.

Unfortunately, since it is for internal usage only, I cannot say who I am, or who I work for. Lets just say we are one of the top video game manufacturers.

looking at the japanese page there's serveral releases that are japanese specific (I've forgotten all my kanji, but one of them looks like a dating sim or something).

You're probably looking at one of the Famicom Tantei Kurabu titles there. They're not dating sims, they're high-school detective adventure games, and pretty good ones too.

...okay, there is a romantic subplot between the protagonist and Ayumi, but she's not the main point of the games.

I do wish they were rereleasing the Nintendo Power remake of the second one instead of the original Famicom Disk System version, though; when they already have remastered graphics and music in an appropriate form for the GBA, it's a real pity they're not going to use them.

looking at the japanese page there's serveral releases that are japanese specific (I've forgotten all my kanji, but one of them looks like a dating sim or something).

You're probably looking at one of the Famicom Tantei Kurabu titles there. They're not dating sims, they're high-school detective adventure games, and pretty good ones too.

...okay, there is a romantic subplot between the protagonist and Ayumi, but she's not the main point of the games.

I do wish they were rereleasing the Nintendo Power remake of the second one instead of the original Famicom Disk System version, though; when they already have remastered graphics and music in an appropriate form for the GBA, it's a real pity they're not going to use them.

I guess the official Nintendo page for Vol.3 has popped up now (maybe since Magic Box posted the info?), so all is good with the world.

The service was called Nintendo Power and it ended back in 2002. AFAIK, there were some SFC games that were only available thru this service. Actually, the famicon disk rewrite service just ended a few years ago too.

akamichi

Wow, so no one has heard about the pocket color?! Might be because there's no such thing you dumbass.
You might be interested to learn about the Game Boy Light though, since apparently you're not anal enough to know that.

Sorry if this post is doubled up. My PC decided to post automatically after I pressed a TAB key.

The official site site reveals some interesting specification.

CPU:
Main Processor ARM 9
Sub Processor ARM7

Fans of ARM CPU's might like this.

.. that the special edition GBA colors make it look an awful lot like the old Nintendo game watches they used to make back in the 80's?

The official Nintendo page linked in the article(!) says the price is 2000 yen, that's $19-20, so there's no "seem to think" here.
But you need not worry your cheap American ass, as the NES ports won't be released there anyway.

Poker night. Every Tuesday at 8. BBQ ribs from the local joint, a couple of six-packs, some of the foulest cigars you'd ever see, and these.

Then back to work at the lumberyard Wednesday morning.

The game's Hanafuda, sometimes called Go Stop in Korea. Nintendo still makes non-video game stuff in Japan, including playing cards. That page is Japanese, but there are enough pictures for anyone to figure out where the links go.

I know it's impossible to try to stop misinformation. But I'm going to give it the old college try, anyways.

The correct figure for Nintendo was 800,000 units shipped worldwide. Someone, somewhere made typo. And that false number is still floating all over the net.

Ummm, no. You can go read Nintendo's own financial report on their website for proof. It's 80,000, period. http://www.nintendo.co.jp/n10/news/030805e.pdf
I'm sure you'll believe Nintendo's own site, along with BBC, Reuters, Associated Press, Forbes, The Financial Times, CNN, and Money, who all state "80,000" over any Nintendo fanboy site claiming 800,000, right?

How about Sin & Punishment AS a game?

http://www.nintendo.co.jp/n01/n64/software/nus_p_n guj/index.html

http://www.nintendo.co.jp/n10/fc20nen/index.html

"I'd attribute this to the SP being the first Game Boy to have a screen that's viewable in total darkness"

That is not true, the GameBoy Light was the first GameBoy to work in the dark. It was Monocrome Indiglow screen.

Check it out here:

• http://www.angel.ne.jp/~qpqpqp/gbl1.htm
• http://www.studio42.com/vidgame/GameBoy/light.shtm l
• http://www.nintendo.co.jp/n02/dmg/hardware/light/

The original japanese SNES (or "SFC") was released in 1990, November 21st (Nintendo Japan) and the original shoulder buttons on the controller must have been shown to the press at least a few months prior to the launch. The SNES launched in august 1991 in NA.

But seriously, who writes stuff like "(c. 1991)" ("circa" ?) on its own notes ?

Even more interesting is you can still get these games from Nintendo of Japan even today.

Look here for details (in Japanese). The trick is you have to send them a blank disk (+ Y500 for the service) which is probably hard to obtain these days.

To the person who asked about the price... In Japan, the Nintendo Game Cube is 25,000 yen (at 110 yen per dollar, roughly $225)...

The "Q", coming in at $350, is a big jump... While I understand the desire to get the added feature of a DVD player, this only makes sense if you only have one TV. The moment you have/get a 2nd TV, you're far better off with a GameCube and a DVD -- seperately...

(much like the DVD player + computer argument... you can't effectively use both at the same time)

I found it amusing that Nintendo's site has an ad for the "Q"... Yeah, it's in Japanese, but check out the middle of this page...

http://www.nintendo.co.jp/ngc/index.html

In Japan you can already play games on your mobile phone

And you can plug both your Gameboy Color and the Color Wonderswan into your cell phone for net gaming.

Nintendo (Japanese)
http://www.nintendo.co.jp/n10/news/001227.html

The GameBoy Light has thus far only been released in Japan, but it does exist. It uses a backlight similar to those found in certain Timex watches. See http://www.nintendo.co. jp/n02/dmg/hardware/light/index.html for more information (in Japanese) and photos (language independant).

Imported units are available in the U.S., you just need to search a bit. For instance, I've seen them listed in National Console Support's product pages.

I've no idea if Nintendo intends to release a U.S. version.