With a press conference in London, Nintendo has put an end to all speculation that has occupied fans for almost a year and a half: the Wii will be in European stores on December 8 and will cost 249 euros. Brits will have to pay 179 pounds for the new console. In recent weeks, various sources had speculated on a lower price and an earlier introduction, but the Japanese are keeping their promises: the maximum price of 250 euros has not been exceeded and the device will be in stores well before the holidays, although people in the Far East clearly not aware of the existence of Sinterklaas. ‘It’s a pity that it wasn’t possible sooner,’ says spokesperson Bianca Stirnweis-van Dort, ‘but that has everything to do with the available production capacity. If the Wii is released, it has to be done in decent quantities.’
Unfortunately, little can be said about the technical details at the moment; the clock speeds of the Broadway CPU and of the ATi-manufactured Hollywood GPU will be announced “in the coming weeks.” Stirnweis-van Dort could not say why those figures are not yet available: ‘It’s really already in full production, so the specifications are definitely fixed!’ In any case, it is already known that the European version comes with the ‘Wii-mote’ and an accompanying ‘nunchuk’, produces PAL images, has 512MB of flash memory, and can be expanded with SD memory. The optical drive can read both 8cm GameCube discs and DVDs, although playback of video DVDs (yet?) is not possible. The console is also equipped with two USB ports and WiFi to communicate with the rest of the planet. The Wii is connected to the Internet 24 hours a day if possible, even when it is turned off. ‘That makes nice surprises possible’, the press release hits the nail on the head, but simply visiting web pages is fortunately also possible.
Via the game console’s Virtual Console, lucky owners can use the internet to choose from a selection of two decades of Nintendo classics, with N64, NES, SNES and GameCube titles available for purchase. The TurboGrafx and Sega Genesis catalogs have also been plundered for the benefit of the new nextgen, as promised. The Wii also comes standard with five sports games that should give a good idea of the innovative controller use. The main part of the game selection consists of new games, of which about twenty are being launched at the same time as the console, including Wii Play and The Legend Of Zelda: Twilight Princess from Nintendo itself. Other game developers include Red Steel, Need For Speed: Carbon and the very interesting sounding Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz to the catalog. The Wii games will have to fetch between fifty and sixty euros, while an extra controller will cost 39 euros. Gamecube controllers and nunchuks cost 19 euros each.
Sony and Microsoft have to be careful: the small competitor has badass hardware