It's Wii Wii Time!
Nintendo’s New York festivities kicked off, as predicted, yesterday with a couple of major announcements. Its newest console, the Wii, will be launched in the US on November 19th, for an almost staggeringly small price tag of $249.99. At just under half the price of a low end PS3, gamers will get the console, the Wii remote controller, a Nunchuk control add-on and not 1 but 5 of the Wii Sports games demonstrated at E3 2006.
A series of on-screen channels acts as a veritable home page to customize and control the system. The channel menu lets you pick a game, get news and weather, view and send photos and create personal content that can be used in-game by the gamer or their friends. Like Microsoft’s point system, Wii gamers can purchase Wii Points good for downloading classic games to the Virtual Console to bring back that retro feeling.
A whopping thirty titles are promised at launch for the console, virtual console downloads excluded. Accompanying the system, Wii Sports is a compilation of tennis, baseball, golf, bowling and boxing. Others like Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess and Excitetruck are expected to be priced at $49.99. Additionally, Nintendo is promising that the system is fully backwards compatible and will play the GameCube’s ENTIRE library.
The low price and release date have been internet speculation for some time now, but it’s great to finally hear it from the plumbers mouth.
