Hasta La Gadget!

Nintendo’s Wii U game console is getting its promised spring update next week, said company president Satoru Iwata in a Luigi-filled video presentation this morning. The update is said to launch software dramatically faster than before, as Nintendo demonstrated in a video last month. Iwata also said the update adds continuable downloads while the console is off, and that Virtual Console won’t arrive until the following week — should you wish to directly launch into the Wii menu, you’ll be able to hold down the B button as the console is starting up.

That said, if you wanna play those VC games directly from the Wii U menu, you’ll need to re-buy them for $1 apiece for NES games and $1.50 for SNES games. A variety of games were shown off as available at the Virtual Console’s launch, including classics like Super Mario World and Punch-Out! Apparently GameBoy Advance and Nintendo 64 games are planned for inclusion on the VC in the coming months, but no definitive date was given. He also said Panorama View will arrive next week for free, and it sounds like it’ll be a separate download from the software update.

Filed under: Gaming, Software, Nintendo

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Source: Nintendo Direct

Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology.

In the unmarked office of 3-D Vision, Inc., you can see a television or PC display a videogame or movie with a convincing stereoscopic effect. That might not seem very unique. However, the television is a CRT from the 1990s, the video game is Super Mario for the Nintendo 64 and the movie is The Wizard of Oz, made in 1939.

Despite the growth in 3D television sales, the requirement to wear 3D glasses has loomed as one of the most significant barriers to adoption. 3-D Vision’s technology still requires glasses, at least for now. However, with some caveats, it overcomes some of the other, oft-overlooked barriers to 3D adoption by creating 3D video from 2D content on 2D (or 3D) displays. On televisions, this is achieved via a small set-top box — a prototype of which approaches the size and noise level of a mini-fridge — that plugs into the video source and the TV and converts the video in real-time with virtually no latency. The box should be available early next year.

Continue reading Switched On: The Old Adventures of New 3D

Filed under: Displays, Gaming, Tablets

Switched On: The Old Adventures of New 3D originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 02 Sep 2012 17:53:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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