Hasta La Gadget!

Nintendo has announced that TVii, the Wii U’s multimedia TV guide, will launch alongside the console’s Japan launch on December 8, while US and European users will have to until 2013 in order to get TVii functionality. TVii pulls data from Rovi’s G-Guide and lets gamers scroll through listings using the GamePad.

UPDATE: It’s confirmed that Europe will see the 2013 delay, but a solid release date for the US is actually still unknown. The last we heard, TVii was delayed into December, so it’s possible we may see it on the 8th along with Japan, but no official word from Nintendo on that yet.

Earlier this month, Nintendo announced that TVii was delayed into December, and would not coincide with the American launch of the console. However, the feature has been delayed once again for both US and European gamers to sometime in 2013. Japan gamers, however, will be able to take advantage of TVii right at launch.

However, one feature that Nintendo is charging for is the ability the Wii U’s GamePad as a television remote control in Nintendo TVii. Users who want this feature will have to pay a one-time fee of ¥100 ($1.22). A strange fee, indeed, but then again, gamers are paying double digits every year to watch Netflix on their Xbox 360, so it’s probably something that we don’t need to complain about too much.

The Wii U had a respectable launch week after its release on November 18, with over 400,000 consoles sold in the US during the first week. That’s a respectable number, and Nintendo may be close to edging Microsoft to the number of consoles sold per month, which Microsoft has held the crown for the past 20 months or so.

Nintendo TVii launching December 8 in Japan, US and Europe in 2013 [update] is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

If someone on your Christmas list is interested in the Nintendo Wii, you might want to hold off purchasing for a few more weeks. A new “mini” version of the Nintendo Wii console has leaked via the Best Buy Canada website home page. There are no hard details on the console and only a small image on the sites homepage.

That little image shows a red Nintendo Wii Mini game console along with the date December 7, 2012 for launch. It looks like the square console is roughly the length of a Nintendo Wii remote on each side, and the version shown has a black case with red trim. The home page says you can pre-order the console now, but if you click the link it goes to a generic list of Nintendo Wii hardware and accessories. The Nintendo Wii Mini was nowhere to be found.

It really wouldn’t be a surprise to see Nintendo shrink down the original Wii console in an attempt to get people to buy a second console to replace the original, as well as to decrease manufacturing costs, a practice more commonly seen from Sony with their PlayStation line.

[via ShopTo via NintendoLife]

Nintendo’s new Wii Mini has been made official, a compact refresh to the original Wii with a few drawbacks – such as no internet connectivity – to keep the price down. The new console, prematurely leaked in the past weeks, is Canada-only – at least initially – where it will be sold at CA$99.99 from December 7. Nintendo has trimmed out all online functionality among other things.

In addition to no online playback – or, indeed, streaming media services like Netflix – there’ll be no GameCube backward compatibility in the new Wii Mini. Your hundred (Canadian) bucks gets you the new black and red Wii Mini console and a matching red Wii Remote Plus and nunchuck, together with a sensor bar, power adapter, and composite cable.

If you want the HDTV component cable you’ll need to shell out separately; Nintendo claims there’s compatibility with “most” of the existing Wii accessories. “It’s a great value for first-time Wii owners who just want to jump in and experience all the great Wii games that helped usher in a revolution in motion-controlled gaming” the company suggests.

Nintendo says the Wii Mini will work with over 1,400 disc-based Wii games, and that no further information about broader availability outside of Canada is available. Still, if the smaller, cheaper console is a hit, we can see Nintendo being eager to expand sales and help shore up its middling bottom line.

[via Engadget]

Wii Mini official: $99.99 Canada exclusive sheds internet is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Best Buy’s Canadian site just got a hardware surprise from Nintendo, the Wii mini. It looks like the retailer jumped the gun but unfortunately, it doesn’t reveal much else aside from a December 7th release date. Rumors of a console refresh have circulated over the last few days and while the preorder link isn’t live just yet, but you can spot the Wii mini’s new red and black design, which looks to be only slightly taller than the original Wiimote. The Wii’s successor launched only a few weeks earlier in the US, managing to sell 400,000 units in its first week. We’ve contacted Nintendo and we’ll have more when we hear it.

Filed under: Gaming, Nintendo

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Via: Eurogamer

Source: Best Buy Canada

In the pre-post-PC era, life was simpler for Nintendo and other successful competitors: Sell console. Sell discs. Repeat until wildly profitable. Six years ago, as Microsoft and Sony were taking part in a game of specification leapfrogging, Nintendo embraced casual and family gaming with the Wii even as it mostly ignored online play and convergent entertainment features. More than half a decade later, Sony has surpassed the original Wiimote with its Move controller and Microsoft has created a motion anti-controller with Kinect, but the Wii retains an advantage in that developers can assume the motion control is there.

Today, everyone in the games business still adheres to the basic notion of compelling software selling hardware, but the source of that software and the manner through which it drives revenue has changed via models such as digital distribution, downloadable content, free-to-play, subscription and advertising. In addition, Nintendo has launched the Wii U into living rooms in which game consoles must compete not only with each other but with Blu-ray players, TiVos, Rokus and Apple TVs for physical connections as well as smart TVs and tablets as other sources of connected entertainment experiences. How it has addressed these challenges reveals much about what the company has held dear from the Wii, what it has reluctantly accepted and what it has now embraced.

Continue reading Switched On: The Three Cs of Wii U

Filed under: Gaming, Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo

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