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The
New York Times and
USA Today have now both confirmed it: the Wii will cost $250 in the US, and go on sale November 19. Indeed, it seems there's no avoiding that these are the facts...but now let's see what Reggie has to say about it all...
Update 1: Reggie is introduced. "The next step in gaming is bringing gaming back to the masses."
Update 2: "One price, one configuration, one color." 25,000 retail locations, 4 million units shipped globally by the end of calendar 2006, with the majority stock going to America.
Update 3: One Wii remote, one nunchuk both included, and Wii Sports included, making the first pack-in game at launch since the SNES. Wii Sports has expanded a bit, for instance they are now demoing Wii Bowling. The final package now includes tennis, golf, baseball, bowling, and suprise! Boxing!
Update 4: 25-game launch lineup, led by of course, Zelda.
Update 5: Talks about Wii Channels. This encompasses a large part of the Wii interface, including the avatar-creator we saw at E3 2006 when Reggie and Miyamoto had their faces on their tennis players.
Update 6: Talks about Wii Shop Channel, which let's you purchase Virtual Console games. Games are priced like this: 500 for NES games, 800 for SNES games, and 1000 for N64 games. 1000 what you ask? Wii points of course! Unlike Microsoft's confusing system though, here 1 point = 1 cent.
Update 7: Talks about Mii Channel. This is the avatar-creator program we've heard about. They created a rough little version of Sam Jackson, and then showed highly accurate versions of Miyamoto and Reggie.
Update 8: Talks about Photo Channel. This is a standard picture/video viewer. It throws some very simple editing and effects as well though. You can make slideshows too! The Wiimote works just like a mouse in the Wii interface.
Update 9: Other channels include things like weather, news, and Internet. You do need to purchase the Opera browser with some Wii points, but afterwards you'll have what seems like a great browser, the controller seems to work well here. There's also a messaging system in place to send messages to other Wii's and even, surprisingly, cell phones. No more details about all that.
Update 10: Additional Wii remotes will be $39.99, separate from the nunchuk, which will be an additional $19.99.
Update 11: GameCube Twilight Princess now pushed back to December.
Update 12: All first-party games and most (if not all) other Wii content will be capable of the 16:9 aspect ratio used by HDTVs, but will not be in high definition.
Update 13: And maybe the worst announcment of the day: Metroid Prime 3 has slipped, along with Super Mario Galaxy, to 2007...
Update 14: It's over. What a day for bad news...