Month: November 2006

I love the smell of DS Lite sales figures in the morning. Ahh. This time it’s Europe, to the tune of 7 million units sold! That’s right, I said SOLD, not SHIPPED. “The worldwide total for the console was put at 26.82 million in October, with the Japanese userbase currently estimated at 11.5+ million and the Americas at 7.5+ million. In addition to the new hardware total, Nintendo...

Peter Pan is the mythical figure who refused to grow up. To some, Shigeru Miyamoto is the game designer who invented the console genre, but refused to shift gears with the rest of the industry as it grew over the past 20 years. Only those gamers in denial would say Nintendo hasn’t suffered from a “kiddie image.” It’s not completely accurate, but regardless public opinion ha...

The folks at Cubed got their hands on the latest batch of scores from Japanese super pub Famitsu today, which has been a notoriously tough magazine to get a good review from (unless your game has the words “Final” and “Fantasy” in it, natch). So, how did the Wii fare in Japan? Zelda The Twilight Princess (Wii, Nintendo): 9 / 10 / 9 / 10 – (38/40) Zelda The Twilight Pr...

It was smaller than I expected, but the AA’s gave it some decent weight. I was worried about the wrist strap, but after five minutes of just waving my hand back and forth, watching the little hand pointer fly around and twist with my wrist movements on screen, I had forgotten all about it. So much so that I went to make a sandwich and it was hanging from my wrist like some huge, gangly Lives...

My girlfriend Johanna is a script-writer, DJ, and a chef, but she has never called herself a gamer. Sure, her dusty GameBoy Pocket and the occasional DDR match prove that she’s flirted with the idea of getting into video-games, but she has never showed any real drive to get into the gaming world. That is until two nights ago, when at four in the morning, Johanna drove to a Target store in Ma...

I, Blake Snow (not pictured), underestimated the Nintendo Wii launch. I thought supply would outlast demand despite my enthusiasm and successful predictions for the console. Because of that, I’m still without a Wii and my initial wait appears to have no immediate end as more than 1 million units flew off store shelves the first day alone with many people left empty handed. With a kid, a fami...

Business-oriented gamer site Next-Gen gives a favorible review of Nintendo’s Wii: “The Wii has had a great launch. It’s inexpensive and easy to acquire, has a solid lineup of genuinely fun games, and even has a killer app. Its network services work well out of the box, its added-value features feel genuinely valuable, and even though the graphics are blurry and low-resolution, it...

Good advice for you “literal movement” Wii Sports players out there: stretch first. After five straight hours of bowling, tennis and even a few games of golf and boxing, I was feeling a bit winded, truth be told. Today, while I sit here at work, my back is sore. I fully realize a majority of the Wiimote movements can be accomplished with wrist flicks (which I applied in Zelda), but for...

For those of you that are still Wii-less, Engadget put together a 44 question FAQ about Wii. Some of our readers have been asking about USB accessories from computers being compatible with Wii and this FAQ answers it (they do nothing). Are there any unanswered questions you guys have? [Thanks, D. Brown!]

Who’s in this boat?

Aside from one paranoid mother I spoke with Sunday about “those urban youths doing 360’s with their cars at the Dedham Best Buy,” I think this is pretty accurate depiction of the various waiting lines that sprung up over the past week, no? [From xkcd]

It’s not really any kind of surprise, but Nintendo is reporting sellouts across the board for the Wii the day after it launched on Nov. 19. Official numbers are not yet available, but somehow in its post-launch hangover stupor, Nintendo was able to fire off a press release touting that retailers were very happy with the results. Day one sales could be 1 million consoles or more. “Circu...