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"Wii Price and Launch Details"

Right. An 'interesting' conference in London has eventually produced the price and date for the Wii European Launch.

Gaby Logan and a host of other people showed off the Wii details and waxed lyrical about how the DS has been a major success. Interestingly, the Wii will actually be sold for a profit (unusual for a console, money is usually made on the software and not the hardware).

As well as the Mii software, that lets you create Avatars to represent you online and the cool Mii room that you can put them in, there's the weather and news channels built in. It's all looking quite cool and well thought out. There will be 15 Virtual Console games at launch, with around 10 more per month released (which puts the Live Arcade on the 360 to shame) and you get the Opera Internet Browser as well.

http://www.wii.com/ should be updated with the European information soon too and screenshots/video of the Wii screens.

So, here are the most important details from Nintendo:
The Date:December 8th 2006
The Price:£179
The Package:white console, one Wii remote, one Nunchuck, Wii Sports

"Users can easily download (for a fee) several of their favourite games for the NES, SNES, Nintendo 64, TurboGrafx, Mega Drive and even MSX from the Internet, and play them on Wii."

Holy crap. Rings of Power, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, Shining Force, Phantasy Star, Abrams Battle Tank, Ecco the Dolphin, Road Rash...

There's the Wii-mote (the thing that looks like a TV remote control) as well as the Nunchuck thing (dunno if that's the official name, seems to be what everyone's calling it because you attach it to the Wii-mote with a cable, so it looks a bit like you could swing it round like Michaelangelo outta Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles).

The Nunchuck bit also has motion sensing I think, has the analogue stick on it, and also has a trigger button underneath...


I think the price is quite good, it does include Wii-Sports, but hopefully they'll release a cheaper version without Wii-Sports a few months after Xmas, and maybe reduce the controller price a bit too.

Other than that, I think the news is all pretty good. One of my housemates was talking about getting one, so hopefully he'll have one in the Spring term of Uni, should be fun.

£179? :( might have been tempted with £150 but another £29? Hmm I'll think about it.

Did you say nunchuck? :S

Yer, tis very good, apparently third party publishers will be able to lock their games to specific regions, but I think all first party games will have no region encoding. Which will be very handy for getting hold of games earlier / cheaper.

It should still work out cheaper I would think.

The Wii is region free by the way.

Sibs wrote:
> Gah. Hope that game with a bundled controller is cheap. £45
> for an extra controller is a bit steep. They should have a
> Wiimote+Nunchuck bundle where it's a bit cheaper as you're
> buying both... Say £39.99 for the bundle, which would save
> you a fiver or so.

They probably will, at least in Game or on Amazon/Play...

Grandprix wrote:
> £179 eh? That's £40 more than the American price
> after conversion.

Apparently the US price doesn't include tax, whereas ours does... So theirs will go up slightly.

But still, most electronics is cheaper in the US than in the UK, so it's to be expected.

Gah. Hope that game with a bundled controller is cheap. £45 for an extra controller is a bit steep. They should have a Wiimote+Nunchuck bundle where it's a bit cheaper as you're buying both... Say £39.99 for the bundle, which would save you a fiver or so.

£179 eh? That's £40 more than the American price after conversion.

34 for 39 pounds for the games.

Wii Play (series of mini games) and second controller package isn't priced, but additional controllers will also be available from launch at the estimated retail prices of: Wii Remote - 39 Euros (£29 in UK), Nunchuk – 19 Euros (£14 in UK) and the Classic Controller – 19 Euros (£14 in UK) .