Nintendo of America
By Matthew Hawkins
Nintendo, which fired the first official shot of the upcoming console war at E3 last summer, just let loose another bombshell.
Satoru Iwata, the president of Nintendo, has announced that their follow-up to the Wii, the Wii U, will be available in the United States by the oh-so-important year-end holiday shopping season.?Reuters also reports that other key markets will get the new home system around the same time as well, including Europe, Australia and Japan.
No exact date has been specified, but if Nintendo follows the same pattern that has been established by their previous hardware's debut (the GameCube, the original DS, the Wii, the DSi), it should arrive just a few days or week before Black Friday 2012. Parents, you've been warned.
Thus far, not much else is known, including a final retail price, let alone Nintendo's selection of launch titles. But the fact that it's definitely coming out by year's end is a lot more to chew on when compared to the other guys.
Details regarding Microsoft and Sony's upcoming systems are still virtually nonexistent, at least officially so. Rumor mills for both camps, on the other hand, have been busy; the most interesting recent tidbit regarding the "Xbox 720," as it has been dubbed, is courtesy of Kotaku.
First off, it may adopt Blu-ray discs, which is a format that's proprietary to Sony (and their current console, the PlayStation 3 to be exact), and also have some kind of built-in scheme that prevents the operation of used games. Both sound fairly outlandish and flat-out crazy, for entirely different reasons.
But stranger things are happened, and as with everything, rumors are a sign of the times. Which in Microsoft's case is how DVDs will no longer be a viable option for delivering physical games (it's barely cutting it as is, in some instances), plus how a purely digital distribution platform may not be entirely in the cards as of yet.
Along with the fear of used game sales, and how it has affected everyone's bottom lines, not just Microsoft's. As for the PS4, nothing notable has been said as of late. Though it's a safe bet either one of the two, or perhaps both, will be officially unveiled at this year's E3, partially as a response to the pending arrival of the Wii U.
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Matthew Hawkins is a NYC based game journalist who has also written for EGM, GameSetWatch, Gamasutra, Giant Robot, and numerous others. He also self-publishes his own game culture zine, is part of Attract Mode, and co-hosts of The Fangamer Podcast. You can keep tabs on him via?Twitter,?or his personal home-base,?FORT90.com.
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