Originally posted by IGN

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September 13, 2006 - (This story has been updated with new and clarified information from Nintendo's North American presentation.)

Nintendo fans finally have a price and release date for the company's new generation console, Wii. The Big N has officially announced that the system will hit retail in North and South America for $249.99 on November 19. The New York Times initially published the story and seems, in fact, to have beaten Nintendo Co. Ltd with the news.
Nintendo's Wii console will come packaged with one Wii remote, one nunchuck attachment, an AC adapter, an audio/video cable, a sensor bar, sensor bar stand, a Wii console stand, and two batteries. The US package will also come bundled with a copy of Wii Sports, a compilation sports game that best shows off the mechanics of the system's unique controller. Wii Sports features tennis, baseball, golf, and previously-unannounced bowling and boxing games.

Nintendo said it would provide Wii owners with more than 25 unique games this year.

Wii's much-talked-about Virtual Console download service, which enables gamers to purchase classic games, will offer a library of some 30 titles by the end of the year. Titles will include entries from the Mario, Zelda and Donkey Kong franchises, Nintendo said. Virtual Console games will cost between $5 and $10 each. Specifically, Nintendo Co. Ltd. announced that Virtual Console games would cost 500 yen ($5), 800 yen ($8) or 1,000 yen ($10); we're presuming these prices are for NES, SNES, and N64 games respectively.

The Big N confirmed that it would charge $49.99 for its new Wii games, which is $10 cheaper than the cost of typical Xbox 360 titles. (Please note that this price is for first-party games; prices have not been announced for third-party Wii games -- publishers are free to set their own prices on Wii titles.)

Nintendo revealed that Wii's various controllers would be available to buy separately at launch. The Wii remote will cost $39.99; the nunchuck $19.99 and the classic controller about $20.

In a surprise announcement, Nintendo said that it wanted to make Wii a living room centerpiece by shipping the system with features outside of the videogame realm. Wii will include a photo channel, enabling users to display their digital photos through the console. It will also boast regularly updated news and weather channels. In addition, the Opera browser will be available for the system, enabling users to access the web with the console.

One of the channels available on Wii is called the "Mii Channel." Here, players can customize avatars by selecting from a variety of face shapes, hair styles, color schemes, and so on. The hook is that these avatars can not only be stored on the console itself, they can also be transferred to the Wii remote itself -- presumably so players can easily access their personalized characters and take them with them when playing against friends.

Sony recently announced that it would ready 400,000 PS3s in North America and another 100,000 in Japan for the system's launch. Nintendo said it plans to ship 4 million Wii units worldwide by the end of the year.

Nintendo will launch Wii in Japan on December 2 of this year for 25,000 yen, the company revealed. North America will get the system first.

Nintendo of Japan has added an amazing breakdown of the Wii's various interfaces to its overseas website. Everything is in Japanese, but the videos speak for themselves. Readers can check the site directly for a 14-page walkthrough of the system's ambitious features. Included in the list of options are demonstrations of the weather forecast, Mii, and photo channels. The forecast launches a virtual globe that can be spun in any direction. In the photo channel, users can load hundreds of their favorite photos and edit them in real-time. It's possible to message friends with Mii character profiles and to send pictures in messages. And the videos demonstrate surfing the Web with Wii's Opera browser. These are absolute must-see videos.

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Originally posted by Gamespot

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NEW YORK--Ubisoft showed off a new and much-updated build of Red Steel, its prominent first-person shooter set in Japan and the first game of its type to come out for the new Wii (considering it will accompany the console to shelves on November 19). We got a good feel for the shooting action in the game, which the designers have been working hard on since the Electronic Entertainment Expo, and we got to play through a brand-new level, which showed off previously unseen environments and culminated in a one-on-one duel with a sinister swordsman that gave us a chance to try Red Steel's somewhat revamped first-person melee combat firsthand.

The first part of the demo we played was all guns ablaze as we climbed several floors of a building and fought off tons of armed thugs in an attempt to reach the roof, where we discovered our ailing stepfather. To get to him, we had to do a whole lot of shooting, and we started to get a solid feel for Red Steel's controls well before we emerged into the daylight. The game's loose lock-on function is perhaps the most important element of its shooting gameplay, since it lets you zoom in. But unlike most lock-on features in games, it doesn't guarantee your shots will hit--it merely keeps the camera more or less focused on the bad guy in question, and it's up to you to fine-tune your aim and make the kill. As mentioned, zooming in is the easiest way to do this, and to zoom you have to extend your arm outward. The possible level of zoom is pretty great (and consequently you'll have to stick your arm way out), so it helps to shoot from the hip, as it were, while playing Red Steel.

After finishing the rooftop level, we finally got to jump into a brand-new level set in a Japanese street in what looked like a much smaller, more traditional sort of town. Picture less of Tokyo bright lights and more of a classical Japanese look, and you've got the right idea. Our mission was to infiltrate a walled mansion where some geishas were being held, and we jumped atop some crates to scale the wall and take out a passing guard before he noticed our presence. This initiated a brief firefight with some other bad guys who were hanging out in the courtyard, and afterward we got to head into the house, where we met up with our sword-wielding assailant.

The swordplay in Red Steel may not have changed drastically in concept since E3, but the implementation of it seems to have been smoothed out a good bit. You're still wielding two blades--the one on the right for attacking and the one on the left for blocking--and now your own physical movements are mapped a little more closely to your character's attacks onscreen. We're not talking a one-to-one correspondence between the way you swing the remote and the way your character swings his sword, but it's closer. To block effectively, you have to thrust the nunchuk forward precisely in time with your opponent's attack. The timing here is very unforgiving, so you really have to be exact to escape injury. Luckily, there's also a sideways dodge that will help you get out of the way, too.

Red Steel's graphics have certainly progressed since E3, with more-cohesive environments that feature a lot of destructible objects, John Woo-style, and with a lot of the less desirable elements having been polished up nicely. It's no secret at this point that the Wii isn't as powerful as the Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3, but we were so fixated on playing a first-person shooter in such an uncommon fashion that the visual gap between this and some of the 360 games we've been playing wasn't even an issue. Let's just say the visuals get the job done just fine. How will the rest of Red Steel stand up to more-intense scrutiny? We'll find out sooner than later--barring some catastrophe, it'll be one of the first games we get a chance to play in final form on the Wii.

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