I was searching on the Nintendo website when I found a post that was titled Black Wii, I squealed with excitement but the link took me the the Japan site for Nintendo. The sales for the Wii are lacking in the foreign state and hopfully their answer is in the new color.  the controller will also be black but the bad news is… its only available in Japan, there has been no word on a release in the States.

Another release to Japan will be the new color for the DSi, Red. That makes the sixth color for the DSi including White, Black, Pink, Lime Green, Metallic Blue, and now Red. Could you imagine a Lime green Wii or even a pink one…?

Nintendo

XSEED announced today their upcoming Nintendo DS title Retrogame Challenge, in which players must defeat the evil Game Master Arino by completing a series of challenges in (ficticious) retro games such as Cosmic Gate (think Galaxian), Haggle Man (a platformer), Rally King (driving game), Star Prince (like Galaga) and Guadia Quest (an 8-bit style RPG). More after the clicky thingie…

Now, I say ficticious because they were all created for Retrogame Challenge, but looking at the screen shots on the official website, you’ll see XSEED’s done a nice job of making games that, for the most part, really look like they came from the time period they each claim (with perhaps the exception of Cosmic Gate, which looks a lot better than Galaxian did when it was released).

Retrogame Challenge will require players to complete goals in the various retro games, after which a new part of the story will be unlocked and a new challenge will await the player in one of the other games. This lets players enjoy a fair amount of diversity as they progress through the overall story. In addition, in-game magazines will feature stories about the games (think old copies of Electronic Games or Joystik!), fictional “news” stories and cheat codes that’ll unlock certain features or level warps in the various games that make up Retrogame Challenge.

The question is this: What the hell does “Guadia Quest” mean?! No…that’s not the question. The question IS, will these fake retrogames have the playability and charm of the actual games upon which they’re based, loosely or otherwise. Still, it’s one more reason to be enticed into purchasing a DS if you don’t have one already, and if you do, this could make a really nice addition to your game pak library. Retrogame Challenge is set to hit in February.

And major bonus points to XSEED for using a picture of the fabulously frustrating ColecoVision controller on their website!

Retrogame Challenge

Supposedly due to pressure from internet rumors, Nintendo made a wee-early-in-the-morning (well, here in the U.S. anyway) press announcement to unveil the next version of their handheld gaming platform. Featuring two cameras (one inside the hinge and one on the outside / back), an MP3 player and web browser, the DSi will also allow gamers to browse for new software in an iPhone App Store-like environment. Nintendo calls this the DS Store. How they came up with the name, we’ll never know.

Yes, Nintendo is finally acknowledging that handheld gaming / internet convergence is a real thing. Which is good, too, because otherwise they might be going out of business soon (ahem).

The DSi’s screens are a bit bigger than the previous ones, at 3.25″, but they drain the batteries more as a result, offering only 3 hours on the brightest settings, as least according to pre-release reports.

Anyway, the DSi isn’t expected to ship until after Christmas, which is bad because that means you won’t be able to get it until after Christmas, but good because that means your Christmas list can include other fun stuff!

MCV

So Nintendo has outed themselves as working on a new console. Some might question the sanity in this since the Wii is still hard to find off and on. On the other hand, Nintendo is lagging behind Sony and MS in terms of hardware specs / graphics capabilities.

So what will their next console be? In a piece on Forbes.com, Nintendo’s Satoru Iwata almost seemed to be warning people that the next Nintendo console might not be as cool as the Wii. Of course he didn’t actually say that, but he did say this:

“Every hardware needs some revolutionary features,” Iwata says. “This time around, it happened to be we had a revolutionary user interface. Will it be the same for the next generation? I really can’t tell.

“It’s natural for the current customer to expect Nintendo is going to once again do something different,” he continues. “If the people are expecting so many different things from Nintendo, it’s going to be difficult for us to go beyond that expectation again.”

So is that Nintendo being cautious or giving us a heads-up that the next Nintendo console might be as much of a relative suckfest as the last one? Ahem.

What do you think the next Nintendo console will be? What do you think it SHOULD be?

Forbes