Games
No Nintendo DSi In Australia Until Late 2009
Posted by Nick Broughall at 10:00 AM on October 7, 2008
This news shouldn't surprise anyone, but Nintendo Australia have confirmed that there are no short term plans to release the DSi Down Under, and we're probably looking at a "late 2009" shipping date. And with the recent news that the DSi content will be region locked, it looks like the DS Lite is still the handheld of choice for Australian gamers this Christmas. Unless the PSP starts releasing some decent games, that is...

Nintendo has confirmed that both downloadable games and DSi-exclusive software will be region-locked, meaning Japanese games won't play on an American DSi and vice versa. Regular DS games, on the other hand, will continue to be universal, and you'll still be able to play Japanense imports of regular DS games on say, an American DSi. That sucks, because it means if you import a DSi from Japan to skip
Sony's PSP is currently getting its butt handed to it by the Nintendo DS, but don't tell that to Sega. With its upcoming Sega Vision PMP, due out in the UK sometime in 2009, the former hardware company-turned-sub par software maker is hoping to take on the jack-of-all-trades portable market. The prognosis for such a device is OK, but then again how could it not be? After all, this is the company that brought us the 32X, Saturn, and the Dreamcast—the only direction any Sega hardware offering could go from this point forward is up.
The recently-announced
With the upcoming XCM Rapid Fire Gear Lite kit, Xbox 360 gamers will be able to add machine-gun style turbo buttons to their controllers. Working across multiple games and easily toggled with a top-mounted switch, the kit will also nearly double the controller's D-pad range of motion to 6 degrees in each direction. It will essentially take the stock 360 pad and juice it like [fill in your favourite baseball player here who you are absolutely SURE never used steroids].
Pandora, the muscled-up Nintendo DS frankenmonster with Linux OS, will be finally available for the holidays shopping season. With only 3,000 units planned, the $US350 game console has no commercial games and is aimed at the homebrew market. Obviously, it's not going to be a hit but its final feature list looks impressive nonetheless.
America will soon join Europe, Japan and some other lucky folks and have access to the elite Club Nintendo...club. Sure, it's a Nintendo marketing ploy to get users to register products and fill out surveys, but Club Nintendo is also the only outlet to buy the most sacred, extra limited edition Nintendo gear. We'll keep our ear to the ground and let you know when registration begins, but until then, check out this awesome SNES Virtual Console controller that was offered earlier this year by Club Nintendo Japan. Pretty great, right? [
Nintendo has confirmed the existence of their
So why is it that the stereotype for gamers is a lonely nerd? Apparently over a third of Australian gamers are members of the fairer sex, at least according to a study by Roy Morgan commissioned by Microsoft.
In the wake of Nintendo's announcement of the
We know, Rock Band 2 just hit shelves and we're already speculating about the instruments in Rock Band 3. But according to a posting on the Harmonix job board, the company is looking to hire a keyboard expert, which we can only assume means that a keyboard will be part of Rock Band 3. From the listing:
For when fruits, veggies, exercise, plenty of sleep and the occasional colonic won't do, Gamer Grub promises to be the first "performance snack formulated especially for gamers." In flavours like Action Pizza, Racing Wasabi, Strategy Chocolate and Sports PB&J, the snacks are not only fortified with vitamins and minerals, but are specially engineered to be crumb and grease free, protecting your keyboard from its normal all-it-can-eat junk food buffet. We're not sure precisely which brick of the USDA food pyramid that videogame genre-flavoured morsels fall into, but we're willing to wave most (OK, some) judgment until we're able to test this stuff for ourselves.
Bad news, folks. We totally missed it in the wake of
More from the Nintendo Press Conference: the company will let you
Ah, video games and casual drug use. They go together like World of Warcraft and loneliness, don't they? That's why we saw a
MCV, a respected gaming news publication out of the UK, has stated "according to [an] impeccable source in Japan" that "Nintendo will announce a new, updated version of its DS console at a press conference tomorrow morning." They cite the exact time of the conference to run at 5AM UK, or late tonight/early morning for Americans. Given the short timetable on this rumour, we'll know either way soon enough. But it's possibly that Nintendo wants to announce the products before
Why Akihabara's Refresh Club doesn't have a New York outlet, I don't know, but on the wake of this groundbreaking news, they better open it soon. For $US25 you will be able to play Wii Fit with Japanese girls in French maid dresses. Yes, Wii Fit, that
A true "next generation" Nintendo console, tentatively referred to as the Wii HD, will hit the market in 2011, according to the folks at What They Play. The site claimed that Nintendo is currently showing early presentations of Wii 2.0 to the game development community, and that Miyamoto's new device will be based on completely new hardware and will contain HD visuals, digitally distributed content and expanded storage.

While Namco jumped headfirst into the Android Market by giving away Pac-Man, EA Games is going to sit out for the time being, at least until there's a billing system in place for apps in the Android Market: "EA will support the Android platform...but has elected to wait for the launch of a content billing solution to bring their premier IP to market."