In one of those “should have learnt from your lessons” sort of moments, the Wii 2 is set to include on board flash memory with only 8GB of space. At least, if rumours are to be believed.

The on-board memory offered by the next console will be 16 times the capacity of the original Wii, but still significantly lower than that being offered by competing HD consoles.

8GB is a fair amount of space, but a lot of phones have more memory than that these days. Sort it out Nintendo.

Thanks to Kotaku for the info.

As you guys know that Nintendo will be showing it’s next console at this year’s E3.

Neil Ashurst, Head of UK PR for GAME and gamestation had the following to say about it: “The Nintendo Wii has been one of the most popular games consoles in recent years, and has transformed the gaming landscape. It brought gaming to a much wider audience and into the living room as an activity for all the family.

There is going to be huge interest in what its successor will look like and what new features will be added – especially with the current trend for 3D and high-def gaming. Just like with the Wii before and more recently the 3DS, you know that Nintendo will be challenging the current gaming conventions.”

wii-2-mock-up-1

Later today we had reported that Wii 2/Project Cafe is now confirmed and will be playable at this year’s E3. So in order to keep the adrenaline going we have decided to bring to you some amazing Wii 2/Project Cafe designs made by some of the most amazing people around the world.
Check them out and let us know if you have any additional ones in the comments below.

Nintendo confirmed that a new console is in production and will be unveiled and playable at E3 this year, earlier today.

Various information has crept up since then, but most interestingly, a image which is said to be of the controller for the console has surfaced aswell.

As you can see, it has a touch screen and buttons, all tucked into the controller. Although, this might just be an concept but rumours suggests that the final design would be similar to this one.

Nintendo’s set to unleash a flood of details regarding their new console in the coming E3 event, to be held in LA in June.

Source

Nintendo legend Shigeru Miyamoto has admitted that a successor to the Wii is currently in production.

When Edge magazine recently quizzed him on the Wii 2, Miyamoto replied “even when the Wii launched we were developing new hardware, work on 3DS had already started. It’s a matter of when we announce it.”

When asked if we can expect an announcement at E3 in June, Miyamoto said: “Please wait. Be patient until we decide.”

With so many rumours floating around, some proper confirmation is nice to have. Let’s look forward to what details will be announced at E3 in June.

Thanks to CVG for the info.

Following the rumours of Nintendo dropping a price cut for the Wii, analysts have speculated that Nintendo are paving the way for an even bigger announcement for E3 in June. Gee, I wonder what that could possibly be?

M2 Research analyst Billy Pidgeon said in an interview with industrygamers that “Wii is certainly due for a price cut, which would be good for Nintendo and for retailers. A Q2 price cut announcement would typically be an E3 event, so scheduling a cut before E3 would clear the boards for another, bigger announcement.”

“A new console would be pretty exciting, but it’s a lot riskier for a vendor with a large active installed base to launch next generation and keep last generation’s base active while the other vendors are still building out,” he added. “Next generation timing and strategy is going to be interesting.”

EEDAR analyst Jesse Divnich offered: “Most video game companies withhold their biggest announcements until E3 and if Nintendo chooses to announce a Wii price drop before their E3 press conference, they must have something much bigger to announce. There are very few announcements that would eclipse a hardware price cut.”

Though Nintendo have argued to the contrary, we all know that the Wii 2 announcement is long overdue. Let’s hope these rumours turn out to be true this June.

Nintendo America boss Reggie Fils-Aime has said that Nintendo’s next home console is unlikely to include 3D.

He’s said that, from past experience, Nintendo don’t think 3D with glasses is the way forward.

“Glasses-free is a big deal,” Fils-Aime said. “We’ve not said publicly what the next thing for us will be in the home console space, but based on what we’ve learned on 3-D, likely, that won’t be it.”

Nintendo designer, Hideki Konno, expressed similar sentiments. “I think at Nintendo, we realize that any sort of goggle-type 3-D technology was not going to work,” he said during the interview. “In order to make 3-D technology viable with video games, we thought we needed to have glasses-free 3-D.”

It’s a shame Nintendo aren’t even considering the adoption of 3DTVs in homes, but they have enough experience in the industry, so I guess they know what they’re doing.

Thanks to CNN for the info.

With the Wii already being relegated to ‘legacy console’ status by major third parties, it seems that the time is ripe for a new Nintendo console, one that would probably be more competitive, on a strictly hardware basis. Apparently, the industry grapevine agrees, as it’s going nuts speculating about the Wii 2, as the successor to Nintendo’s insanely popular Wii console is being called right now.

One of the more credible of these rumors comes from respected source Tech Radar, who claim that Nintendo are all set to unveil the Wii’s successor at E3 this year, with an early 2012 release following.

Apparently, the Wii 2 seems to be a pretty powerful console, with a quad core processor, HD output, a built in Blu Ray drive, and a built in projector (WTF?). That last may be the new console’s hook or gimmick, that Nintendo hopes to use to drive sales of the system to the casual public, a bit like the 3DS’s 3D screen without glasses. In any case, if those specs are true at all, then we may very well be looking at what would be the most powerful home console ever.. until the PS4 and the Xbox 720 release, that is.

Nintendo, of course, responded swiftly with a ‘no comment,’ but they’re not fooling anybody. While we may not necessarily get a system with the specs outlined above, we’re sure to get some competitive new hardware from Nintendo in the form of the Wii’s successor soon enough. The first indication of this is bound to come this E3.

For the time being, file this away in the ‘rumors’ section, but keep a close watch on it.

The Wii might be the oddest console in gaming history. Hitting retail in late 2006, the massively underpowered system sold millions upon millions on the promise of its innovative new controls and its potential for great games, exploding at retail overnight. And while the hardware sales for the Wii continued to set records, the software side was a bit more dreary, with nary a proper third party game hitting the system, and the only bright spots being Nintendo’s own excellent and top of the line first party endeavors. Whereas the situation soon changed once the third parties got a tab on the situation and began to take the system seriously, it didn’t help when, without exception, all third party games began to fail on the Wii.

This was also accompanied by a widescale adoption of HDTVs, causing the Wii’s technology to be undoubtedly inferior and obsolete, especially in the wake of its HD enabled rivals getting their own motion control systems.

According to EA, the Wii is already finished- he believes it’s now a legacy console, something that, in stores, one would find next to the PS2 section.

Speaking to IndustryGamers, EA Games head honcho Frank Gibeau hinted that Nintendo knows the situation and is working on another platform. “When you look at Nintendo, for a while there, it was all about the Wii being the biggest entertainment platform ever and capturing the mass market, and it faded away. Now, they’re coming back with a second act. I think they know that. They’re very self-aware as an organization and a very powerful brand,” he said.

“They understand the dynamics and the fact that HD consoles is a booming part of business right now. Legacy platforms like PS2 and the Wii have dropped off significantly. They’re not stupid. They’re going to figure something out. They’re going to come back at it.”

He also had a word of advice for Nintendo, saying that they needed to better court third parties if they wanted to avoid the software droughts that have become characteristic of their systems since the N64 days. “The Wii is a tough market for a third party. When I look at a development dollar in terms of which teams do I invest in, and what platforms to go at, they’re not very competitive when you look at HD consoles, or free-to-play bets, or things like tablets and handsets. It’s something they need to think seriously about with their next gen – how serious is a third party development community for them on their next platform and their next bet? They can get to a certain level of success with their own IPs and their own internal development, but if they don’t have that developer ecosystem where it’s frankly easy to make money on the platform, they’re going to see there are too many opportunities in the world right now to go build games on other platforms in a very successful high quality, highly profitable way. They need to take note of that,” Gibeau offered.

Whereas I can by and large agree that a new Nintendo system is probably right around the corner, maybe being revealed at this year’s E3, I’d say that Nintendo tried their best to make the Wii as third party friendly as they could, and that maybe the third parties could perhaps have taken the system a bit more seriously and dedicated their resources and teams to the systems if they wanted to see results. Some companies who did this and saw results were Ubisoft with games like Just Dance and the Wii versions of games like Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands, and Activision, with games like Goldeneye 007 and the Wii versions of the Call of Duty games. EA was nowhere on the horizon.

Nintendo boss, Satoru Iwata, has said the company will not make a decision about a successor to the Wii until developers run out of inventive ideas for the original.

“It’s just four years since [Wii’s] release,” said the Ninendo exec. “It’s selling over seven million units a year in North America, so we don’t think it’s at the limit. We’ll make decisions about a successor system at the time when software developers cannot offer surprises [on the Wii].”

With the Wii being graphically behind the other two major consoles of this generation, an announcement of the Wii 2 would be welcome. That said, this shouldn’t matter much provided Nintendo can keep delivering the goods on the original Wii.

Thanks to Andriasang for the info.