DallasNews reports that GameStop will be the only retailer with playable Wii demo kiosks this holiday. The company revealed the news on Saturday during its annual sales conference in Dallas.

GameStop also said it has not determined if it will offer pre-orders for the Wii. The sparse supply during the launch of the Microsoft Xbox 360 last year has made GameStop reluctant. "We did learn a lesson last year," said Steve Morgan, president of GameStop. "I think the lesson is caution and optimism at the same time."

Wii upholds Cube region lock(News)

by Tom Bramwell Tom Bramwell


Nintendo UK has confirmed to Eurogamer that the Wii's region locking will extend to GameCube games.

A company spokesperson also said that Virtual Console game releases would not be universal - in other words, European gamers will get European versions of the games.

The news paints a slightly clearer picture of the circumstances surrounding Wii's backwards compatibility in the run-up to the console's 8th December launch.

The console is known to be compatible with all GameCube software, and peripherals including controllers and memory cards, while Virtual Console will deliver titles from systems including NES, Super NES, Nintendo 64, Megadrive and TurboGrafx at the rate of around 10 per month.
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In answering our queries, culled from some of your recent forum threads, Nintendo also said that it expects to release RGB and component video cables that fit current pricing models.

It declined to comment on recent reports, supposedly surfacing in Nintendo Power, that Virtual Console will also host Commodore 64 games in future.

To my absolute and utter surprise and amazement, the SNK booth had two kiosks with fully playable near-final builds of Metal Slug Anthology for the Wii. It completely rocks. I checked out the options and there are like 6 or 7 different control schemes. You can play with the nunchuck attached using the analog stick (lefty or righty), in this mode you "throw" the Wiimote forward to throw grenades, which is kinda cool because you can hold down the fire button (B) while you chuck so you don't lose your stream of bullets for longer than you have to, it only takes a very slight movement). You can hold the controller sideways, NES style... but in this mode I couldn't figure out how to throw grenades. There are also control scheme options for VC controller and GameCube controller as well. Very cool! I had to check out Metal Slug 6 since it was only released in Japanese arcades, it's freaking great. It looks better than any previous version graphically. Less pixellated. It has a zoom-in/zoom-out effect sometimes too... like in Alien Hominid, which was not in any previous incarnation of Metal Slug, to my knowledge. The backgrounds were gorgeously animated and there was a new 'Laser' weapon which shoots a constant straight beam and extremely powerful. (Cool note: the first time I tried to load up Metal Slug 6 it froze up so the guy had to open up the black box that contained the Wii... turns out it was the test kit Wii with the green faceplate on the front. I got to see the disk eject and go back in too... very very smooth, smoother even than my car CD player.)

To my absolute and utter surprise and amazement, the SNK booth had two kiosks with fully playable near-final builds of Metal Slug Anthology for the Wii. It completely rocks. I checked out the options and there are like 6 or 7 different control schemes. You can play with the nunchuck attached using the analog stick (lefty or righty), in this mode you "throw" the Wiimote forward to throw grenades, which is kinda cool because you can hold down the fire button (B) while you chuck so you don't lose your stream of bullets for longer than you have to, it only takes a very slight movement). You can hold the controller sideways, NES style... but in this mode I couldn't figure out how to throw grenades. There are also control scheme options for VC controller and GameCube controller as well. Very cool! I had to check out Metal Slug 6 since it was only released in Japanese arcades, it's freaking great. It looks better than any previous version graphically. Less pixellated. It has a zoom-in/zoom-out effect sometimes too... like in Alien Hominid, which was not in any previous incarnation of Metal Slug, to my knowledge. The backgrounds were gorgeously animated and there was a new 'Laser' weapon which shoots a constant straight beam and extremely powerful. (Cool note: the first time I tried to load up Metal Slug 6 it froze up so the guy had to open up the black box that contained the Wii... turns out it was the test kit Wii with the green faceplate on the front. I got to see the disk eject and go back in too... very very smooth, smoother even than my car CD player.)