Nintendo President Talks Wii/DS Hookup

GameDaily has a look at comments by Nintendo's President Iwata about connectivity between the DS and the Wii. He also touches on the Virtual Console, and Nintendo's place in the marketplace. From the article: "Let's say your Wii is connected to the Internet in a mode that allows activation on a 24-hour basis. This would allow Nintendo to send monthly promotional demos for the DS, during the night, to the Wii consoles in each household. Users would wake up each morning, find the LED lamp on their Wii flashing, and know that Nintendo has sent them something ..."

The Whole Interview

[grammar fascist]

The entire interview is here:

http://techon.nikkeibp.co.jp/english/NEWS_EN/20060 525/117498/?P=1 [nikkeibp.co.jp]

GameDaily summarized (or copied) what they found most interesting. I find this moreso:

Q: Why does your controller have a speaker?

Iwata: This feature was absent from the prototype a year ago - we introduced it fairly recently. We discussed what type of feedback the games should provide the user with. Households sporting 5.1 channel speakers will certainly be able to enjoy realistic sound, yet not all homes have such audio equipment. Adding a speaker to the controller will enable us, for example, to have it emit sound effects when hitting the ball in ping-pong, tennis or golf games.

Not only that, but 5.1 can't produce a sound exactly where you are no matter where you are in the room.

Yet another instance of Nintendo anticipating their customer's needs rather than (or in addition to) listening to their gripes. What customer would have said "speaker in the controller!" rather than "more 5.1 support?"

3 GB per month Caps in .nz and .au

[tepples]

you actually pay per byte to download? You need a better ISP.

Try a better country. The oligopoly situation in e.g. Australia and New Zealand, combined with the limited bandwidth on and off the continent, has allowed residential "broadband" providers to get away with billing per megabyte over the first 3000 in a month.

Re:Not all that jazzed about this...

[radish]

My Wii won't be connected 24/7, because I refuse to leave my Internet on that much. I flip the switch on the cable modem at night to cut it off, and turn it on in the AM. There is just no reason for it to run 24/7 if no one is using it, IMO, so I don't even take the chance.

Damn You!!! I wondered why my late night downloads keep stopping, it's because of you SWITCHING OFF THA INTARWEBS!! Please leave it on so the rest of the world is able to keep working - kthx.

More seriously - what do you hope to achieve by switching off your modem? Stopping evil h4xorz taking over your toaster? You might want to look into this little thing called a firewall.

Re:Do I get a say in the matter?

[KDR_11k]

The demos are held in the DS's RAM, which is 4MB. The DS demos I have on my computer average around 1.5 MB.