Nintendo held a big press event in NYC yesterday to officially unveil the Wii u Home Console and let us in on some previously unmentioned information. If you follow me on Twitter (@JeffMMcKinney) you might have seen some of my tweets from the event. For those of you that don’t follow me (why aren’t you following me!?) and for everyone who missed my tweets because you are barraged with a billion tweets an hour, here is a recap.
- The Wii u will go on sale in the Americas on November 18, 2012.
- There will be two versions of the console available at launch. The Basic Set will be offered in white at a suggested retail price of $299.99 and will feature 8GB of internal memory. The Deluxe Set, which will sell for $349.99, will be glossy black and will include 32 GB of internal storage, a console stand, GamePad charging cradle and a stand that allows users to place the GamePad vertically on a table. The Deluxe version will also include the new Nintendo Land video game.
- Both versions will come with the Wii U GamePad controller. The GamePad is a wireless, touch-screen controller with dual analog sticks, D-pad and buttons.
- There will be 50 new games available during the console’s “launch window”, which Nintendo defines as November 18, 2012 to March of 2013.
- In addition to playing HD games, the Wii u will also include Wii TVii, a new way to watch, search, and record all your TV-viewing sources (including network & cable TV, Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, etc).
Those are the basics and I’ll have more specifics about the new console and games as we get closer to the launch.