Nintendo Wii Fanboy

Now, we've been saying for awhile now that the Wii would revolutionize the industry and it has. But, we wouldn't go so far as to say we were bored by it all pre-Wii. We loved the GameCube, we loved the GBA and we still love our DS. We loved the N64. We hardly found ourselves without games to play, that's for sure.

"A major insight that Nintendo had early on was that they saw that gamers were getting bored, even though they didn't know it yet," Kaplan remarked. Robert Matthews, senior director of consumer marketing for Nintendo of America backed her up, stating "Just look at the way people consume entertainment today. The idea that you would spend hours playing videogames is just not real anymore."

While we'd argue that, blogging doesn't leave us with as much time for gaming as we'd like, but we think overall that there will always be a place for lengthy games, jam-packed with feature-rich content and that Nintendo's new proven focus shouldn't try to do away with those.

Do you guys care to toss in your two cents?

Following in the footsteps of George Harrison, Nintendo's top PR person (and the apple of Matt C's eye) Perrin Kaplan has decided to call it quits with Nintendo. She didn't state any reason why she was departing in her correspondence with Reuters, but we're sure she just doesn't want to relocate. Leaving her home of 15 years to follow her job to a new city just probably isn't a life choice she's comfortable with.

Oh well, at least she'll have Matt to help her through the tough times when she departs at the end of the year.

It's a wild week in the world of Nintendo's upper management in marketing ... we think. Recently, Nintendo's marketing department was told they'd need to ship off to either New York or San Francisco from their current homes in Redmond. According to Game Informer, as astounding 90% decided to remain in the area and take severance pay. What's even more shocking are that Beth Llewelyn (senior director of public relations), Perrin Kaplan (vice president of marketing and corporate affairs) and George Harrison (senior vice president of marketing and corporate communications) are among the dearly departed. From Nintendo, we mean.

Those are some big names dropping from Nintendo's ivory towers, and we've got to sad we're sad to see them go. George was always a nice, candid fellow, and who can forget drunk Perrin (pictured above)? Now that was a classic. We would like to reiterate that Game Informer's claim has not yet been corroborated, so we'll post an update with confirmation or denial when we get it.

[Thanks, Jensonb!]

Every now and then, we just have to ask -- if you've been looking for a Wii, have you found one yet? Have you given in to bundles just to get it over with? Give us a status update! And in general, we'd love to hear about demand where you are. Are random people (read: not gamers) still crowing about the Wii where you live? Have the shortages seemed to have an affect -- good or bad -- on the desires of the masses? Some people think the demand will wear down eventually, but the commercials and word of mouth seem to be fueling a continued momentum.

In the spirit of Sonic and Mario uniting for a friendly sporting exhibition, N'Gai Croal brought Nintendo of America Vice President Perrin Kaplan and Sega of America President Simon Jeffery together, ushering in a new age of Sega and Nintendo Doing Stuff Together.

In addition to the quite promising info that Shigeru Miyamoto is involved in Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games "more ... than sort of the average game," there are some hilarious quotes from Kaplan, who seems to be euphoric in the extreme over the Sega-Nintendo collaboration. On why Mario gets top billing in the title: "He's Italian, he's really sexy, and he can get more women than Sonic." Depressingly, we have evidence to the contrary of that last point (said evidence is a Sonic 360/PS3 spoiler, so be warned ... in fact, be warned in general).

Looks like Perrin may have jumped the gun a bit when she said that the company would not be manufacturing any more GameCubes and we should all just consider the thing to be dead. At least, that's according to Nintendo UK spokesperson who recently told Europgamer "I can confirm that globally, Nintendo is still continuing production of GameCube hardware and GameCube software."

He said, she said ... it makes our head spin.

[via Joystiq]

After a bunch of Perrin Kaplan flip-flopping and general mass hysteria, it turned out that the Wii would in fact be region-specific after all. Importing games that the world has deemed too insane for the American public is one of our greatest joys in this world, and lo, Nintendo cut us down without mercy. But in this rare tale of Nintendo playing the role of evil, a shining knight gallops toward us with an interesting coat of arms adorning yon shield ... it's Datel, Advanced Gaming Technology™! Yes!

Apparently, Datel has announced plans to bring a Wii version of their popular Freeloader boot disc, allowing a gamer to essentially ignore any and all region-locks. Though the updatable nature of the Wii theoretically might allow Nintendo to block this product in the future, we'd imagine that even evil has unexpected bouts of lenience.

We've never really had a reason to dislike Perrin Kaplan, Nintendo of America's vice president of marketing and corporate affairs. Sure, she got a little drunk at E3 (seriously, watch that video, it's awesome), but who wasn't? But now...she's crossed the line. We reported yesterday that the Wii would be region-free for first-party titles, and left up to the publisher for third-party ventures. However, a UK Nintendo rep flatly denied her claims, and the official line from a U.S. rep was this:

"We've heard conflicting reports from lots of folks out there, but can tell you that Wii will be region encoded, as will first-party software."

How dare you, Kaplan? We trusted you; put our ability to play quirky Japanese Wii games in your hands! You failed us, you fibbing...fibber! A curse upon your soul!

Nintendo, in their almost-infinite tornado of news today, never mentioned anything on the promised ability for the Wii to play DVD movies. No mention in the press releases that followed their event today either? Hmm, how odd...

So what does Nintendo's VP of Marketing Perrin Kaplan have to say about this? Well, apparently she confirmed to IGN that the Wii is going to totally toss out the DVD movie functionality all together. The decision to rid the console of this feature was apparently in the interest of delivering it at a cheaper price for the consumer.

So Fanboy readers, is this a good or bad thing?