Category: NDS

Stores in Australia are heading into a possible Wii shortage this week, due to to worldwide demands for the hot game console leading up to Christmas.

A recent poll done by various stores around Sydney shows that most has Wii consoles in stock, but doesn’t expect them to last towards the weekend.

A spokeswoman for Myer said their stores were currently receiving their last delivery before Christmas, but expected them to sell quickly.

“They’re selling like hotcakes,” she said.

“Once the current deliveries sell, we’re not receiving any more until the early New Year.”

Nintendo Australia public relations coordinator Heather Murphy admits the Wii and its smaller cousin the Nintendo DS have become victims of their own success.

“Throughout 2007, both Nintendo DS and Wii’s popularity have grown exponentially,” Ms Murphy said.

“The range of games for both Nintendo DS and Wii is really broad - we have games that appeal to core gamers, casual gamers, young females, even seniors are embracing both the Nintendo DS and Wii.”

Ms Murphy said that the company is working to pump out more units harder and faster than ever before, but admits that many people who are thing of owning a Wii this summer will most likely miss out on the fun.

“We’re continually putting more and more Wii systems into the pipeline, but they all sell through almost instantly,” Ms Murphy said.

“Due to the high demand for both products, come Christmas time we may not be able to satisfy all consumer demand.”

Many stockists are profiting from the Wii shortage, with anecdotal reports of customers buying as many as 10 units at a time and then selling them at an inflated price online.

Several listings on the online auction website eBay have attracted bids between $400 and $500, with one listing as high as $729 - almost double the recommended retail price of $399.

Toshi Iwai, a madia artist from Japan and the creator of the Electroplankton, has collaborated with Yahama to product a completely new instrument: the Tenori-On. Toshio Iwai says the Tenori-On was developed with “particular attention being given to the beauty of the light & sounds, the ease of performance, and as a musical instrument of the future.”

The Tenori-On features a 16×16 LED button matrix. There are six modes of performance and sound/light: Score Mode, Random Mode, Draw Mode, Bounce Mode, Push Mode, and Solo Mode. Compositions are made of “Layers” and “Blocks”, where sounds made in each layer will be played in order of the position of the button pushed.

The Tenori-On was offered in a limited test market in the UK for £599.00 (about $1,200 USD). Artist like Bjork have used the Tenori-On during live performances.

Touchscreens. They’re everywhere, as if electronics makers aren’t cool unless their phones or media players have them, and soon that will be true for laptops as well. Touchscreens aren’t going to completely replace the mouse and keyboard in the next year or two, but we’re hurtling toward a future where they’re the dominant way we interact with devices. The catch is that “touchscreen” can describe a few very different technologies that all perform a similar function. Here’s a breakdown of the most popular techniques for making touchscreen magic happen—and the crazy new techniques that will succumb to your caresses in years to come.

At a basic level, they all perform the same function—sensing a disturbance in the force when your finger or stylus or whatever pointy object you’ve got touches the screen, and then extrapolating that into knowing where you’re touching it and relaying that to the software. The differences lie in how each screen detects a touch.

Resistive touchscreens are the ones you’ve probably put your greasy fingers on more than any other kind, mostly because they’re the cheapest and oldest. They’re in most touchscreen cellphones, many tablets and the Nintendo DS, to name a very few.

How it works: On the bottom you’ve got a layer of glass, and on top of that, you’ve got two more: a conductive and a resistive layer. They’ve got a sliver of space between them. And on top of that you’ve got one more layer, which is the one you touch. So, when you push down on the screen, the conductive and resistive layer touch each other, which changes the electrical current running through ‘em, and the device can tell from that where your finger or stylus is touching.

Good and bad: While resistive is a good deal cheaper to manufacture at the moment, one downside is that it’s hard to do multitouch, because of the constraints and shortcomings of a pressure-based system. Another problem is that the multiple layers of touch technology on top of the LCD block an awful lot of light—think of how much dimmer the DS’s bottom screen is than the top one. read this entry »

Yesterday, Kotaku reported on Nintendo and 54 software makers filing an injunction to stop the sales of the R4 and similar devices in Japan. For the uninitiated, the R4 allows you to download DS games online and play them on your DS. Yes, DS piracy. And now said piracy is threatened! So what does that mean? R4 sales are through the roof. Hell, even I bought one yesterday.

The R4 is sold all over the place in Akihabara, the nerd district of Tokyo, and the employees at stores there have already noticed an uptick in sales.

The rush in demand has been amazing. These devices always sell well. But this weekend should be staggering, don’t you think?

Yes, I do think. So if you’re on the fence about getting one or just discovered their existence thanks to this lawsuit, now seems like a pretty good time to jump on board. For, uh, homebrew games only, of course. [Kotaku]

These are the current software profits for Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony based on first-party game titles published under their banner. It’s much like the hardware situation, with Nintendo up front with an uncountable amount of money, Microsoft somewhere in the middle with a deficit, and Sony pulling up the rear with billions in the red. So not only is Nintendo turning a profit from each Wii sale, it’s also generating loads with their games as well. We hope Ninty’s taking all this cash and coming up with a next-next-gen system with both unique motion-sensing gameplay AND good graphical capabilities—not to make Wii Sports P.E. Fun Times, but something good that we would want to play. [EDGE via Kotaku via Boing Boing Gadgets]