Nintendo just confirmed in a press release that they will be dropping the Wii’s price in North America to $150 on May 15, so there’s one rumour that turned out to be true. Not just that, but Nintendo’s also switching things up a bit by swapping out the bundled Wii Sports with Mario Kart Wii.

Wii Sports, together with Mario Super Sluggers, Animal Crossing: City Folk, and The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, will now be getting re-released as part of the ‘Nintendo Selects’ collection – the Wii’s equivalent of the GameCube’s popular Player’s Choice series of discounted hit games. Each of the ‘Nintendo Selects’ will cost just $20, which is great for people looking to pick up some great games with their new $150 Wii, but I can’t help but feel just a little ripped off, as I’ve purchased Animal Crossing and Zelda full-price.

It seems the Wii is going to follow the path of the PlayStation 2, becoming a real budget system that will eventually live in the shadow of its next-gen successor. Reggie did say a long time ago that they’ve got lots of room to drop the Wii’s price, and I have no doubt it will be cut further in the future – EA in particular has been quoted as saying that the Wii would “explode” if it broke the psychological double-digits barrier.

Again, the Nintendo Selects collection and the lower-priced Wii bundle will be coming out on May 15.

The Swedish website Loading has ignited an exciting new round of rumours, coming supposedly from a source close to Nintendo.

The most exciting part of their report is that the console’s controller will feature a touchscreen with haptic feedback technology – that is, a touchscreen that allows you to feel textured surfaces. For example, you’d be able to touch soft fur, and it would feel just like it, instead of your screen’s cold, hard glass. Loading included a link to this video in their article, which demonstrates Toshiba’s take on the technology.

The new console will apparently once again start a revolution with its controller, with the focus of Nintendo’s presentation at E3 being all about the look and feel of its games. Loading even said that the console will be named Nintendo Feel.

The source also said that you have to try “Feel” to really understand it, but that the idea of haptic feedback is very easy to sell to both hardcore and casual gamers – which I agree with wholeheartedly.

Lastly, it was mentioned that the Wii Vitality Sensor will make a comeback at E3 this year, but as a key feature of the Wii 2 rather than a peripheral for the Wii. Which ties in perfectly with the prediction I made yesterday.

Thanks to everyone who sent this in!

Iwata, your fans are waiting.

Nintendo confirmed the exact date and time of their press conference at this year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo. It’ll be taking place in the Nokia Theatre on June 7, at 9:00 AM Pacific Time (GMT-8). I can guarantee you that the conference will be live-streamed, as it has been for the past few years, but I don’t know yet where you’ll be able to go to watch it.

The big news that we’re waiting for, of course, is the reveal of the Wii’s successor, but the 3DS will be a major focus of the conference, too. Expect Nintendo to spend a lot of time on Super Mario 3DS, Kid Icarus: Uprising, Mario Kart 3DS, among many other major releases for their new handheld. I expect it will be one of the greatest Nintendo conferences in recent memory, and I’m sure we won’t be forgetting it anytime soon.

Between now and June 7, Nintendo will probably be staying on lock-down with their information, as they’re the kind of company that loves unloading a single, great barrage of surprises and general awesomeness on us at E3. While I can’t make it to E3 this year myself, I’ll be doing my best to cover all the major Project Café news that is sure to pop out of the event.

Kotaku just came out with an unconfirmed report telling us that the Wii’s successor will have HD, but no HDD. Instead, they say it will feature a measly 8 GB of flash memory. For comparison, the Xbox 360 launched in 2005 with a 20 GB hard drive. The system will allegedly be open to additional memory by means of SD cards, just like the Wii, DSi, and 3DS, but I still think it will be inconvenient for purchasers to be forced to buy additional storage just because they want to say, download a large expansion pack or two.

Additionally, Kotaku’s sources have told them that Project Café will not utilize HD-DVD or Blu-ray discs, but will opt for a proprietary disc format with a capacity of 25 GB instead – the same capacity as a single-layer Blu-ray disc.

They also said that they’ve heard conflicting reports on whether the Wii 2’s resolution will cap out at 1080i or 1080p.

I find the rumour of 8 GB of memory rather worrying. Flash memory does have many advantages over hard drives, but considering how cheap the latter has become, I think it would honestly be a little silly of Nintendo to not step up to the plate and give us enough space to, you know, not have to “clean the fridge.” While 8 GB is 16 times the amount of memory the Wii had, Wii 2 games will no doubt be larger in size, so that amount of memory will probably still fill up just as fast.

At Nintendo’s last investor relations meeting, an attendee pointed out that the Wii Vitality Sensor was nowhere to be seen on the company’s sales plan, and asked Iwata if it’ll be released in the next fiscal year, if ever.

Iwata answered the question by explaining that the Vitality Sensor is “a totally new type of entertainment,” telling us that it currently only works properly with 80% of people. The folks at Nintendo being the perfectionists they are, he wants to bring that figure up to 99% before releasing it to the market.

Iwata thinks the sensor has an awful lot of interesting potential – and frankly, I do, too – and doesn’t want to give up on it. But by the sound of it, fully developing it might take quite a while – quite possibly beyond the Project Café launch. As multiple reports have shown, the Wii is definitely on its way out, and the Vitality Sensor may be better off as an unusual, attention-sparking peripheral for Café rather than yet another accessory for a console that has already saturated the market.

Do you think this is a realistic possibility?

You may or may not be aware of Wii 2 Blog’s mockup gallery (if not, you should go check it out!), which features over 100 fan-made mockups of Project Café. I’ve been fortunate enough to have had two artists email their work to me personally for inclusion, and I’d like to showcase them on the front page today.

Matheus K. (mdkex)

I first came across Matheus’s work when looking for mockups on deviantART. He is a Brazilian artist hailing from the fandoms of several popular anime series, and has made a number of very polished 3D renders of what he thinks the Wii’s successor might look like. His designs are inspired by the alleged leaked images, but he has added his own touches to them, and made them look far more attractive than the “painted Windows 7 boxes” we’ve been seeing over the past couple of weeks. He even went as far as creating some fake blueprints for the system, which you can see in the gallery below (as always, click the pictures to see them full-size).

You can check out more of Matheus’s art and follow him on his deviantART page.

Jade Doel (peachy)

Jade, who goes by the name peachy at the forums, is currently studying the art of product and furniture design. What better product to try and design than Project Café’s mysterious controller? His designs carry a little bit of Apple-esque design flair, but are very clearly more than just an “iPad with buttons.” He dubs his creation “nStream,” and has recoloured it in 4 glossy colours. He even took the time to create several mockups of a possible splash screen and user interface for the controller, which, while probably not very realistic, look very cool nonetheless.

Jade has a personal blog at which he posts many of his designs, which you can bookmark and follow if you’re interested in seeing his other work.

I’m hoping to feature more original work from the community in the future, so if you’re an artist looking for some exposure, feel free to send your Project Café art in to me at contact@wii2blog.com, and I’ll consider featuring you in a post.

The user Retro over at NeoGAF made a great post yesterday which I think is worth every Wii 2 Blog reader’s time. It’s a lengthy but incredibly well thought-out piece that aims to convince any last skeptics of the advancements a touchscreen controller could bring to the gaming table. The obvious uses like privacy in multiplayer games and an off-screen HUD are present, but Retro went much further than just that and listed off a mind-numbing variety of other possible applications it could be useful in.

I’m not going to go any further, because this work of speculative art deserves to be seen in its natural habitat, so click on over to the original post and have a read.

Special thanks to Guest finding Retro’s post and letting me know about it!

Nintendo, let's make Project Café's launch a great one.

Nintendo has taken on a fair amount of criticism after the 3DS’s launch, in that the selection of games for the system was mediocre at best. I’m sure a lot of you will agree that we don’t want the Wii’s successor to suffer from the same launch blues next year that the 3DS did.

With this in mind, IGN’s Lucas Thomas wrote up a three-page piece on what games Nintendo would need to have right out of the gate to ensure that Project Café will be off to a smashing start, and listed games from past Nintendo system launches to illustrate his points. The article’s a good read, but if you’re of the tl;dr mindset, here’s a quick summary of what Lucas thought would make for a killer launch:

• a killer multiplayer game, like Ice Climbers on the NES
• a game that promotes an unusual peripheral, like Duck Hunt on the NES
• a game that shows off the system’s visual capabilities, like Pilotwings on all three systems it appeared on
• a game that showcases gameplay which is only possible on that one system, like Super Mario 64 on the Nintendo 64
• an addictive game with crazy viral appeal, like Tetris on the Game Boy or Wii Sports on the Wii
• a meaty single-player adventure, like The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess on the Wii
• a AAA third-party game that shows fans that Nintendo isn’t the only company interested in the system, like Super Street Fighter IV on the 3DS
• a free demo to get fans excited for a major upcoming title, like Metroid Prime Hunters: First Hunt on the Nintendo DS
• a nostalgic game for long-time Nintendo fans to sink their tooth into and feel right at home with, like Super Smash Bros. Melee on the GameCube

Again, this is only a rough-and-dirty summary of the full article. Wii 2 news has been really slow over the past few days, so it’s a great way to spend some time while we wait for the next exciting leak to come.

Remember Emily Rogers? Sure you do. After all, she’s given us some of the most interesting stories about Project Café in the past couple of weeks. Now, though, she’s hung her credibility over a cliff with a document she just published. It is supposedly a list of third-parties with Wii 2 dev kits that Nintendo is passing around to get more developers excited about the system. It would normally be harmless to post up such a document and call it a “leak” at this stage in a new console’s development, but there are so many signs pointing to this one being fake that it becomes pretty much obvious that Emily fabricated it herself, which I’ll touch on in a moment.

Here you can see the original document Emily posted. It might not look weird at first, until you take a closer look at the top. Notice that it claims that E3 ends on June 8th, when it actually lasts until the 9th. Nintendo’s people would never make such a mistake, especially on a document like this. What’s more, the document displays Nintendo’s old red logo, which they stopped using in favour of a grey one several years ago. Lastly, what are Mario and Yoshi doing on a document that’s supposed to give third-party developers the hope that studios other than Nintendo’s own can experience commercial success on the system? At this point, you could still theoretically mark it as a rumour, albeit a highly, highly unlikely one. But now, that rumour gets crushed.

Here’s an edited version of the document, with the corrected date being the only difference. Okay, Emily changed the date to make the doc more presentable. But how did she do it so quickly, get the font right, and position the corrected date in exactly the right position? There is no way she could’ve done that unless she had the source file for the doc. And in turn, there is no way she could have the source file unless she made it herself, which would explain the red Nintendo logo as well as Mario and Yoshi, too.

What can we take away from this incident? Emily Rogers’s reports should be taken with a dump truck’s worth of salt from now on. She never claimed the above document was authentic, but she repeatedly states that she didn’t make it, despite all the evidence that she did. She said she’s going to put up screenshots of some Wii 2 games on May 10, and it’ll be less than a month from there until we find out just how much of her “information” was really true.

Most gamers will agree that physical buttons are a necessity for any kind of serious gaming, and dislike buttonless devices like the iPod Touch and iPad for the very reason that they lack tactile controls.

With all the rumours about Project Café sporting a touchscreen controller, there’s no need to worry about losing the very buttons that Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft always take care to include in their consoles. Iwata has recently gone on record declaring that he loves buttons as much as you do, so you can rest assured that the Wii’s successor is going to have them. Here’s the full quote:

Whenever we make a new game console, we’ve done it without throwing away buttons and the directional pad. The reason for that it’s better to have them, because buttons and directional pads benefit gameplay response.

Taking this into account, Nintendo isn’t planning on completely ditching buttons, nor is Nintendo thinking of taking tablets as they are today and implementing them in a game console.

Two things are pretty much confirmed there: there will be buttons and a D-pad on the Project Café controller, and there will also be a tablet or tablet-like screen involved. It almost sounds like Iwata was deliberately responding to some of the popular Project Café rumours out there.