hehe, my book has "panoply" in its title :P

they produce them to a 80/20 ratio per tier, each tier being composed of 3 characters. They release the popular ones (mario, luigi, etc) in seperate waves and capitalize on their existing popularity to adjust production. It's quite easy to figure out how many of each have been made actually, provided you have some…

not full games though, hurray for a demo? :/

Boo-hoo kotaku, big deal.Fact of the matter is that many people enjoy nintendo games, reviewers and users alike, and that's fine. Using such numbers to prove a point is hardly news though, Apple/MS/other companies do it as well.

and don't forget kids, the systems are region-locked!

the new tracking-assisted 3D kicks the crap out of the old one, this is not an incremental update - this is how it was meant to be all along. It makes me want to never turn the 3D off, unlike the previous models. MUST BUY.

there are many prototypes, depending on what stage of the development you look at - not much to play around with though, as little to no final software was written for it with the exception of a handful of games, most of which got ported to other formats.

You're not missing out on much though, it was a heavy unit,…

Sorry, I meant that it's missing its complementary (but equal) little brother.

There were two units planned for release at that stage: An add-on you snapped onto the SNES, and a stand-alone version for those who didn't own a SNES. Both were the same thing and under license from Nintendo.

The one in your initial…

to be fair, the Famicom did this a long while beforethe SNES was even around. In Japan, of course.

your picture is missing the bottom half unit:) It was a confused little system, and the devkit/software was not that easy to work with. Thank someone it got canned.

damn, impressive drawings!

This is what they did:

- Changed to higher quality character models for most things (Choccobo not included)

- Changed to higher quality textures

- An obvious (and free, in terms of effort) resolution upgrade

A great catalyst for unique branding through packaging.

I understand, yet there's no escaping that it does look like a toy - even though it's not as "colourful" as a Fisher Price piece. I consider nintendo's TV remote, shaped like a Wii remote, to be rather subtle myself. That thing looks like a controller, no doubt, and I m happy I got one back in the day :D It got quite…

spot on!

I'd hardly call plastic/gold "subtle", unless you also think a golden iphone is subtle. :)

some of it has to do with its 64DD heritage. Most expansion-pak dependant games fall into this category, DK64 coming to mind as well.

remember f-zero X, kid

it mostly sucks based on business reasons though. They want a low-maintenance/low cost service that's free for the end user, how well could that bode? :P

I kinda love Balmer for who he is, a big child. Microsoft doesn't seem the same w/o the guy, anymore, despite his less-than-stellar decisions at times. His heart was always in the right place.