Nintendo’s official Wii website updated

Follow the Japanese and North American press conferences held in the past 24 hours Nintendo’s official Wii website has launched providing some great video coverage of features, information on games and technical specifications of the system too boring to be detailed at a press conference.

Movies featuring a user interaction with a number of features of the Wii channel give a good insight into what the menus and such will look like. The fact that wide screen displays are used in all these shows great promise for the possibility of widescreen support for many titles. This page gives a nice explanation of many of the services offered.

We get a nice rundown of some choice games. Wii Sports, Zelda, Wario Ware, Excite Truck, Super Mario Galaxy, Metroid, Mario Strikers, Big Brain Academy and Batalion Wars are featured. There’s also another 42 games listed to be released by March 2007.

The Japanese version of the page features a great video combining clips of many games and some bozos playing them.

Now some noteable things about the Wii’s hardware.

– It’s tiny
– Wireless capable out of the box using a wireless 802.11 b or g
– Can be networked using a USB 2.0 LAN adapter which I figure is something you plug into one of the USB slots to accept an ethernet cable that does not seem to be included with the system
– Backwards compatible with Gamecube games, 4 controllers and 2 memory cards (which will hopefully support the Microphone peripherals)
– Stadard DVD sized discs for games
– 4 Wii remote capacity
– SD memory card slot
– AV Multi-output port for component, composite or S-video which, if as described is a single port, is not the same port we’ve seen on the SNES, N64 and Gamecube alike. Great to see them supporting component video again after removing it from later models of the Gamecube
– Blu-Ray