We love a new console at Everybody Plays, and Nintendo's latest home system, the Wii U seems to be ticking all the right boxes. With a great looking line-up of games including New Super Mario U, LEGO City Undercover and Wii Fit U, there's certainly plenty to be excited about - and it seems the internet's getting well and truly on the hype train too, with rumours flying around about the Wii U's release date, price, and games like Mario strapped to an inflating Yoshi.
First up comes news of a leaked internal stock list from a company called VPD, a distributor that supplies products to retailers such as Amazon and Blockbuster. Seeing as the site's protected by a login system, all we have to go by as evidence here is a video that purports to be of the website, which shows a listing for the Wii U, along with an alleged release date and price (note: the video has since been removed. Whether that makes it any more or less legitimate remains to be seen). Either way, the listing suggests that the Wii U will be released in America on the 11th of November, with three flavours of console available - a basic model called WIIU SYSTEM GM for $249.99, a slightly more advanced one, WIIU SYSTEM W/ - GM for $299.99, and some sort of bundle, called WIIU SYSTEM 349 - GM for $349.99. While it doesn't really give us all that much information about what any of the packages contain, we'd hazard a guess that there won't be that much of a difference, if any, to the actual console itself, or any important peripherals - rather, it'll probably be variations of bundled controllers that make up the cost. Perhaps the base model only has a GamePad, while the middle one comes with a Wii Remote and Nunchuck, and the most expensive includes an extra GamePad and Wii Remote?
New Super Mario Bros U really can't come soon enough.
Meanwhile, news closer to home from France via French games website Jeuxactu suggests that the Wii U may be slightly delayed making its way across the pond. According to the site, French retailer FNAC have started to display posters in store, advertising the Wii U as coming out on the 7th of December, at a cost of a whopping 349 Euros. While it may initially seem a lot more than the US models, there's every chance that FNAC are only advertising the price for the most expensive model, safe in the knowledge they'll be able to drop the price later. It's fairly safe to assume that the dollars to euros conversion will be in place here, with the pound being worked out against the euro (which always leaves us paying a lot more than the Americans).
Either way, these rumours certainly seem plausible to us. If they're true, the Wii U will launch somewhere within a slightly more than three week window towards the middle of November/start of December, and cost, if the base US price of $249.99 is taken, £156. Including VAT, we could expect to see that rounded up to £180-200, but any more would probably be pushing it. At the high end, going by the French prices, we could end up paying up to £280 for our Wii Us. It's fairly certain the console would sell a lot better at the one price then the other.
Either way, the rumours look set to be proven one way or the other next week, as Nintendo are hosting an event in New York, where they're expected to reveal all about the Wii U's US launch. Sadly, there's no similar event planned for Europe, or the UK, and it's expected that only US details will be announced at the American event - so it could still be some time before we learn when the console will find its way into our hands. Luckily, the rumours so far seem to blend in pretty well with the five things our "psychic cat" predicted about the Wii U a few weeks ago, so she could end up being Mystic Mog after all.
