The scratches? They’re…a feature!
Nintendo is on the defensive this week after a large US-based retailer released sales figures showing that the company had recently placed an order with them for four million of competitor Microsoft’s Xbox 360 console. While this in itself was cause for some raised eyebrows in Redmond the really interesting part is what else Nintendo ordered – namely several million sheets of sandpaper and some transferable Wii U logos. After the large purchases were all leaked to the press, the company broke its silence.
“We bought these consoles purely to provide incentives to our… uh… employees” stated President of NoA Reggie Fils-Aime in a hastily-convened press conference. “Since, y’know, everyone already has a Wii, what better present would there be than to give each of our employees an estimated 800 Xbox 360s. And the sandpaper? Well that’s for research into desert levels. The Wii U transfers are just so employees can put them on the back of their cars. We’re anticipating that at 800 transfers per car, we should be getting a lot of positive advertising.”
With 360s now available for around $200, and the company needing to be seen by investors as cutting costs, especially given the supposed $80m development cost of the Wii U, this has been seen as something of a risky move. Indeed, this isn’t the first time that Nintendo have made bizarre purchases in the lead-up to a console release – in early 2006 a suspiciously large purchase of duct-tape and a buyback of second-hand GameCubes caused shares in 3M to soar.
In unrelated news, Microsoft have confirmed that they received an extensive order for 4 million Smartglass enabled tablets from an “unknown, Japanese buyer”.
Reggie finished his statement by claiming that “we as a company are committed to the utmost quality on all of our products, which is why we’ve decided to announce now that all new Wii U consoles will come with a three-year guarantee against Red Ring of… uh… I mean, against general hardware failure.”
“caused shares in 3M to sore.”
Why? Were they tired of the beating they took in the lack of humor?
HA!
So, Nintendo is releasing a 360 with a touchscreen controller? TAKE MY MONEY!!!
What’s funny is Nintendo is actually the one doing the most innovating in videogame space, but still some Basic Barneys think innovating is just putting more horsepower in the consoles.
Oh no question Nintendo is innovating in control schemes, but in terms of hardware there’s no denying they’ve lagged and it has hurt them. 3rd party power houses like Skyrim, Bioshock, Portal and Mass Effect have all failed to appear on Nintendo platforms because the hardware couldn’t support it. I’d argue those games have done a lot more innovation in a good way than what the Wii brought to this generation. Now the WiiU looks to repeat that process by clocking up as much power as the current generation and will either become the weakest once more or will have a very short run. It’s unfortunate but it may very well be the case.
I will still buy a WiiU for pikmin 3 and NMH3 however…
3rd party power houses like Skyrim, Bioshock, Portal and Mass Effect
Bioshock was fun (although the sequel was boring) Skyrim was unfortunately a broken mess on PS3, and Mass Effects final game was pretty much universally reviled.. there were talks of a lawsuit about its blatantly untrue marketing promises.
No thanks.
old joke is old.