The folks over at Nintendo are awash with cash. It's totally deserved, but almost sickening when you look at how wide their profit margins are. Their stocks are climbing to record highs, and have outsold Sony almost 3:1. Moreover, they posted a profit of $8.1 billion bucks (that's billion, with a B) since their DS Lite and Wii consoles are essentially money printers for the company. DS Lite is on track to knock the Gameboy off the perch as the best-selling entertainment system ever, and the Wii continues to elude fad status and dominate the console spotlight (not to mention Engadget's gizmo of the year poll).

Also, the WSJ has a good editorial describing how Nintendo went from the homely 3rd choice at the dance to leading lady.

On another Nintendo related note, if you're sick of waiting for the trickle of Wii Virtual Console games, you can always get one of these amazing USB Nintendo control pads and fire up your favorite emulator!

So I've been wary of this for a bit, but now I'm a little concerned on behalf of my cute little Wii, which looked like the horse that would smoke the others in the next-gen Preakness.

And then you have your darkest fears confirmed by something like this press release. Wow. I mean, really, wow. You almost have to work hard to have that big of a vapid gap in release schedule...

...so good thing everyone still seems to love Wii Sports. No one loves it more than this little guy though:

How effing cute is that?

You have to love the rediculous shit americans get away with in Japan. Take this kid. He essentially trespasses his way into the original Nintendo HQ, then gets a guided tour instead of getting kicked out, all the while filming while he's been asked not to:

Yup.

Well this was unexpected. A few days back, if you looked at Amazon's best sellers, you'd note that not only was the PS3 doing poorly, but it was getting spanked by the SNES?!? Man, Nintendo still has a yen-printing machine this many years out? Yikes.

In other news, yet ANOTHER Wii modchip is on the way, Reggie has dropped a huge hint suggesting in addition to Wii Virtual Console nostalgia, that classic backissues of Nintendo Power may be available as a Wii Channel!

On a heavier note, CVG does a fantastic job of asking the question I've been asking myself after my eyeballs go dry from 4-hour stints of playing Zelda on my Wii (40 hours in and still not finished!): is the novelty of the Wii wearing thin? And more importantly.... WHERE ARE THE GAMES? After I beat Zelda, I'm going to finish Wario and Elebits in about 3 hours each, and then what? Call of Duty? Done. Red Steel? Almost as crappy as Farcry. So.... um, Nintendo? Games please?

Now that the DS Lite has hit Korea, they've wasted no time in making some amazing skins available for the handheld. These are really beautiful, and if you're headed to Seoul I'll pay you back...

In other news around Southeast Asia: ever wonder where game company names come from? Well, JC Barnett has all your answers right here. Back to Korea, where despite years of shunning the Japanese-manufactured console market (for obvious reasons), there is a slow movement to embrace console gaming on the peninsula. Accordingly, given how tech-savvy the S. Koreans are, the big three game shops are gearing up for a new kind of war in the S. Korean gaming market.

Finally, despite the fact that it's typically a disturbingly peaceful place, Japan's crime news continues to be punctuated with exceptionally shocking and tragic murders, including this one describing how a man and his mother were murdered by a youth who was trying to obtain money to support his arcade gaming habit. Contrast this to the USA, where we have murders and gun violence galore, but despite the best efforts of many out-of-touch firebrands it's not always possible to link the violence to videogames. This was the case with the tragic Salt Lake shooting rampage, where the teen was found to have owned no console or computer games, and not to have played them much at all. Despite the fact that Jackass Thompson earlier speculated that the shooter played GTA...

Sigh.

*choke*

Man, as if Nintendo couldn't get any more warm and cuddly:

"In those 25 minutes, they'd transferred all of my Miis, friends, and saved games from the old console to a new one. She logged on to make sure my 500 points transferred to the shopping channel. She sent me out with a $0.00 invoice showing a warranty replacement of my Wii and a reset of the warranty clock, meaning the Wii I took home has 15 months of coverage from today, even though I bought my original one almost 3 months ago."

A must-read!

...a real faceful. Seriously, ouch, ouch, ouch. I mean, how do you recover from things like:

"Gabe Newell suggested that Sony should scrap plans to release PS3 and develop an entirely new system."

This from the daddy of Half-Life. NOT small potatoes. Also, notably:

"'The happy story is the Wii,' he added. 'I’m betting that by Christmas of next year, the Wii has a larger installed base than the 360. Other people think I’m crazy. I really like everything that Nintendo is doing.'"

So basically, Sony gets a beatdown, Mario gets a handjob.

A fat bunch of Wii-related goodies to wrap up the week. For starters, Wii've got rhythm sticks on the Wii now:

Want to bet how long it takes for Drum Hero to appear on Wii? Thanks to the Wii Drum Machine, you've got a DIY fix to hold you over.

Want to tone up more than your forearms? We've also got the Wii Fitness Project to test, Morgan Spurlock style, if the Wii can help you trim down and tone up. I know I break a sweat beating up my wife in Wii Sports boxing.

Nerd alert: grad students reinvent the wheel; Power Glove to follow. I know that Nintendo learned their lesson with the useless but cool-as-hell-looking PG, but the Wii gives the old gizmo an actual chance at being useful. Maybe. Or something like it. We'll see. At any rate, this grad student could strike it rich by beating Nintendo to the punch, filing a patent, and then suing the pants off them for technology they've got in the marketplace... sigh. UPDATE: nevermind, Wii Powerglove now exists.

Finally, while it's no big shocker, November was a HUGE boom for the gaming industry, with sales up 34% last month! What's most interesting to note:

"Looking at how the new Sony and Nintendo consoles fared, the Wii sold through 476K units in the U.S. while the PS3 sold 197K units. Meanwhile, Microsoft's Xbox 360 (which is in far greater supply) sold 511K units. Interestingly, the PS2 managed to outsell the Xbox 360 yet again. In fact, so did the old Game Boy."

Hmmm....

In a landmark ruling in the land down under, in the Sony/Hardware/System maker vs. Mod Chip war, the Mod Chippers have won! The case basically points out that region-encoding limits consumers unfairly (amen), but also comes dangerously close to opening up the pandora's box of legalized piracy. It's a tough nut to crack: personally, it's my damn hardware and I should be able to play it, broil it, turn it into a habitrail, and yes, mod it if I want to. Telling console owners, consumers, that they don't have the right to mod their hardware is like saying Honda Civic owners can't tweak their engines. All of the you-bought-this-unit-so-therefore-you-agree-to-this-license-agreement is rubbish IMHO; if someone sells you something, that's that. It's yours. Do with it as you wish. If Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo wanted to lease consoles from now on, that'd be a different story. But for now, as long as we're lining up for days and buying consoles by the tens of thousands, any country with a decent legal system should follow suit with the aussies and let us crack the case and solder away.

Nintendo has already led a strong charge in circumventing the need for chips by making the DS region-free (play imports! all you want! yippie!), and if Sony and Microsoft would get out of their proprietary mindsets, chances are they'd see modding drop a notch as well by letting US/EU Otaku play Japanese imports on their systems.