Nintendo Rumor Roundup: Storage, Disc Format, And Vitality Sensor


The Wii successor/Project Café rumors have died down since Nintendo’s official announcement a week ago, but there’s still a little info leaking out (allegedly) here and here. Today has brought a few more nuggets to the web, so let’s take a look.

There are reports that the new console only has 8GB of storage. I’m not sure how I feel about this, because putting too much on external storage (SDXC cards, for instance) is asking for piracy and media-mounted hacks. This spec could easily refer to system storage and not a “mandatory add-on” like a hard drive unit.

Game discs are rumored to hold 25GB of data. The only discs in production capable of doing that kind of density are Blu-ray; I doubt Nintendo secretly developed an entirely new disc format, and micro-DVD-DLs would likely be even more expensive. And I’m pretty sure we’re definitely getting discs. It’d be cool if it were not 25GB of disc space, but 24GB of solid state space, but with 32GB going for around $30 in bulk, that’s just not going to happen.

And let us not forget about the Vitality Sensor! I was there when they announced it (though we couldn’t report it due to bad wi-fi), which was some time ago, and Satoru Iwata says that it has not been forgotten. The delays are Nintendo working to make it work with as close to 100% of the population as possible. Due to “large individual differences in the biological information of humans,” compatibility is not as high as they’d like, so they can’t give a release date.

Similarly, Iwata declined to put a date on the new Mario and Mario Kart games — but said they would come out this fiscal year, or else they won’t meet their hardware sales goals. Iwata’s full remarks on this and other stuff can be found here, it’s actually interesting reading. He’s very articulate when there’s time to translate properly.