Fun toys of the month, the Korg Mini-Kaoss, Korg Kaossilator, and the Korg DS-10 Nintendo DS analog. Way too much fun.

An interesting, longish interview with Mr. Iwata (president of Nintendo), which focuses mostly on how problems and solutions cluster in counter-intuitive ways.

The classic nethack game (tile screenshots) is now available for the Nintendo DS. Some background on the ubercool Nethack, a game that captured the essence of the nerd hacker in the 80s.

A large set of interviews with various Wii system developers, via kottke.

The Wii Help Cat: A lesson in interaction design (via slash7), analyzes the odd Nintendo Wii help system.

The Chief Happiness Officer writes about Business lessons from the Nintendo Wii. Don’t sweat the specs: make ‘em happy.

ARSTechnica looks at the recently “leaked” Wii specs … looks like a bad fake. Via HackThePlanet (a classic, low-noise blog).

E3 2006: Sony Manipulates Audience During Press Conference. They copied Nintendo badly, which appears to have flopped at the presentation.

Nintendo’s Long Tail
And then Nintendo announces that they’ll be working on making their back catalog available. Miyamoto doesn’t know which games they’ll make available, but everything can run. I can pretty much guarantee that the chance to play Dr. Mario on a big screen is going to sell my father a Revolution. Admittedly he’s not necessarily your typical approaching 60-year old (he bought us our Intellivision and I’m convinced that it being “for the kids” was never an excuse he had to use) but instant access to a library that size is a compelling reason for a great many people. (Found at a random blog)