It’s not much of a news story now that the Wii launch info has been unleashed – yeah, that’s the word – across the globe, however we thought you’d like to know that the UK portion of Nintendo’s Wii umbrella site, www.wii.com, is now up and fully functioning.

There’s plenty to see on the site, although it omits to mention certain little nuggets of hitherto unreported info – such as the fact that UK gamers will find a £20 Virtual Console voucher in their boxes. It’s a good place to start your Wii info-trawl, though. As is www.nintendo-europe.com, where you’ll find that we were a bit hasty in rushing to work out the UK price at anything so unsophisticated as the actual exchange rate!

Yes indeed, at the time of writing 249 Euros was worth a touch under £168. We foolishly thought that this might mean an eventual price of £170, but it seems we were nearly a tenner out - £179 is going to be the actual launch price. That’s still cheap, but did we hear someone say something about rip-off Britain? You want proof? The US launch price of $249 (not £249 as we excitedly mis-typed yesterday) equates to just £133...!

Meanwhile we can now reveal a few other prices. Standalone Wii Remotes will retail for £29 and single Nunchuk controllers will be available for a staggeringly cheap £14. Ditto the Wii Classic controller. What are they making these things out of – cheese? Again these prices are upwardly adrift of the US dollar equivalent. And while we’re grumbling, has anyone else noticed that Europe is last to get all this stuff once again? We’ll even be a day later waving our Wii wands than Australia! Hmmm...