Ah, a new day begins and nary an Xbox 360 story in sight! Well, if there is we’re certainly not reporting it just now – Microsoft has had quite enough of the oxygen of our publicity after yesterday’s X06 blowout.

And so, by means of an antidote to all that 360-related tumult we have excitement of an altogether gentler pace – brand new and previously unseen (by us, anyway) pix of the Wii Virtual Console, in full effect and the English language to boot.

So what do we have here? Hmm, screen 1 shows the Virtual Console front page and demonstrates the sort of options we’ll be able to browse and dive into. Based on what Nintendo has told us so far it looks like a pretty complete list too, with news, weather, digital image management and the Mii channel all on display, as well as a bunch of games – presumably downloaded through the Wii Shop channel that’s shown.

The next two screens show how the downloadable game selection and start screens are displayed. Not especially interesting in themselves, but the thought of being able to download a vast array of such classic titles is still mind-boggling. Following that there are a couple of screens of the ‘Mii’ system in action, showing how a Mii avatar is created or selected from a milling crowd of previously-made ones.

Finally there’s a pair of screens showing the Wii’s scheduling/messaging component in action. Quite why you might prefer to leave an electronic message for ‘Tommy’ rather than a hastily scribbled note sellotaped to the fridge door is, well, a question that Nintendo would probably prefer us not to consider… But we daresay that there’s more to this functionality than is shown here.

So there it all is. Don’t you feel a bit more knowledgeable now? And it’s not too much longer to wait until we can see this in action for ourselves either. Roll on December 8th!