Oops! Despite Nintendo’s best efforts to keep the Wii price and release date information sacrosanct until the official announcements are made, it seems that the New York Times website has gone and jumped the gun, revealing all somewhat ahead of schedule. Bad newspaper! Go to your room! Here, then, is what they reckon to know. Pinches of salt on standby...: • The Wii will launch on November 19th – just in time for Thanksgiving on the 23rd – priced just under $250 (equivalent to £133). • The Wii will come bundled with a copy of Wii Sports – ace! • Wii software will be priced at around $50 (approximately £27). • There will be around 30 games available to download via the Wii’s Virtual Console, each priced between $5 and $10. • Other online services will include web-browsing, digital photo management, messaging and access to news and weather channels. Meanwhile the first of the *official* announcements has now taken place in Tokyo where Mr Iwata revealed a Japanese release date of December 2nd, a price point of 25,000 yen (approximately £113) and 16 titles for launch – including Zelda: Twilight Princess, Red Steel, Wii Sports, Elebits and Wario Ware: Smooth Moves. Iwata-san also unveiled more of the Wii’s advanced functionality, detailing the unit’s web-browsing and messaging components, as well as something that Nintendo is calling “Mii”. This neat feature allows players to create little avatars which can be used in games such as Wii Sports and Wario Ware. They can even be saved to the Wii Remote and ported to friends’ houses etc. How cool is that? A website containing mini movies of some of the unit’s functionality can be found at www.wii.com. The English language sections aren’t working yet (presumably they’ll be activated shortly) but you’ll certainly get the drift. The global weather functionality is surprisingly cool! Back to the Noo Yawk Times unofficial ‘reveal’. Intriguingly, the info published overnight was taken down again pretty promptly, which leads us to believe that it was either entirely incorrect or that the paper had broken some sort of embargo and had had its wrists slapped by Nintendo’s legal bloodhounds. We think the latter. Whatever the case the Japanese announcement is fully kosher and we do not have long to wait for the official declarations from the US (which we should have later today) and, last of all, Europe, which takes place tomorrow at midday GMT. Exciting stuff, eh!