Reggies Talks Shortages And Metroid

Firstly he apologised for the lack of Wii and DS units being made readily available.

"We apologize that it continues to be a difficult problem to get your hands on [a Wii]," he said. "The fact is, we manufactured 4 million Wii consoles by the end of the calendar year. Our challenge was getting them not only into our warehouses and then into warehouses of our retailers, but there is some handling of the consoles in terms of putting the "Wii Sports" disc in. That whole inventory chain is what prevented us from selling all 4 million that had been produced."

He then went on to talk about the companies handheld console, the Nintendo DS:

"We put everything in the marketplace that we humanly could by December 25th. But from December 26th until mid-January, we were effectively out of stock," Fils-Aime responded. "It's going to be tight probably until March. And then as we gear up for the April 22nd launch of 'Pokémon Diamond' and '[Pokémon] Pearl,' things should certainly open up at that point."

The exciting bit of information came from Metroid Prime 3 though:

"What I will tell you about 'Metroid' is that 'Metroid' will be fabulous. I think it's fair to say that all of us were disappointed with the sales of 'Metroid Prime 2,' Retro [the game's developer] included. The focus on 'Prime 3' is to make that the stellar game for a first-person experience on the platform. What that means is we're going to make sure it's perfect when we launch it. I think this is one where your readers — the fans of Nintendo, the core gamer — need to recognise that when we release it, it will be perfect. And if that's a little later than folks would have liked, I'm hoping they're going to be happy. They certainly seem to be happy that we took our time with The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess."

When asked if perfect meant online play Reggie replied: "That's perfect for you."

So I think we can almost assume we are guaranteed online play for Metroid Prime 3. Can't wait, huh?