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An audio-visual machine and a game machine rolled into one, the Gamecube focuses on game play and is being pitched as "the ultimate TV game machine and the first of its kind." The cube will launch in Japan in July of 2001 with five titles, with a North American launch to follow in October 2001. The price is currently undecided.
According to Nintendo, one of the goals for the machine was to create enhanced functionality in the hardware that could reliably be used by game developers to create great games.
A Nintendo Gamecube disk can hold 1.5 Gigabytes of data, 190 times the size of the cartridge for Super Mario 64. It has a 4 megabit flash memory "Digicard" for saving game data, an SD Digicard Adapter for reading and writing data off of the 64MB SD Memory Card, the wireless "Wavebird" controller (which has a range of 10 meters / 30 feet). A Digital Video Cable, Modem Adapter and Broadband Adapter are also available for it.
Nintendo has also released the next generation Game Boy and has enhanced the portable gaming machine's capabilities dozens of times over. The new Game Boy Advance has a screen that is 1.5 times larger and is run by a 32-bit CPU, providing enhanced processing speed and other streamlined functions.
The new Game Boy will go on sale in Japan on March 21st, 2001 at a suggested retail price of 9,800 yen. A Mobile Adapter GB for Game Boy set to launch on December 14th in Japan will allow Japanese game players to hook up their Game Boys via a cell phone for connected game play.
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