The cat is out of the bag as they say. From Electronic Gaming Monthy magazine:
* A pricetag of $249 for Nintendo Wii “seems appropriate”.
* Console is always online – always online, even when off.
* Built-in speaker – On the controller – See below for more details.
* No improved graphics on Virtual Console – As in, they aren’t redoing the models, doesn’t talk about framerates and such.
* TG16 will have it’s 1st party games out at launch – 3rd party will come later as demand increases.
* Estimated prices for the Virtual Console download service are “a few dollars for NES, $5 for SNES and $10 for N64“.
* More Third Party Exclusives than Gamecube.
* As for first party games: In Zelda: Twilight Princess there will be no swinging the controller for the sword all the time, you just press a button. There are some cases where you will swing though – You’d get too tired too fast otherwise.
Controller secret details: “The controller will contain a…
…small amount of memory, which can be written to by the console (via Bluetooth) during the game. This will usually be used to store small sound files which can be heard via the controller’s small internal speaker. In demonstrations this system could be used, for example, to simulated the sound of gun shots coming from the controller when fired; when you put this together with the force feedback, it creates a game experience which surpasses anything we have been able to create before.
In other experiments we created a simple “Chinese whisper” style communication game which one player could whisper into the controller (we were even able to be in another room when doing this) and then the sound would be sent via the console to another player’s controller which they could then hear. Great fun!” I reckon that confirms a Microphone as well.
Special thanks to wii-volution for the email with details.