Spanish-language website Meristation has an interview up with Jim Merrick, Director of Marketing for Nintendo of Europe. In it he revealed the following, much of which will be of interest to our readers in Europe.
On DS Wi-Fi
First, there will be 25,000 Wi-Fi hotspots across Europe such as there are in Japan and the U.S. These can be used without any special activation. In addition, gamers will also be able to use other Wi-Fi hot spots not installed by Nintendo; for these, you will need a key to properly configure your DS. Merrick assures us that Nintendo of Europe is talking with many Wi-Fi distributers across Europe.
For home use, the USB Wi-Fi adapter will be available on Nov 25th for 39.95 Euros. As previously reported, this adapter will turn any internet-enabled computer's USB port into a Wi-Fi hot spot that DS can use. The adapter will also be compatible with Revolution.
Mario Kart DS will have chat capability with friends. You can play unknown users online through Wi-Fi, but unless you have a friend profile for those users you will not be able to contact them. This is part of what makes the Nintendo Wi-Fi play "safe".
At the moment no one is working on an update of Pictochat.
On Revolution
The Revolution will launch worldwide within a period of 14 weeks in every region. Merrick says 14 weeks is the "maximum", and he will be pushing for even less time. Obviously, he said, "simultaneous" launch can't mean the same day and same hour because of logistics. But he would like there to be less time between regoin launches.
No Revolution games will be shown for the rest of the year. However, he confirmed that certain companies already have dev kits "with technical capacities oriented towards the end product", with controls as demonstrated at the Tokyo Game Show. Merrick said the reason Nintendo will not show games this year is that they don't like to show products in an unfinished state. While the graphics will be comparable to other Next-Gen systems, according to Merrick, the games will be shown when they are in a playable state.
He also noted that developers certainly do not have to use all the features of the Revolution controller. As an example, Marrick noted that many games don't use all the features of the DS - Mario Kart for instance, which does not use the touch pad for control. Therefore, there will also be a control scheme available modeled on the more classic scheme of the GameCube controller.
Finally, he noted that while the Revolution will reproduce DVD, have Bluetooth, SD cards, USB 2.0, the real step forward, in his view, is free Internet Wi-Fi form day one. "Xbox Live was a great step in online gaming", he said, "and we want to offer the next definitive one."