Game Cube launches!

Nintendo finally launched its Game Cube console in Japan this morning, with the BBC and others reporting enormous queues for the console in drizzly Akihabara. Those of us who have decided to import Japanese units will be pleased to hear that at least one company - Lik-Sang.com - have confirmed receipt of their allocation. Others, including UK-based Madeira believe that they will either today or tomorrow. There has been some confusion over the number of launch titles available with the console. As far as we can make out, Luigi's Mansion and Wave Race: Blue Storm both shipped out to retail, and were joined by Sega's Super Monkey Ball. The latter is not presently available though according to the BBC, but will join the others on store shelves tomorrow. We recall this being made clear by a Nintendo representative in the past, too. One thing that has apparently outfoxed a number of Game Cube buyers is the lack of supplied A/V cables. Imagine the annoyance of buying a console and dashing home only to realise you don't have any audio or video cables. According to Nintendo, this is because it should be left down to the consumer to decide. We reckon for the UK at least, we can expect to see the familiar RF cable supplied alongside the others. If you've imported a Game Cube and didn't realise that it lacked any cabling though, don't worry! The old Nintendo 64 and Super Nintendo cables will work. We can heartily recommend the N64's S-Video cable. On that front though, we have to report somewhat disgustedly that the console will not output RGB, something a lot of people were hoping to see. Of course, the Nintendo 64 didn't output RGB either unless modified to do so, but we still foresee this as a source of perturbation for a lot of die-hards. We won't know much about the success of the launch until later this weekend or the beginning of next week when the first sales figures start to appear, but pre-release predictions have the Game Cube mopping up the Japanese market within the next few months. Related Feature - The Nintendo Show