WaveBird details emerge

When the Cube was in development, one of the things that got us really excited was Nintendo's intention to produce an official wireless controller which used RF (hurrah) instead of IR (boo, hiss). It is a given these days that for magical reasons known only to the people who design them, third party controllers are always bad, bad, bad beyond the measure of gentle journos like myself, and thus the prospect of the console's Daddy actually doing the dirty work gave the project mouth-watering potential. WaveBird was its name, and like the console itself, Nintendo is currently toying with how to launch it. According to a release in the States, WaveBird will launch at $34.95, the current asking price for the official controller, now arriving on 10th June. In turn, the Dual Shock 2-alike we all love will drop to a fairly paltry $24.95, and to top it all off, that's effective immediately. Further WaveBird details have emerged this week. The controller will take two AA batteries, and this is expected to allow for over 100 hours of use. However, the controller will only now be effective over a range of six metres, instead of the previously suggested ten. However, there will be 16 RF channel frequencies, so multiplayer bouts are perfectly possible, even with four of the things. In fact, you could have four Cubes and 16 controllers and they should still not interfere with one another, and of course RF, unlike IR, is not a line-of-sight system, so your mate can't cheat using strategic Labrador positioning. No release or pricing information is currently available for the United Kingdom or Europe, and with the current GameCube controller on sale for £24.99, it's difficult to say where pricing is likely to go. One possible outcome is that the controller will launch at £34.99, but if we were being optimistic, we might expect it to launch at £24.99 with the current controller dropping in price to compensate.

Source - press release