Nintendo World Event Round Up

Japan knows when the 3DS will be available and how much dough they'll have to fork over for it, but us westerners will have to wait patiently for the 19th of this month when Nintendo of America will reveal North America and Europe release information.

But there's a problem with "separate but equal." The internet changes everything!

First, the 3DS has an estimated battery life of 3-8 hours. There are a ton of variables that affect that statistic. Primarily, playing a 3DS game sucks the battery life much harder than a normal DS game. The same is said of the level of screen brightness you choose to play games on. Nintendo's estimate is actually based on the lowest level of brightness!

Those numbers may seem prohibitively low, but the inclusion of a dock for the 3DS, and all of the software encouraging the use of the sleep mode paint a picture of 3DS use as more of a cell phone than the traditional gaming handheld.

Other prohibitively low numbers include the unit count Nintendo has slated through the end of the fiscal year. Yes, the "fiscal" year ends on March 31st, but all territories will have to scrap it out over the 4 million 3DS units that have been produced. Japan is allowed 1.5 million units from the end of February, when the handheld launches, to the end of March. That means that 2.5 million units will have to be split up between European and North American launches.