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More Pre-E3 Nintendo News - DS Lite June 11th for $130

Nintendo's second major-announcement-shoe has dropped. A couple hours ago, Nintendo of America let loose the NA street date and price of the DS Lite: June 11th [just over a month from now], $129.99. Two curious things about this announcement, apart from the fact that it's a rather huge one that dropped before E3:

1) Only one color will be available at launch, "Polar White". Why just one? We know Nintendo has three over in Japan, with a fourth (Black) in the wings. It is a mystery.

2) It isn't launching at the same time or bundled with New Super Mario Bros. . . but in the Nintendo.com posting, they tie the two together, saying "OH WOW THESE DON'T LAUNCH TOGETHER BUT YOU TOTALLY NEED TO BUY THEM BOTH AT THE SAME TIME OK!!?"

Now, these both may seem like missed opportunities, but maybe not. It's not like Nintendo has to do Nice Things like bundles or product diversification through multiple colors or whatever, doing these Nice Things would not necessarily change the amount of product they move, so they don't have to.

Now, another issue: with this, Nintendo has eliminated two of the key "Big E3 Announcements" we've been expecting. To me, getting these announcements out of the way in the week before E3 says "This is piddly stuff we wanted to get out of the way, to make way for the real earthshattering announcements at E3". Because clearly, if all they had to drop on us at E3 were going to be the Revolution rename and the DS Lite date/price, they would have kept those as their ensleeved aces. But they didn't.

So . . what could they possibly be holding back for E3? We know there's going to be hands-on Wii demos, we know there's going to be Twilight Princess News, we know there's going to be demos of all the great new DS games queued up for the rest of the year . . but are all those really larger than the name and the DS Lite date and price? It's pretty clear that there's going to be something pretty massive at E3 from Nintendo, and we just aren't entirely sure what it will be yet. We'll know in under a week, though, as the Nintendo Press Conference is on the 9th.

We, of course, will be bringing you coverage straight from the show, so look for the news here as it breaks.

Source: Nintendo.com

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