So what does this mean for you? It may already be too late but you should probably try and find a place to pre-order as soon as possible if you want to get a system next week. If that fails, just try and get to the store as early in the morning as possible. I personally pre-ordered my system on Amazon. Right now it is saying my expected ship date is April tenth even though the system comes out on the fifth. Does this mean I'm not getting one from the first batch or is Amazon just being slow? It's hard to say, but I placed my order on February 24. That's pretty early to not have one shipped on the release day.

Let me start off with a quick summary of Mr. Iwata’s keynote. If you didn’t feel like reading the semi-live blog, this’ll be a perfect substitute. I’ll do it as short and sweet as possible.

Upon entering the doors I was greeted to a gigantic room full of attendees all waiting to see the president of Nintendo. I sat down and prepared to live blog the speech. Aaron told me the internet wasn’t available so we resorted to a semi-live version, which consisted of Aaron blogging into a text document and me texting updates to Jonny so that he could post it onto the site. Whatever it takes right? It was well worth it too because from start to finish it was an exciting keynote.

I unfortunately could only come in at around 4 completely missing all the panels I had intended to go to. Instead I just sat in the middle of Yerba Buena Park and enjoyed the afternoon until my six o’clock Deep Silver event. They were showing off two games I was interested in checking out.

The first one was Duke Nukem: Critical Mass for the Nintendo DS. To put it in their words, “The Duke is back.” Without going into too much detail, Critical Mass is a 2.5D action platformer similar to the original Duke Nukem. It wasn’t playable so I can only go by what I saw. It seems to be in the same vein as the classic so fans should be excited.

Hey folks, this is Jonny giving you updates from Chuck Jose at the GDC keynote address. Aaron and Chuck don't have Internet access in the auditorium, so Chuck is texting updates to me, and I'm putting them up for you as fast as possible. Please note that all quotes should be considered to be paraphrased.

(All times are Pacific Daylight, a.m.)

9:37 - We're catching up on a few things. Iwata is on stage and discussing Miyamoto's development philosophy. Further updates will be more timely.

After I picked up my badge I started walking around the West Hall to see what I could get my hands on. There were attendees everywhere either chatting or typing away on their computers. Technically the exposition doesn’t start until Wednesday so the first couple of days are mainly for the developers and business people but there were still some stuff I could still check out.

I quickly stepped into one of the AI Summit’s sessions involving AI postmortems from Eric Grundstrom, senior software engineer at EA, Matt Tonks, gameplay programmer for Epic Games, and John Abercrombie, AI programmer at 2k Boston. I learned what was successful and unsuccessful for them in their attempts at programming AI. It was quite interesting actually and I definitely got something out of it.

I was going to use this blog as a last chance to reminisce, but the 10 Year Anniversary special already gave me a chance to do that. Instead, I'll take this opportunity to get a few things off my chest before I go. I mostly just want to say what I think about the current state of gaming. I'm not passing judgment on any console manufacturer; they each have a business to run and must do what they think is best for their bottom line. Good luck to them all. As far as I'm concerned, the more games being made, the greater chance I'll find something that I can enjoy. With that said, let's get started.

A recent survey revealed that Netflix is looking into creating a Netflix instant streaming disc for Wii. The survey states that the disc will be priced at either $9.99 or $2.99. A Netflix subscription is required to use the service, and the disc has to be in the Wii whenever the user wants to watch a movie. And of course, the Wii has to be connected online in order to stream the movie.

NWR turns 10 today! To kick off the celebration, here's a few words from the Godfather himself, Billy Berghammer.

March 7th 1999. My girlfriend was out of town, and I was kind of bored. The N64HQ had closed down months before, and rumors began swirling about the successor to the N64. One of my close friends in Milwaukee was part owner of an ISP called NConnect Internet and gave me some free space to create one of the first sites dedicated to the next Nintendo console. So it was me, Front Page 98, zero experience in building a real website from scratch, absolutely no management skills whatsoever, and horrible design taste.

Now while this is no confirmation that Wii MotionPlus (and by extension, Wii Sports Resort) will release prior to that date, perhaps it is a sign.

Being that the game is arguably one of the more important titles for EA and Nintendo to show off the functionality of the new peripheral, you would assume that the peripheral will need to be available prior to that date. Hopefully Nintendo will shed some light on the official release date soon.