Why does he even have to go there? I've never been to Australia and I can tell what the problem is. NoAus is run by a bunch of f*cking braindead morons. Hire someone who isn't a complete idiot to be in charge and things should improve.

I betcha this is creating quite the stress at NoAus headquarters....

In case you are wondering Iwata, I'm always looking for work...

Hide your koalas! Iwata's a comin' down for his surprise "international BBQ"!

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Why does he even have to go there? I've never been to Australia and I can tell what the problem is. NoAus is run by a bunch of f*cking braindead morons. Hire someone who isn't a complete idiot to be in charge and things should improve.

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I can see it now...

*Iwata enters NoAus*
Iwata: Errrr, this is NoAus headquarters, right?
Guy: Uh, yeah, errrrrrrr....I think it is hold on...
*Iwata waits for 15 minutes*
Guy: Yep it is...So who are you?
*Iwata's face scrunches up*
*NoAus building explodes and Aussie Nintendo fans cheer*

;____________;. no really, :e-sadface:, atleast something is being done finally. After one of the strongest console launches ever, GCN has sold like 3 consoles a month, I don't think we've even sold over 100,000 here, we're upto something like 60,000 (expecting Mario to come in with the info) even the GBA is behind PSOne here. Australia fails at Nintendo.

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*NoAus building explodes and Aussie Nintendo fans cheer*

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NoAus are SH*TTING their pants at this news I'll bet.
I think this is a surprise visit, and I think the way that these guys found out he was coming to Australia was by this news article too.
Hell, I'mscared of his coming to Australia, cause that might mean that NoAus might start CARING about Nintendo again O__o

I think the ONLY person I knew from NoAus that probably did anything was David Yarnton. But he pissed off and now works at Nintendo of Europe, of all places.

This may be kind of off the topic but how many N64's were sold in Australia?

No freakin idea.
I don't get horny over finding out sales numbers like Mario does, so we'll wait till he comes on

Well i can shed some light on the situation.

I run a video games store in Melbourne (where NOA is based) and i stock roughly the same amount of GC titles as Xbox and PS2, each system is given the same floor space and same A/V set-up.

However when it comes to POS items its impossible to obtain any from NOA. I've asked my supplier for any kind of GC/GBA posters, dummy boxes and displays, NOTHING, not a thing. When i ask for Xbox or PS2 its how many of anything do you want?

Here's some quotes from my supplier:

-On stocking the gameboy player/GC bundle:

"We where offered the Gamecube with the Gameboy Player but we didn’t purchase it as ******** wasn’t selling many Gameboy Players; this was decided by the purchasing dept. Sorry about the inconvenience."

-On obtaining Nintendo promo items for my store:

"We wont be able to get any GBA or Gamecube POS as Nintendo are actually dropping off in sales; they don’t really send out any POS unless it’s a special offer that they have going eg. Players Choice Console etc. "

I then called NOA to get yelled at by some sales person that since i'm not a direct customer (ie i cannot commit to $20,000 per month in Nintendo stock which is their minimum requirment), they cant send me any kind of promo anythings.

So this leads to retailers being overwhelmed by anything xbox or ps2 and with zero to no advertising material for nintendo stock. Which in turn, leads to declining sales....its not brain surgery...just advertise and help out retailers other than Myer or Kmart!!

Holy SH*T E2GAMES!!!! You know back in the N64 days, my auntie used to work for them (Nintendo) and they had A SH*T LOAD of posters and advertisments, HELL i have about 50 old fridge magnets from back when Mario 64 and N64 were released here, back then there were heaps, i mean, its f*cked to hear that now there is practically nothing considering the stuff my auntie used to have. This is so poor...

Those NOAu guys better hope they'll keep their jobs.

Actually, I smell complete reform incoming.

Actually It's NAL (Nintendo Australia Limited) NOA is Nintendo Of America.

why is nintendo australias PR email have the @noa.nintendo.com

I can see it now.

Reggie, right off the airplane, steps foot on Australian soil.

Australia sinks. The Indian and Pacific Ocean become one. Aussie gamers cry out in horror. Steve Irwin goes missing, and his show is cancelled.


Such tragedy.

We need a 'Reggie-lution'. Our PR and Marketing divisions are full of dickheads who probably have never played a videogame in their life.

Good lord, he's channeling his predecessor... AND THE MAN ISN'T EVEN DEAD YET!!!

Yeah i mean they probably have allot of promo stuff just sitting around but because i'm not a direct customer i'm not able to obtain any.

Very sad story since Sony and Microsoft don't require you to mortgage your house just to get some POS....

If Australia sunk, where would all England's prisoners go

I just have to say about freaking time!

I hope Iwata goes on a "You're fired" spree, maybe reggie should go there part time, or better yet lets clone him and ship him to Austrailia!!!!!!!!!

"You're fired! BANZAI!"

what can I say?
Gamecube holds a 5% share in Australia
Is it Nintendo's fault? did they not make a zelda australian exclusive ad? sponser AFL? ect.

The fact is people claim to KNOW everything, you know how much of a budget Nintendo of Australia is given?
stop talking nonsense

Iwata is coming over proberly with a bunch of finacal officers, proberly look over the books and try and find ways of getting distrubters (yes it also is there fault, try getting ur hands on mgs:ts or PNO3 ect.) Interested again
Finding ways of advertising with max effects
and other things.

I use to ring the nintendo line alot when I was in high school years ago, and I have contacted them a few times and even won in there made in wario Comp.
They are a nice bunch of people, noone would be saked..... Maybe hire some more

or even HIRE some NICE Promotions people who visit stores....cause the local game store man hasnt had NINTENDO promo stuff (posters, cardboard sets) since the middle of the N64 era, due to him thinking the rep was a bad name

Bupbow. I bet PGC to the news.

Deadly, you obviously don't understand. When you attempt to contact Nintendo Australia continuously in order to get their support to be able to expose the people of Australia to Nintendo's wonderful products you kind of get put down when you supposedly finally make their media list and wait for months without a single word from their end as to why you haven't recieved anything, then when you call you don't recieve a straight answer as to why you haven't been contacted. You know how many times i saw that zelda ad, ONCE. ONCE!!!!! I saw one billboard of the gamecube on hoddle street and that was it. They sponsored the AFL? Well then why the HELL did AFL 2003/2004 NOT get released on the damn system?

The had small signs on a few AFL grounds (Docklands, MCG, Princess Park) that was it. That was last year. AFL 2003/2004 didn't come out because AckLame hate the cube.

I wouldn't be suprised if Iwata doens't just disband all of NAL. Make NCL cover the whole region.

This is awesome! Go Itawa! I hope they disband NCA and stary anew.

I've got some sales figures from the Sydney Morning helrald, form January this year:
PS2: 1 million
Xbox: 400, 000
Gamecube: 100, 000

So it's not quite as bad as some of you said, but it's pretty damn bad! The problem seems to be that the Xbox has taken the N64's place (Black, large controllers, 4 controller ports, a popular 4 player FPS)

Nintendo Australia is not as bad as sega is/was here though. They launced the Dreamcast, famous elsewhere for for being cheap, for $500, with only the 33K modem, which they wanted to charge you to upgrade. For a comparison, at the time N64 and PS1 were $180.

As for how the N64 did, it really seemed to do well, espescially among younger people. I'd say it had about 40% of the market, based on store shelf space.

One last thing, last generation Sony may have market share, but they really lost out a lot in Australia due to piracy. Pretty much everyone had their PS1 chipped here, and it's not for imports. In fact, regardless of age, I've not met anyone who gas a PS1 and no pirated games here. Some PS1 owning friends of mine have never owned a legitimate game.

This generation, it's Xbox that has the piracy problem. Console modding is very popular, and you don't even need to burn a disc, just copy to the hard drive (usually a 120 gig hard drive is installed when modding). I even know people who download entire xbox games, then transfer them to the xbox hard drive.

Anyway, after the Iwata visit, id like to see games released closer to their US and Japan counterpart release dates. Also id like to see a function held at say the melbourne exhibition centre every year where nintendo showcases upcoming games, they get games from other developers such as capcom, games like resident evil 4, metroid prime 2, show off a few DS's and some games, kinda of a like a mini e3 to show whats in store for nintendo in australia. I mean come on, they have sexpo every year, home and garden shows, and cheap cds sales there. I'd definetly pay to goto something like that.

OOOOh what's a sexpo? Sounds interesting.

its basically a huge porn show, its best as i can describe it. you gotta be 18 or over to goto it only problem is ive never been even though im old enough.

Sexpo? I live in Melbourne and have never heard of it.....

must. go. to. next. one.

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Originally posted by: RABicle
The had small signs on a few AFL grounds (Docklands, MCG, Princess Park) that was it. That was last year. AFL 2003/2004 didn't come out because AckLame hate the cube.

I wouldn't be suprised if Iwata doens't just disband all of NAL. Make NCL cover the whole region.

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Doesn't Australia get Cube games well after Europe gets their's? Since they're both PAL why not just ship European copies to Australia? There's no need for them to be any different and the games will get released quicker.

Hopefully this will signal an improvement for Australia. I personally think it can be difficult to turn your ship around once it's in the storm...to me, Nintendo made almost all of the right moves with GameCube, yet it's still in third place.

Yeah, my understanding is that Monaco are a tad pissed off since the N64 days, when they lost money from advertising in the second half of it's lifespan. Monaco now actually ask for a quite a wide range of games, just not many copies of each. Of course, NAL don't actually give them much anyway. Bloody hell, we don't even have player's choice titles here! It's bloody ridiculous.

EB games get their stuff from Aussie, so I've actually seen Mario Golf, and strangely enough, Hrarvest Moon for sale here. They also have player's choice games with player's choice boxes, just they cost as much as normal games. We actually got a deal where you would get a Zelda bous disc with a new Cube, so I traded mine in and bought another one to get it, as well as a free player's choice title. I think that was a move on Monaco's behalf, which was a good, except no stores actually have many of the titles anyway.

1080 will come out next week, a few months after the Aussie release.

For the first half of the N64's lifespan in Australasia, it was going pretty well. There was credible advertising with famous sportsmen in NZ and giant billboards with Mario Kart in Sydney. The thing was, it just couldn't match the PSOne's price... something that was clearly quite important. The next-gen should probobly just be dumped here: NAL's dug themselves into a hole that's going to take a lot of effort to get out of. Unless Nintendo want to starts losing mega-profits for a token market, why should they bother?

BTW: This is Ocarina Blue, just that as soon as I changed my email to an Hotmail account so it could be public, my Hotmail account stopped recieving messages.

The fact is, the gamecube is a great console. i also own a ps2 which i have been resonably happy with, but playing the GC then going to the ps2 makes me realise the huge difference in graphics there are. For example, i thought Silent Hill 3 was a good looking game but now i look at it blows compared to other GC games.

P.S. How can you not know about Sexpo, its a big event

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Originally posted by: reviewgamer
This may be kind of off the topic but how many N64's were sold in Australia?

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i know the launch was awesome, because they had this black trailer that i keep going on about, with 8 N64's with games like Mario 64. They dont have that anymore cause the new driver they got was a total dick, bring back my dad he had it on time, or even me, im old enough to drive the trailer around!!!! (Keep it at my place for loads of gamecube playtesting HEHE)

If he wants to come over to NoE, tell him I'll sponsor the gun and bullets... (j/k)

wow, there are a few australians about, that's pretty cool

this is my first post, probably because it's interested me heaps to know that nintendo are aware of how bad things are down under. man i'd love to talk to him myself, i'm sure a lot of nintendo fans down here would too. currently i'm in tokyo on student exchange and the cube here is actually kind of big. funnily enough there is NO xbox promotion is this country. as far as this place is concerned, there's only two consoles, ps2 and cube. you see gamecube ads on tv, i've seen pikimin posters and ads, wario world ads, quite a few gba ones too. definitely you can say that nintendo has a presence here.

and in australia, it's somewhat different. no gc promotion. and yes, it's odd, but there appears to be only two consoles in this country too, but it's the evil ones =( i have wondered what sort of budget nca has here but whatever's going on, consumers don't know. at least, the regular people don't. anyone who is a fan bought a cube, but everyone else i'd probably consider to be uninformed. i've noticed that in dick smith (kind of like a walmart) stores they've withdrawn their support for the cube so there literally is only two consoles- the catalogues do not feature gc at all, though there's still some stock in the stores.

reviewgamer is right on, we need to be cared about. people need to be informed. it's not like there aren't nintendo fans here, i'd say n64 and snes were quite popular in their days, but it's like everyone moved on or something. a mini expo (not a sexpo) would be fantastic. of course i'd want it free and in sydney i'd like to see more competitions too, more events. people need to be playing the games, seeing what's cool and wanting to get a cube.

of course, we don't know what it's like on the distro side, things seem pretty grim but i hope that gets sorted out too.

I am from Australia and I bought a cube at the launch and at school i was the greatest thing since sliced bread. For a while everybody asked how it was and could it do this and could it do that. Everyone said "oh yeah i will get one" Then the hype went it was no longer the new exciting thing and no-one but me and my friend had one. The ads went from the TV, the gc game departments kept getting smaller and smaller, this is a result of NAL, sure there is still some talk at school whenever a great game comes out like Zelda or Mario Kart, but otherwise nothing.