Nintendo Co., the world’s No. 3 maker of game consoles, said at a special event in Japan that it would launch its highly-anticipated Wii game console in early December in the country. This is a bit later than expected, as some analysts predicted that Nintendo was capable of launching the console already in October.

The console maker said that its Wii launch in Japan is scheduled on the 2^nd of December and that the price will be below ¥25 000 (approximately $212). No information is known concerning the release dates in the U.S., Europe and Australasia regions as well as the number of consoles to be sold on the first day, however, it is known that Nintendo wanted to sell 6 million Wii game machines by March, 2007.

Nintendo, known for games featuring characters such as Donkey Kong, Mario and Pokemon, said there would be 16 software titles from 10 developers available at launch including “The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess” by Nintendo itself, Reuters news-agency reported.

Back in July, 2006, an analyst said that manufacturing of Nintendo Wii console has been initiated and expected the launch as early as in October. It is unclear whether the information of analyst was false, or Nintendo had difficulties with production. It is known, however, that IBM announced beginning of its custom processors shipments to Nintendo in early September.

Nintendo Wii console will feature IBM’s custom PowerPC architecture based microprocessor named Broadway clocked at 729MHz and code-named Hollywood chip with built-in graphics core, DSP and I/O features from ATI that will operate at 243MHz, earlier reports suggested. Nintendo Wii is expected to use 91MB of memory in total: 23MB of “main” 1T-SRAM, 64MB of “external” 1T-SRAM and 3MB texture buffer on the GPU. Nintendo’s Wii does not feature a hard disk drive, instead, it boasts with 512MB of flash memory, but the console will also have a card reader, which will allow installing more memory.