When a few hours ago I read about the new Nintendo 2DS on Twitter, I immediately thought that it was an hoax: a new "portable" console to play 3D games on a 2D screen, with a wedge design that makes impossible to place it in a pocket and play outside home! After the great success of the giant tablet-gamepad on the WiiU, the great design genius strikes again!

What do you think about it? For me it's ridiculous, it's huge, for just a few dollars more you could take the original 3DS, even if I have a theory: are they discontinuing it? If you search on Amazon, you can see that the original 3DS is sold for $10 more than the MSRP and the giant 3DS XL has almost the same price. With the same price, everyone will choose the larger one, right?

Long story: when some years ago I went in Japan for the first time, I bought a Wii and a lot of GameCube games, as they were sold for just 100 yen cadauno (around 80 cents at the time)

I also bought 伝説のクイズ王決定戦 （Densetsu no Quiz Ouketteisen - The legend of the quiz tournament of champions), a quiz with voice recognition where you have to say the right answer, in Japanese and without a list of "possible" answers.

Ok, I never played it, but the box is nice to keep on my shelf... and then there was the very useful mic included in the box

The games that use the mic are:

• Mario Party 6
• Mario Party 7
• Odama (a "ninja" themed pinball created by the designer who created the only Dreamcast game that uses the mic)
• Karaoke Revolution

In the beginning, I only owned GameCube games: Wii games were "too new" and were starting from 2000 yen - $15, so I preferred to save money and buy 20 games for the same price - I didn't even have Wii Sports, as in Japan it's not bundled with the console.

When I came back to my country, to play PAL games I installed the WiiKey.

The problem is that the Japanese Wii works ONLY in Japanese.

Yes, if you take a copy of the Italian Wii Sports DVD and you run it on a Japanese Wii (using a modchip, because there is regional lock), everything will still be in Japanese!!! (unless a game does not contains the files required for Japanese language)

So, when on Waninkoko blog I read about his new Region Changer, I immediately using for changing the region to PAL.

What a dumb decision! It was an untested beta (Marcan defined it as semibrick) and I got an half-working Wii tthat would hang when the keyboard would open because the Italian dictionary wasn't installed, and had double channels for weather, news, and so on...

A mess!

In the end, using AnyRegion Changer I fixed the problem, but I never managed to run any of my  GameCube games anymore.

I tried everything, loaders, dozens of different MIOS, but ALL my GameCube games were hanging at boot: strange....

I tried using a GameCube SD adapter to load them using the old SD Loader: nothing

I tried the new DIOS MIOS, for loading games from USB: nothing, no game started

Yesterday I told myself: "enough, there is no way to make them work", and, while I was disconnecting controllers and memory cards, including the mic (that's actually using the memory card interface). Just when I unplugged it, BOOM, the game started!

I tried my games: all were working now!!!

Moral: when the GameCube mic is conntect to the Wii (at least to mine) and you try to run a game that doesn't use it, it will hang at the booting logo.

Yay, now I can play Donkey Konga!

More info, in Japanese, on the official website (with epic soundtrack)

Let's hope in an English translation

No pics for now, probably we should wait for June, it will be officially announced at the E3, but that brief document tells us that:

1. It will be sold in march 2011 (in Japan)
2. It will be retrocompatible with DS and DSi games
3. It will have a camera (otherwise, how it could be DSi-compatible? )
4. It will have two 3D screens, with no need of special glasses!!

Yes, you got it right, autostereoscopic 3D screens!!

It's the SHARP screens that I mentioned exactly one year ago (for a cool coincidence, it was my first post on Dandandin.net!) about the new WOOO mobile.

Last time that Nintendo tried to make a 3D portable gaming console, the 1995 Virtual Boy, it was an epic failure, but this time? In my opinion it would rock!

Details like price and if it has a more powerful CPU are not yet revealed...