nintendo

Leaked from today's 404 episode:

- Pitchfork's People's List polls readers for the best albums of the last 15 years.

- The new rise of a summer hit: Tweet It Maybe.

- How Murder by Death became the No. 3 most successful Kickstarter music campaign ever.

- The Internet has finally met its match: Avril Lavigne engaged to Nickelback frontman Chad Kroeger.

- Lights turning off at Nintendo Power?

- Custom BioShock pinball machine is Rapturous.… Read more

Before Google, many young'uns (such as myself) relied on magazines, telephone hotlines, and other old-world forms of communication to learn more about upcoming video games, hints, or cheats. One favored source of Nintendo game information for many people, Nintendo Power, will end its 24-year run this year, reports Ars Technica.

Supposedly, the magazine's parent company, Future Publishing, could not strike up a new contract with Nintendo to keep the publication going. An Ars source cites Nintendo as "difficult to work with," uninterested in expanding online content for the Nintendo Power brand, and even unwilling to retake the magazine from Future (which gained rights to the magazine in 2007 from Nintendo).

Future Publishing did not immediately respond to CNET's request for comment. … Read more

It looks like September 13 will be the day when Nintendo spills the beans about all things Wii U, including what I'm hoping is more than just the launch date and price. I'd imagine we'll also get a pretty good idea -- if not a definitive list -- of what the console's launch lineup will look like.

Nintendo COO Reggie Fils-Aime will be on hand to discuss the future of the console and explain some of the other features that the Wii's successor will be packing in. Of course you'll recall Nintendo's E3 2012 presentation … Read more

Today's laptops, smartphones, and tablets are smaller, thinner, and lighter than ever before. But to build today's ultraslim, ultraportable devices, designers and engineers often make their creations more difficult, if not impossible, to repair.

On this special episode of Cracking Open, I show you five ways manufacturers are making our gadgets harder to fix and give you a few tips on working around these self-repair roadblocks.… Read more

It seems as if Nintendo has been around since Pac-Man and Scrabble were invented.

And yet the company continues to encourage people to spend hours and days in beautifully mindless pursuits. The pursuit of coins, for example, as in Super Mario Bros. 2. I wonder if they enjoy it on Wall Street.

To stimulate your feelings about the Nintendo 3DS and the new 3DS XL (90 percent bigger screen!), the company has hired Penelope Cruz and her sister Monica.

Can you imagine these two sitting by some Italian pool and whipping out their little play machines?

You don't have … Read more

Jeff: The 3DS needs all the help it can get, so a new Mario Bros. game has worked in the past, why not again now? The problem with that mentality is that after a while, even the great Mario isn't invulnerable to becoming stale. And in the case of New Super Mario Bros. 2, I'm afraid it has finally happened.

Now before you gather up the pitchforks and start heading my way, you'll be happy to hear that I still think the game is fun to play. If you own a 3DS odds are you haven't bought a game in a while, so this will most likely find its way into your portable system. That said, you may fall into the same deja-vu trance that I did while playing and begin muttering, "Haven't I done this before?"… Read more

The video game industry had a tough July, new data from research firm NPD has revealed.

During the month, total video game sales across the U.S. hit $548.4 million. That figure, which includes hardware and physical software sales, was down 20 percent compared with the same period last year when the industry hit $686.3 million in revenue.

It was a similarly bad story for the gaming hardware market, which saw revenue fall by 32 percent to $150.7 million. According to NPD analyst Anita Frazier, every console saw sales decline year over year last month. Only the … Read more

Yesterday was your last chance to get in on the Kickstarter fundraising for Boxer8's Ouya. After 30 days and more than 63,000 backers, the Android-powered home gaming console pulled in a total of $8,596,475 ($99 of those from your correspondent).

As my colleague Michelle Starr reports from Australia, you can now visit the Ouya Web site to place a preorder for the console. The price is now $109, and it's due to ship in March 2013.

Regardless of your thoughts on Ouya's merits, the little console that seems like it maybe could has captured … Read more

Subscribe: RSS (SD) RSS (HD) iTunes (SD) iTunes (HD) CNET's popular list of the 16 most-anticipated tech products for 2012 is running out of ammunition. The year has already produced a new iPad, Android 4.0, new ultrabooks, and new Macbook Pros, but there are still some big products expected this fall.

In this CNET Top 5, we're here to give you a refresher on the tech everyone's going to be talking about this fall. If you can think of one we missed, be sure to leave a comment.