Walmart wants your 3DS pre-order so bad it's throwing in this bonus case

Little known fact: 3-Dee is powered by microscopic hamsters on equally microscopic wheels. Not only does the technology's dependency on living organisms jack up the price, it also means that the 3DS will require a constant supply of oxygen. It's a good thing, then, that Walmart's 3DS pre-order freebie, a Power A-designed case (pictured), has plenty of breathing holes. Just remember to take the device out of its cage every once in awhile -- it needs direct sunlight too!

You can see more images of the bonus Power A "Flex Case" (a $10 value, you could brag) in Walmart's product gallery. Actually, no -- wait. These are ... GoldenEye screenshots?

• Source: Walmart

Retailers: 3DS games priced at $40-50 in US; £33-40 in UK; €50-60 in Europe

Nintendo has refuted our attempts to wrangle 3DS game pricing info so far, but retailer listings may be shedding some light on the subject. We hope you weren't hoping for a standard price point, because it looks like there's some wiggle room. A review of GameStop and Amazon listings reveals 3DS prices of either $39.99 or $49.99 in the US. Meanwhile, Eurogamer reports that UK retailer Game has confirmed the standard software price will be £39.99 in the region, though other UK retailers have prices listed as low as £32.99. Finally, we perused Amazon France and spotted prices of €49.95 and €59.95.

The disparate prices between titles matches up with pricing in Japan, though it is a bit more standardized. We'll keep poking Nintendo for official details.
Source: Eurogamer, GameStop, Amazon France - PilotWings Resort, Amazon France - Nintendogs & Cats, Amazon US - 3DS

Rayman 3D is an 'adaptation' of Rayman 2

Tucked away in Ubisoft's 3DS lineup press release is this golden nugget: Rayman 3D is actually an "adaptation" of the classic Rayman 2 (the Dreamcast version, specifically). Those of you who have experienced the joy of Rayman 2 can probably stop reading now. The rest of you will be glad to hear that the 3DS version will feature "major updates" to certain gameplay elements, including "accessibility, progression and learning curve."

Frankly, we're just glad

Alleged 3DS, PlayStation Phone disassembled

Not one but two ritualistic device dismantlings have been exacted in recent days, an alleged 3DS and PlayStation Phone the sacrificial lambs. Spilled across a TVGZone forum thread are the guts of an apparent 3DS, posted by a Taiwanese tinkerer who claims to have obtained the stolen unit (not unlike the one supposedly lifted from an assembly line earlier this month) and promptly taken the tools to it. The de-casing has revealed only a typical arrangement of circuitry and plastic bits, leaving us to wonder if the plundering of this poor portable was in vain.

As it we hadn't seen enough already, TGbus, which had apparently tired of displaying its alleged "Xperia Play" PlayStation phone alongside its comprehensive collection of the world's handheld devices, broke out a set of Torx bits and proceeded to tear the thing down. The meticulous disassembly, however, failed to uncover what some might have hoped would be an intact, teensy-weensy PlayStation system -- just more circuitry (including what's suspected to be a Qualcomm MSM7x30 chipset) and plastic bits, it seems.

Are you finished yet, you monsters?

UK retailers list 3DS for March 18, £249

Listings for the Nintendo 3DS have popped up on UK retailers, including The Hut, Best Buy, Woolworths and WHSmith, offering "pre-order deposits" with a March 18 date. According to these sites, the handheld will be available in blue, black and red. As MCV points out, however, all these sites pull their listings from The Hut's database, so they're essentially all from the same source. (Duplicate 3DS listings on all the sites, featuring a March 25 release date, have been removed since we first looked at these retailer sites.)

Earlier this morning, the sites had listed a placeholder price of £299 (about $466) for the 3DS, but as of publishing, the RRP has changed to £249 ($388). For comparison, the DSi XL is priced at £159.99, roughly $250 by today's currency exchange rate. In the US, the XL's MSRP is $169.99, suggesting that, if Nintendo uses the same strategy of using roughly the same numerical price in pounds and dollars, the 3DS price could be set around the $250 mark, when it's expected to be announced by Nintendo next week. That is, if the UK price here is accurate.

MCV notes that it has been "lead to believe" that the once listed March 25 release date is going to be the real one, and that the 3DS price will be somewhere between £200–230 ($312–359). We hope that turns out to be closer to the truth, for our UK readers' sake. Nintendo will hold a European 3DS event in Amsterdam next Wednesday, at which point we should find out.

Nintendo tried 3D on GameCube and GBA

In a new Nintendo-organized roundtable discussion with the excitable Earthbound writer and all-around Japanese celebrity Shigesato Itoi, company president Satoru Iwata and Shigeru Miyamoto discuss how the 3DS came about, revealing Nintendo's long history with 3D experimentation. In fact, the company had 3D running on both the GameCube and the Game Boy Advance SP, which was also used as a test platform for the DS's touchscreen technology.

"Making three-dimensional images that can be seen by the naked eye requires a special liquid crystal, so we tested it out by putting it in the Game Boy Advance SP," Iwata reveals. "But the resolution of LCD was low then, so it didn't look that great and it never made it to being a product."

Of course, Nintendo's most famous dalliance with three-dimensional technology, the Virtual Boy (pictured), actually made it into stores, where it ... didn't do much. Miyamoto attempts to cast the odd goggle thing as a toy, like the Ultra Hand or the Love Tester, rather than what was intended to be the next step in the company's game console line. "I imagined it as something that people who were on the lookout for new entertainment or who could afford to spend a bit of money could buy and enjoy, even if the price was a little expensive," he offers. "But the world treated it like a successor to the Game Boy system."

"That was also true within Nintendo," Miyamoto adds. "Our sales department treated the Virtual Boy as an extension of our licensing business." In hindsight, it does make sense for Nintendo to file away the Virtual Boy, along with its low sales and small game library, as a weird, one-off toy, instead of a true platform iteration. Of course, all the headaches it caused are probably best forgotten.