New Super Mario Bros – UK release announced

SPOnG has just received news that our most anticipated DS game of 2006 – New Super Mario Bros – will be releasing in the UK on June 30, just in time for the school holidays.

We had a tantalising little glimpse of the game at GDC last month and you can check out our hands-on right here.

New Super Mario Bros is the first game in the multi-million selling franchise for over a decade. It follows our second and third most anticipated games for the spring and summer: Metroid Prime Hunters (May 5) and - yes, really - Dr Kawashima’s Brain Training: How Old Is Your Brain? (June 9).

Now, we’ve been hassling Nintendo to let us know when it plans to release those beautiful looking DS Lite’s so that we can finally play all of these great games on the Tube and out in public without looking like an overgrown child. Being Nintendo though, it's being very tight-lipped about when we can expect to see an official release of these diminiutive beauties over in Europe. Come on, guys! Don’t make us waste our hard-earned on overpriced imports!

Surely, but surely, it has to be a joint June 30 release for the DS Lite, bundled with New Super Mario Bros. SPOnG thinks it’s probably down to whether or not Nintendo can actually make the number of DS Lites required for a concurrent US/European launch to work well enough.

At the rate they are currently moving off the shelves over in Japan, this is perhaps not looking likely. By the end of April, Nintendo plans to have sold 1,250,000 DS Lites in Japan. Just turn up the speed a bit on those production lines, Nintendo. Those underpaid factory workers will never know!

Anal-obsessive fact and world-record fans might be interested to learn that the original Super Mario Bros. still holds the record for the highest-selling computer game ever (40 million copies sold according to the Guinness Book of Records) which gives you some idea of how important this new title is to Nintendo, and to gamers worldwide.

http://news.spong.com/article/9855