Out with the old and in with the new. That’s what Nintendo is thinking with an official price cut on the DS Lite from $129.99 to $99.99. Very nice of them. The DSi’s price is still $149.99 and the DSi XL is $169.99.

Aside from the DS Lite price cut, Nintendo is also playing with colors. Red in particular. They will be re-releasing six classic DS Mario games with red boxes. They hope that the red color makes them easier to spot when customers are shopping for games. These games include New Super Mario Bros., Mario Party DS, Mario & Donkey Kong: Miniland Mayhem, Super Mario 64 DS, Mario Kart DS and Mario & Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story. So who is buying a DS Lite now?

That DS Lite above looks pretty genuine right? That’s what the buyer thought too when he purchased it on eBay. When he opened the package he knew something was wrong. The corrugated cardboard box was the first suspicious giveaway. Then on the back of the box there was pixelated English text.

When he opened the package he found that yes it was a fake, however, it still played DS and GBA games in their proper slots. The surface of the system has some small pockmarks, which is not up to Nintendo’s high quality assurance standards and the inner bezel is also discolored.

Out with the old, in with the new. An internal GameStop memo has surfaced announcing the discontinuation of Nintendo’s DS Lite. With the 3DS now available, the old DS Lite is being put out to pasture. The memo tells employees to remove displays of Crimson, Black, and Metallic Rose models, once the stock is gone.

It is a five-year-old system. There’s no official word from Nintendo yet, but we imagine that will be coming soon. If you want one, you better grab one while you can.

We have less than two weeks before the Nintendo 3DS will make its way to U.S. and U.K. shores with it’s glasses-free 3D gaming. But there’s one feature you are sure not to like and that is backward-compatibility loading times on old DS games.

The 3DS is cutting edge handheld gaming right? So it should be able to provide faster loading times, even for the old DS games. Nope. Gamespot managed to get its hands on a Japanese 3DS from last month’s launch and they compared the load times of several DS games on the new 3DS with the old DS Lite.

You may be buying a 3DS to play 3D games glasses-free, but the 3DS has another bonus in store for you too. Nintendo has made it tougher than all of their other DS consoles. The 3DS is now easier to open than the DS Lite and it doesn’t have to worry about cracked hinges since there are now 3 layers. This also makes it easier to grip, thus preventing you from dropping the 3DS.

There’s also a new glass-fiber resin to reinforce the 3DS case. Even the insides have been rearranged so that if you drop it, damage will be minimized. Sounds like they went above and beyond with this one. Let’s hope it is as good as it sounds.

If you buy the 3DS you might want to consider a wall charger as well. Nintendo has unveiled figures for the 3DS’ battery life, and compared with its predecessors, it doesn’t look good. The official numbers are three to five hours per game, or five to eight hours if playing an older DS title. It takes up to three hours 30 minutes to fully recharge.

The DS gave us 10 to 14 hours, DS Lite 15 to 19 hours, DSi 9 to 14 hours, and DSi XL 13 to 17 hours. It’s safe to say you won’t be having any all-nighters playing a 3D Mario game on this thing unless you are plugged in.

The homebrew community is giving some love to Nintendo’s Virtual Boy. The Flashboy Plus is the second of two flash carts for Nintendo’s original stereoscopic system, featuring a new backup battery and 16Mbits of memory. That’s enough to fit any one of the system’s 22 commercially released games.

The battery only keeps one save stored at a time and there’s no way to read the battery-backed memory, so you’ll still have to finish one game before you start another, but you won’t lose your progress every time you shut down.

Ahoy pirates, listen up. Nintendo will be increasing the piracy protection on their latest DS handheld, the Nintendo 3DS over the previous model of the Nintendo DS. According to THQ VP Ian Current, the DS market and especially the DS Lite had been affected by piracy, so they are hoping that the new security will put a stop this.

I’m sure it will slow pirating down, but sooner or later someone will get around it.

People like their consoles like they like their supermodels, thin and puking. Well, thin anyway. With two nice round buttons in front. But nevermind that. The newly launched Xbox 360 has sold 15,000 units in Japan in the first four days. The strong sales were in addition to 2,370 of the previous generation version of the games console. The week before the release saw only 2,060 Xbox units of any kind moved.

Sales were helped by the launch of Capcom’s top-selling game, Monster Hunter Frontier Online. In Japan the new slim console costs $339 while the previous Elite version dropped to $282.

The Letcool handheld emulator sort of looks like a Nintendo DS Lite with no top display. Must have been hard to design this one. This odd handheld can handle GBA, NES, SNES, Sega Genesis and Game Boy ROMs, and future updates will also include additional support for others.

The Letcool can also double as a portable media player, playing nice with 8 different audio formats and 10 video formats. Despite the name, you don’t need to let it cool. We think. Some other features include TV-out, 4GB of internal memory, a microSD memory card slot, a digital camera and a battery life of 6 hours. Only $70.

It isn’t cool or convenient for kids to check their blood glucose levels normally, but kids love videogames, so Bayer’s Didget is the perfect solution. It’s based on the company’s Contour glucose meter, but instead of connecting by USB it’s shaped like a Game Boy cartridge, which let’s kids put it into a Nintendo DS or DS Lite.

Kids can upload their scores to a custom game to unlock new characters and items, but the One problem with this plan is that it isn’t compatible with the DSi or the XL, so it is already obsolete.

As if we needed yet another ebook reader on the market. Well, the DSi XL’s larger display could be good for reading some classics. Nintendo knows that there’s money in the ebook market so they will be offering a downloadable package of ebooks called 100 classic books.

It will hit Wii channels on June 14th for $20. Then you can take a break from gaming to read some actual literature. Maybe some Mark Twain or Dickens. Assuming that they offer anything of that quality anyway.

The new Nintendo DSI was launched in Japan in October, where it was called the DSI LL. Well, it will be available in the UK and Europe from the 5th of March onwards, and will be called the Nintendo DSI XL.

The Nintendo DSI XL boasts two 4.2 inch screens, which are 93% bigger than the screens on the current Nintendo DSI Lite, and of course it also comes with a larger stylus to accompany that screen space. The DSI XL also features a wider viewing angle, and comes pre-loaded with “Dictionary 6 in 1 with Camera Function” and “Dr Kawashima’s: Little Bit of Brain Training: Arts Edition”.

Looks like that extra-large DSi LL, unveiled in Japan this morning will be coming to North America and Europe in the first quarter of 2010. It will be known as the Nintendo DSi XL in North America and Europe, which is fitting given all of the XL sized Americans who will be buying it.

This new DSi offers a screen 93% larger than the current Nintendo DS Lite with a better view angle, a longer touch screen stylus, and preinstalled Nintendo DSiWare™ software. The new version will arrive in North America and Europe in the first quarter of 2010.

I am a big fan of NERF Blasters and we have a bunch of them around our house. You never know when you might walk around a corner and take a NERF dart to the head. PDP unveiled a new NERF Switch Shot EX-3 blaster today that also works with the Nintendo Wii.

PDP says the device is Nintendo licensed and can be used in three ways. First, it will shoot a pair of darts that store under the barrel waiting to be used. The device also has a Red Reveal used to play the NERF N-Strike Elite game from EA.