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Turns out our snooping was spot on -- Nintendo has just made official its intention to drop the suggested retail price of the Wii down to $149.99, and will additionally include a copy of  Mario Kart  and the Wii Wheel peripheral with all purchases of the console. They'll replace the current bundle of  Wii Sports  and Wii Sports Resort  games. The steering wheel, along with the Wii Remote Plus and Nunchuk controllers, will match the color of the console you buy, whether it be black or white, and will also be available to buy separately for a scant $9.99. See Nintendo's full press release after the break. 

For a product with the word "vitality" in its name, Nintendo's forthcoming Wii peripheral doesn't seem to have much of a pulse these days. The oddball controller certainly piqued our interest when the gaming giant showed it off way back in 2009, but aside from some false alarms and an uncovered patent application, we haven't heard a peep. Nintendo president Satoru Iwata addressed the Vitality Sensor's conspicuous absence during a financial presentation, chalking the delay up to "differences in biological information in humans." The peripheral is still coming, according to Iwata, but it won't be released until the company can make it work well with 99 percent of consumers -- a tall order indeed. And what about the other one percent? Well, perhaps they can try these on for size. Joystiq Nintendo

Another year, another chance for Nintendo to deliver what it's alternately denied and teased since day one -- a successor to the Nintendo Wii capable of displaying games in high resolution. Will Nintendo finally make it happen? Multiple totally anonymous sources say yes: they told  Game Informer ,  IGN  and Kotaku  that just such a system will debut at E3 2011 in June, possibly with a teaser of some sort next month. While the ninja moles didn't provide many hard details -- mostly just the typical iffy claim that the system will wipe the floor with competitors in terms of speeds and feeds -- they told IGN that it will support 1080p resolutions and be backwards-compatible with games for the Wii. Naturally, we'll believe it when we see it... so here's hoping we see it fairly quickly. Update:  Rumors are bursting out of the woodwork at this point, and we're going to refrain from posting them all here, but anonymous sources ...

Nintendo's miniature white monolith has sold like gangbusters for long enough that we're wary it'll ever get cheap, but a trusted source tells us a price cut is indeed headed our way -- and that the Nintendo Wiiwill cost just $150 starting May 15th. The timing would make some sense, given how Nintendo's profits have tanked for a while due to flagging hardware sales, and just last month Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime hinted that the Wii's price might be a potential variable to change that in an interview with  Gamasutra . Still, we're not fully convinced that Nintendo would announce a price cut then, rather than, say, at the Electronics Entertainment Expo in June, and it's not like the company to let this sort of announcement leak out. Still, if you find a shiny new copy of  Mario Kart Wii  in a $150 console bundle this time next month, don't say we didn't warn you.