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Is this Project Cafe?

by: Sean Colleli -
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With Nintendo's confirmation today that Project Cafe is in the works and indeed will be playable at E3, of course the rumor mill is churning like crazy. Gamersheep has a couple of purported images of an actual unit, which I think is kind of hideous. I don't really mind the ergonomics--I like that it looks more retro, like the NES and SNES--but that drab gray color? Egh. The Wii's Apple-esque white was kind of boring, but at least it looked sleek. I wouldn't mind if they made another white console and this design would be very sexy in gloss black, but I'd rather they go with Super NES purple again before this ugly gray.

This could be a developer box (we've seen Nintendo's dev consoles in the past and the colors are pretty odd--Wii dev units have a pea-soup green faceplate) or of course this could be a big fake. Maybe a talented fan sculpted this up out of vacuform plastic--it does resemble the "leaked" concept images we've all seen--but then again it isn't too far fetched that this is real. After all we got pics of Sony's NGP months before it was announced and with all the Project Cafe leaks in the past few weeks (and the 3DS leaks before them) it's become clear that Nintendo isn't as air-tight as they used to be.

Doesn't this strike people as a little odd, though? The run up to the Wii's announcement and launch was an agonizing year-long trickle of information and half-truths. Project Cafe? Bam, confirmed mere weeks after the first rumor. I almost feel cheated out of the suspense.