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TOKYO -- Nintendo's GameCube console will hit the shelves in Japan in less than a month, but the U.S. release is being pushed back almost two weeks--and Nintendo says that more systems and software will be ready because of the delay.

However, postponing the release until November 14 means the new game console will ship in the United States later than Microsoft's rival Xbox, which is due out on November 8. A hot competition is expected among those players and Sony's PlayStation 2.

The company holds out big hopes for the success of the console, says Atsushi Asada, executive vice president.

"The console gaming market is still far from healthy," he says. The increasing sales of the last few years have been led by jumps in hardware sales and not software, which is decreasing.

"We hope the GameCube can break this cycle," Asada says, describing his company's new console as a "masterpiece of video game console design."

Deluge Planned

Nintendo plans to have 700,000 units available at launch in the United States. By the end of the year, Nintendo hopes to have shipped 1.4 million consoles in Japan and 1.1 million consoles in the United States, and expects this to increase to a total of 4 million for both markets combined by the end of March 2002.

Helping sales by the end of the year will be a selection of consoles available in colors other than the violet console available at launch. Nintendo plans to offer orange and black consoles in Japan in November 2001, complete with matching controllers, and also plans to sell a controller in a color the company calls violet and clear.

On the software side, five titles will be available at launch in the United States. All priced at $49.95, they are "Luigi's Mansion," "Wave Race Blue Storm," "Pikmin," "Super Smash Brothers DX," and "Eternal Darkness." An additional 12 titles are expected to be available by the end of the year. Those are "All Star Baseball 2002," "Dave Mirra Freestyle BMX 2," "Extreme G3," "NFL Quarterback Club 2002," "Crazy Taxi," "FIFA Soccer 2002," "Madden NFL 2002," "SSX Tricky," "Star Wars Rogue Leader: Rogue Squadron II," "NFL Blitz," "NHL Hitz," and "Super Monkey Ball."

Gaming Shift

Asada says the company is considering how to change game software to give it a wider appeal. Average consumers are finding console games to be too long and complex, while serious gamers are no longer impressed by new games that simply boast better graphics, he says. Underlining the importance he places on software, he says, "No matter how good the hardware, it is no good if there is no interesting software."

The GameCube is based on an IBM PowerPC "Gekko" running at 485MHz, with graphics and I/O chips from ATI Technologies and an NEC Flipper system LSI (large scale integrated circuit). It has 40MB of memory and an optical drive for proprietary 8cm discs developed by Japan's Matsushita Electric Industrial, better known by its Panasonic brand name, which have a capacity of 1.5GB.

The console is the first of two major home gaming consoles expected to launch this year and compete with Sony's PlayStation 2 console, which first went on sale in Japan in March 2000. The second new console, Microsoft's Xbox, is due for launch later this year.