OCTOBER 2003

October 1st 2003:

The Game & Watch Design Contest is officially over! A few last-minute entries have been added to the contest log, and the winners will be announced on October 6th, which will mark the first anniversary of this web site! Come back on this special day for a few special treats! ;-)
If you want to see what the packaging for Pokemon-e EX Dragon booster packs and theme decks will look like, drop by SportsLine.com for a few pictures. The names of the theme decks have been added to the Future Releases section.
If you've used my Animal Crossing-e card checklists, you probably noticed that some information is missing: When you send the printed password to the character displayed on the e-Card (if that character currently lives in your town), you will usually receive a NES game instead of the item listed in my checklists. However, what NES game you'll actually get for each character has remained unspecified until now.

partyp00per has decided to start collecting this missing data, but he needs your help! If you have Animal Crossing (and the e-Cards for this game) and would like to help, you can contact him using this address: [email protected].

The project has already begun on animalcrossingcommunity.com, and you can keep track of the progress done by visiting this thread. partyp00per also set up this list which he updates regularly. If he succeeds in collecting all the data, I will add it to the checklists, as well as the e-Card Catalog, and all the people who participate to this project will have their names mentioned in the Special Thanks section!
The news items for September have been moved to the News Archive section.
The Mario Party-e Zone and Chanel 61-e web sites have been removed from the Links section, as it seems they no longer exist. In their place, I added a link to animalcrossingcommunity.com. Just because. ;-)

October 6th 2003:

On this glorious day, this web site is celebrating its first year anniversary! It's hard to believe that close to 1000 e-Cards have been produced since the e-Reader's release last year, and I do hope that Nintendo will keep 'em coming! (And how about letting third-parties in on the action, while you're at it...?) ;-)
I had a couple of things planed for today, one of which was to add all the scans of the Pokémon-e EX Sandstorm cards to the e-Card Catalog, but alas, I haven't received them yet, so it will have to wait at least another week. Fortunately, I do have one other special treat for you: An interview with none other than the editor-in-chief of Pocket IGN, Craig Harris! You can read it in the Interviews section.
And finally, here are the winners of the Game & Watch Design Contest:
You'll find all the details in the latest entry in Pixelboy's Diary. Congratulations to all three winners!
A new promotional Pokémon-e card has been released for October: "Grovyle 004", with the same "WINNER" holo stamp as the "Combusken 009" e-Card released last month. I'm not sure yet how this new card can be acquired, but I added it to the e-Card Catalog nontheless. If you want to see what this promo card looks like, drop by pokemonleagues.com. (Note that there are actually two new promos, but only one of them has an e-Reader data strip printed at the bottom. The other one is a holo card.)

October 11th 2003:

Today's update is all Pokémon! First, all the scans of the Pokémon-e EX Sandstorm series have been added to the e-Card Catalog.
The serial number of each Sandstorm e-Card has been added to the checklist in the Checklist section. (They have also been added to the Sandstorm entries in the e-Card Catalog, of course).
The "Grovyle 004" promo card I reported about last week can be found in the Pokémon League Season 2 kit. (If these kits are released once every month, why do they call them "season" kits? Beats me...)
Rumors indicate that the next "WINNER" promo (in conjunction with the release of Pokémon-e EX Dragon) will be "Marshtomp". Speaking of EX Dragon, some information has been released this past week about this new series containing 97 cards. It is not currently known how many of these cards will have e-Reader data strips.

October 18th 2003:

I have so much news to report this week, I don't know where to begin! I think I'll start with the lastest info concerning Super Mario Advance 4: First of all, I received confirmation that the GBA game comes packed with not 2, but 7 e-Cards in the box! However, it seems some SMA4 boxes contain only 2 e-Cards, and there is some speculation running that those with 7 e-Cards are some kind of special Wal-Mart promotion. Jason Hill contacted Nintendo about this, and here's the reply he received:
I'll try to sort this thing out and report on it next week. The addition of the SMA4-e series in the e-Card Catalog will be delayed until then.
According to Nintendo's official Super Mario Advance 4 web site, the contents of the Series 1 and Series 2 packs of SMA4-e cards will NOT be random. Each pack will contain the same 18 cards (8 power-up cards, 5 level cards, and 5 demo cards), which is great news if you ask me! Thanks go to TheJerkle for the link.
UncleBob, who could easely be called "mister e-Reader" on gamefaqs.com, contacted me this past week with some interesting information:
I added this piece of info to the "Marill (68/100)" entry in the e-Card Catalog.
UncleBob also reported the existence of some extremely rare promotional Pokémon-e cards, which I had never even heard of before now. You can read all about it in this thread of PokeGym.net. I'm trying to gather more information about this, with the goal of adding these rare cards to the e-Card Catalog later.
I also stumbled upon some information about an Energizer Max Animal Crossing-e promotion that ran earlier this year. Rest assured I'll have more info on that soon.
If you're wondering what to expect in terms of e-Reader cards in 2004, wonder no more: The next F-Zero game on GBA will feature e-Reader support, according to this recent Pocket IGN article!
To top it all off, I've got some last-minute news for you: The December issue of Nintendo Power (vol. 174) has loads of information and pictures for the upcoming Game & Watch-e series! The small piece of bad news is that the cards will be sold as randomized packs of five cards (bummer), but every cloud has a silver lining: Nintendo guarantees that you will find at least two complete games in every pack, and there will be some special (and rare) holographic cards "that feature Mario's gang in the classic games" (whatever that means).

There's also a footnote on page 127 that provides confirmation that a third series of SMA4-e cards will be released in the near future, and the release date of November 24th 2003 for Pokémon-e EX Dragon is announced on page 89! (I added all this latest info to the Future Releases section.)

October 26th 2003:

Ooof! Sorry for not updating the site sooner, but adding the Super Mario Advance 4-e and Pokémon Battle-e cards to the Checklists section and the e-Card Catalog took a lot more time than I had anticipated! But it's all there now, and the catalog now contains over 1000 cards! I'd like to thank Gary K., NintendoJim and UncleBob for giving me the data I needed for these latest checklists and catalog entries.
Speaking of UncleBob, he contacted me about some news he recently got from a Nintendo representative: There will be a third and FOURTH series of Super Mario Advance 4-e cards, and they will both be released on December 22nd 2003! You can read all about it in this thread of the gamefaqs.com forum (JookySeaCaptain is UncleBob's username on that forum, BTW). I added this little piece of information to the Future Releases section.
Now about the five extra cards found in specially-marked boxes of Super Mario Advance 4, it seems that it is indeed a limited edition Wal-Mart promotion, and none of these extra cards are found in the Series 1 and Series 2 packs of SMA4-e cards. I went to a Wal-Mart store in Brossard (south of Montreal), and the SMA4 carts sold there only had two cards. So it's limited to the US, it seems... This sucks... :-(
You want more bad news? Rich (a.k.a. nli10) informed me that Super Mario Advance 4 was also released in Europe very recently, and all the e-Reader features have been removed from the game! This would seem to indicate that the e-Reader will never be released in Europe. So all you Europeans can stop visiting my web site now. ;-P
Both nintendo-e-reader.com and pokemon-games.com have been updated with information about the Pokémon Battle-e series. There's no mention of the Super Mario Advance 4-e series yet, but I'm sure that will change real soon...
Mark Raby and jsdewey were kind enough to supply me with a link to the Animal Crossing-e Energizer Max promotion. Apparently, this promo is available in Canada only. The cards offered are "K.K. Tour Tee" (D06), "Timmy & Tommy" (B03), and "Boy (3)" (P05).
By the way, I don't know if you've noticed, but the GBA/e-Reader bundle is now available in stores across North America, for 70$US.
Neocoff sent me a reminder this past week about some information (found in the Game & Watch-e article in the latest issue of Nintendo Power) which I forgot to mention: There will be three types of game cards in this series, namely "Classic" (exact reproductions of the originals), "Colour" (which feature Mario and friends in colored versions of the games), and "Collector" (which is a lot like "Colour", only certain in-game characters are replaced by others).
I received some e-mail recently about the reported "e-Card feature" in the upcoming Metal Slug game for GBA. Please take note that this is in no way related to the e-Reader. These "e-Cards" are simply power-up icons which can be found within the game.