Nintendo's secret weapon. I'm Fred Fishkin with Bloomberg Bootcamp. With Microsoft unleashing its Xbox... .and Sony pumping up its Playstation2... .is there room for yet another competitor in the game console market this year? Nintendo thinks so. Its new GameCube should hit stores in November at about the same time as the Xbox. Unlike the Xbox and PS2... the GameCube won't play DVD movies. It will connect with Nintendo's new Game Boy Advance... the updated handheld that arrives next month. Nintendo's Beth Llewelyn ...

"And we're expecting huge things from Game Boy Advance. It goes on sale June 11th and we're already hearing from retailers with our pre-sell of over 200 thousand units. And in Japan it launched in March and in its first five weeks sold 1.6 million units and is still going strong."

With a larger color screen and faster processor... the 100 dollar Game Boy Advance will also work as a game controller for the GameCube. And that is Nintendo's secret weapon... .tying the popularity of its handheld ... to the new console... .

"The connection between Game Boy Advance and NintendoGameCube ... some have called it kind of the Trojan horse there... but the fact that Game Boy Advance has been designed from the get-go to work with GameCube is certainly something that is very unique to Nintendo."

And that could be formidable. Nintendo has sold 110 million units of the original Game Boy over the last 11 years. Bootcamp, I'm Fred Fishkin, Bloomberg Radio