Companies file patents for a number of reasons. The obvious one is to protect great ideas from being copied before they can be produced and put it up for sale. It's probably safe to file these peculiar Nintendo patents in that category. The blog 22Hundred.net (via Kotaku) recently drudged up a number of patents Nintendo filed with the European Patent Office way back on May 9, 2006 (before the Wii was even released), and we'll let the diagrams speak for themselves:
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