Nintendo records a surprise annual profit despite missing out on its Wii U sales target, whilst an MMO sequel of medieval strategy game Anno 1404 enters beta.

A disappointing year for Nintendo, the company was nevertheless pushed into the black thanks to foreign exchange gains. Nintendo recorded a net profit of 7.1 bn yen ($71.4 million dollars), a marked improvement from the $530 million loss of the previous fiscal year.

However, sales of the Wii U have been disappointing for Nintendo following its launch in November last year. Nintendo had hoped that it would sell 5.5 million of its new consoles by the end of March 2013, but the figure turned out to be only 3.45 million.

The Wii U’s sales were not helped by the lack of launch titles on the platform – Nintendo will look to remedy this at E3. This will be a huge task with the spotlight turning to Microsoft and Sony as they show off their next-gen consoles.

The 3DS held strong in the Japanese market, but has yet to gain real momentum in North America and Europe, according to Nintendo.

The company is targeting sales of 9 million Wii U consoles and Nintendo 3DS sales of 18 million this year.

Anno Online is heading into closed beta, Ubisoft has announced. The free-to-play browser based MMO will look very familiar to veterans of Anno 1404, a trade and resource centered strategy game that released in 2009.

We’re big fans of the Anno series, so we’re keeping a close eye on this MMO. You can sign up for the beta here.

Finally, Valve has released an update to the Steam beta client which allows players to limit games’ download speed. The beta update allows players to choose from a selection of download speeds to limit the amount of their Internet connection that is dedicated to downloading titles. The download limit is currently for all downloads, it cannot be set per game, for now, at least.