Flaight

Really? Weird that too, I didn't know that in 2 decades of learning. Then again I took a more direct approach by staying there rather than approaching it academically. There are pros and cons to this though. My understanding of Japanese may be natural and instinctive, but sometimes I can't link it to a particular set of grammar. Good luck with it anyway Scandalous...!! :awesome: Anyway I'll be happy to be your safety net in case your GF fails you EDIT: On a 2nd thought, that last sentence can be misunderstood. I meant in learning Japanese by the way. I don't mean... you know... no, I'm not like that. I'm perfectly straight, thank you.

Roadkill thanks for the link to the gfx card. So, is Radeon X850 generally considered as the best around 150 now?

Lol if you didnt know what this thread was about, it'd read like we've all been smoking a huge bag of weed. Funny that, isn't. Britain is one of the most globalized countries and Japan isn't even a developping country. Yet in Britain Japan is still very outlandish and unknown, it has that "unexplored world" feel to it. but on the other hand it's precisely that combination that gives japanese language such a calibre on your CV. How did you manage to get to level 4 anyway? darkcloud: I can sing quite a few songs now. One I'm proud of is called "Zo-san". Ask your girlfriend You'll be rolling on the floor laughing. BTW, how did you meet her?

Personally, I recall BigTac as a friendly lad from the days of the old forum at cube europe. So I don't really have anything against him. I do agree tho that he likes sensationalization. I don't know whether that comes from his frustration for not being able to say what he knows. Or he just enjoys it? If he's bound by industry licence agreements, the bottom line is that he can't divulge anything meaningful. That's the whole point of license agreement. If so, his quasi-Nostradamus posts are naughty. Very Very Very naughty! Might as well not say anything at all.

I think it's rather a cop out to assume that people, who are speculating about Sony copying Nintendo, are paranoid. The hardest part of development in this area is introducing a new idea. It's dangerous and prone to failure (virtual boy anyone?). It's so much easier to wait till something succeeds and build upon it. DCK's view on the logical functions is flawed, not because it's a lie, but because it's only a part of the big picture.

I know the rumour that Sony's anti-Rev strategy may be to use PS2, but I can't see why such separation is so important from "rep" point of view. People know very well that both PS2 and PS3 are SONY's. If you make a peripheral for one, that's it - people know Sony's stolen an idea, for better or worse. Any ego or whatever else is gone. Also, backward compatibility problems arise if there is a discrepancy in input interface between PS2 and PS3. Like, if you play PS2 Dance Dance Revolution on PS3, surely you should be able to just plug in the old dance-mat into PS3 (rather than buying a new one)? I'm not saying PS2 won't have revmote add-on. I'm just saying, either both PS2 and PS3 will have one, or neither at all.

Yeah, I can't believe it's region free either. This is truly the definition of "Too good to be true", yet it is going to be true! I wonder how the business side will work out. Region locks existed in order to control the pricing. Every region has its characteristics in the strength of economy, and often prices were adjusted to fit into the trend of that region. With region-free, such business strategy will completely fail. It'll be interesting how it all works out.

I predicted a "splitting" controller, one side having D pad and the other half having other controls. I think that concept is not hard to come up with. In other words, coming up with the "D-pad addition" side is not unusual. What is phenomenal, is the mechanism of remote-control-like Revmote. That is something special and is rather hard to imagine. Once you hear it, you go "ohhh yeah it's so easy". But without hearing it, it's hard to come up with. Some say the rev stick turned out to be the least "revolutionary" side of Revolution. I'm not so sure. It's such a simple idea, yet it's so expansive. Coming up with that mechanism is the real creativity here.

lol. Thanks. Still, darkcloud and everyone here have fantastic ideas in this thread. I don't want to kill it off by being complicated. Carry on lads.

Yeah, that's a possibility. Or just changing the infrastructure a bit to accomodate for the future addition of PS3-stick. If PS3 itself is "ready" for such extension, sony can wait a year or so before releasing such add-on.

Innovance, I don't have problems with what you are saying. My comments so far have specifically targetted those who expected E3-esque revelations. I believe most of those comments come from those who: (1) Do not understand what separates GDC from E3 (2) Take hype at face value (3) Fail to see the strategy from Nintendo's point of view Any, or all of those.

Nihongo ga sukoshi wakarimasu "I understand a bit of Japanese", I gather My @ss long post was such a conversation stopper. Apologies lads. Just ignore it! This might help a bit to start, particularly on the structure of a sentence compared to english.

No disagreement there. It's still the first time officially Nintendo stood on a stage to provide background for it. As I said, that is the pendulum swinging in the direction of GDC. That has no basis upon which to criticize Nintendo for not revealing what E3 would reveal. Your criticism is understandable, but you're barking up the wrong tree. I think you replied to your own post there. E3 is the place for what a lot of people (with hype) have been expecting. Strategically too, it makes sense. If you are frustrated today due to lack of E3-esque info, then good! That's what Nintendo wanted, in order to build up towards E3 of biblical scale. I think the problem is that people expect a revelation whenever Nintendo staff stand on a stage. A recent example was the online webcast of Miyamoto interview. It was in the context of Miyamoto's personal journey following his Knighthood, not a place for him to talk about Nintendo's big deals. Yet people criticized the interview for not being so revealing. Again, that way of looking at it is totally out of context. Whichever way you look at it, IN CONTEXT, this GDC makes sense bearing in mind E3 is only a month away.

EDIT: Feel free to skip this post of mine if you haven't got time. It's admittedly a bit too long ============================================== Let me share my thoughts on learning Japanese. A bit long, but stick with me. I've spent 2 decades perfecting (?) it, so I think I have a wisdom to share. I was lucky to start very young as my brother was a Japan freak (Japan-holic, Japan-philia? something like that). Hell, he even ended up in Japan now and married to a japanese. He must have been one of the first englishman to get into imported 8 bit games in the UK. Thanks to our enthusiastic dad for making it easier. When I first started learning Japanese, I started off with the grammar. I realised it wasn't that hard, but this is a bit misleading. We're used to learning european languages, which tend to be very grammar heavy. So, overcoming grammar is pivotal in learning european languages. Japanese isn't very grammar heavy. It's fairly free style, it doesn't have gender for nouns, and there is no strict order of segments in a sentence to make sense. So in a european sense, Japanese comes across easy. I discovered, however, that the real obstacle lies beyond that point. This is when things get tricky. Japanese has various "modes" of speach. You know how differences of english dialects are "heard"; it's more to do with how a word is pronounced and a sence spoken. In Japanese, this takes a written form. It's not just a matter of changing the accent and tone of your voice, but you have to know the mutation in written Japanese. To start off with I did the standard form. I started off with the so called "Business Japanese", which is a standardized Japanese (like the book "Japanese for Busy People"). It's a good start and it's not as hard as learning German or Latin. I recommend it. You'll get a lot out of it. But don't forget, an every-day Japanese goes way beyond it. "Business Japanese" was introduced to unify the complication of Japanese to allow us foreigners to get an easy access to Japan. If you want to blend into the culture and people, there's an aweful lot beyond it. People there will be considerate enough to default to the standard Japanese when they see foreigners. But if you want to participate in their everyday convesation, it's a lot more complicated. In the end, the only good way to complete your training is to live there. Hard at first, but I don't regret it at all. There is something very special about their culture - maintaining harmony and respect for each other, and their language reflects that by being ambiguous, poetic and sentimental. That's why a direct translation of Japanese comes across Cheesy. Ever noticed Iwata and Miyamoto coming across a bit soft touch and melodramatic? That's the core feature of their language. Something always strange and bizarre about what they do, yet always creative, attractive and friendly. You only need to be open minded to see that. So outlandish and old fashioned in some ways, yet it's not a developing country; it's still the 2nd largest economy in the world after 10 years of recession. 70% of their country is still mountains and trees, yet they are possibly the most technologically advanced. Yet they still have one of the lowest crime rates out there. Everything seems to be extreme in both directions, or "in the middle". Odd contradictions exist everywhere, without disrupting each other, in perfect harmony, blue corner and red corner somehow working together. The city centres are colourful, or trash and messy, then there's the country side which reflects 1000s of years of history still intact. Clear, blue sky on one end, you go through a tunnel on a bullet train for 10 minutes and it's snowing the other end. I could never imagine seasons like that being raised in the middle of nowhere in wiltshire. Flower covered "pink" spring, very dark green summer, which turns yellow and red in the autumn as the temprature suddenly drops, then snow white winter. It depends on where you live though. It's a bit of everything. There are always bad things about every nation and Japan has its share of badness, but overall it's been a very rewarding venture. When I was 9, I could never have imagined learning Japanese would lead me to this present. That's my experience. Oh and Japanese learning software on DS would be fantastic! I hope they'll make one. It would have made my life a lot easier. Learning Japanese must be easier now, with all the study aid out there. Start with the standard form of Japanese. Business Japanese, or whatever it's called. It's not that hard and it gives you a solid stepstone for reading, playing games and watching Anime etc.

system_error, if that is the case, if that is REALLY the case, then Iwata did not achieve what GDC is for, just as much as he didn't bring E3 to GDC. In other words, the criticism is still unfounded. In reality Iwata still talked about how disruption is happening. Talking about Brain Age is an extension of how development philosophy is being manifested in their plan. In this way, the pendulum still swings in the direction of GDC than E3-esque presentation. At best, you can criticize Iwata for not being quite as GDC-esque as they could have been. It would be totally out of context to criticize them for not revealing content or specific info of a console in GDC, when E3 is really the stage for it. Otherwise there is no point for E3. Your argument essentially destroys the object of E3's existance.

They better be. In fact even Xbox360 better have the best graphics. That's the key factor of the development philosophy of Sony and MS. Fail that, and they lose the point of their existance. That's why Revolution is in a completely different league in their development philosophy.

What they did was very GDC. You know what GDC is? It isn't E3. They did well to discuss more abstract side of game development. Did you really think they'd release pressure running up to E3? Wouldn't you use GDC to frustrate and build up even more pressure, which they will release A BIG TIME in E3? I sympathise totally about your annoyance on the likes of BigTac contributing to hype. But seriously, don't be a moron all your life. This GDC presentation made perfect sense given the circumstance and context of the build-up towards E3. Christ, I wish people put more context in their perspective. Sometimes I feel like I'm in a primary school here.

Nintendo said in this GDC that the revmote is rather expensive to produce. PS3 should ALREADY have problems of keeping the cost down. There are 2 scenarios - One, Sony copies the rev stick and make it too expensive for average world population. Two, Sony copies the rev stick and makes the package cheap, resulting in a massive financial hit. Or, sony won't copy it just yet. All lose-lose situation at any rate.

Expecting a little more? You kidding GDC stands for Game Developer's Conference. It was fitting for that - talking about the designs of some games and philosophy. There's this thing called E3, which you guys probably have never heard of, coming this May and that's the big stage for big bomb shells. *Tongue in cheek*

Retro sega systems games will be available? my god. At last I'll be able to get off emus and play Shadow Dancer

Club skill's radio broadcast is overwhelmed due to too much demand, apparently. Only had a commentator describing it between background music rather than the actual GDC live feed. You could read it off few live blogging at Kotaku.com, Eurogamer.net and as the others have pointed out, IGN. You have to manual-refresh though.

Is it a matter of hanging around ebay all the time? 150 sounds rediculously cheap when it's only been 2 months since it was 200. Heck, even 200 sounds good. Ebay stops me from saying it's "impossible", but I can't help but feel that you're scraping the boundaries of possibility. What's your trick? I'd love to know the hard facts. Do you just bid for auctions and hope it's volatile enought to stay cheap?

Isn't Revo the smallest of all next gen consoles though? If being less bulky is the issue, you probably won't have a better choice. By the looks of it it could possibly be smaller or about the same as the old NES.

Following up on The-Ironflame's comment, I think a lot of the games from that era has to be seen in the context of the time when it was released. FF4 really broke away from what was expected of console RPG at the time. It was amazing then. Saintly amazing. Godly. I find this remake to be faithful to that sentiment. Then again, when it comes to the game content, more has come into play in modern RPG. Don't forget, we're constantly in a competition of "mine is longer and more complicated than yours" in RPGs. That and eye-candy. Those are what people have been expecting as the means of "advancement" in this genre. As a result, I think all earlier FF remakes won't quite stand the test of time simply because what is measured as value has changed over the last decade.

Alright, fair enough... in theory anything can go for anything on ebay - afterall a fiver went for just over £300 some years ago. But seriously, realistically speaking, what's good between 100 to 150?