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• For one thing, alot of normal stores still keep 10-9 hours during the week. For some salarymen, this severely limits the places where they can go shopping after a long work day. Convenience stores are open 24/7. So, by nature, the stores stock some essential items like porno mags, playstation games, and Hello Kitty toothbrushes.
• A few years ago, Nintendo (it may have been Sony; but I think it was Nintendo) experimented with using the convenience stores as a huge distribution point for game cartridges/CD's
• Most convenience stores can be used as drop-off points for the equivalent of FedEx or UPS. This has been true for a long time. You could take a package down to the corner to send it to your friend on the other side of the country.
• Most stores also have a basic "online shopping" kiosk where wide variety of goods can be bought.

All of this has contributed to the convenience-store-as-shipping-depot model that has been born. The rationale is that if the (UPS) guy stops at 7/11 every day to make pick-ups, he can also make deliveries on the same paycheck. This is rapidly becoming a common distribution method in Japan and the convenience stores are turning into gauche versions of Mailboxes Etc.

Now, referring to the original subject, the recall notice on Sony's page was very amusing. They actually have the audacity to state "because some overseas disks that shouldn't be playable are playable, we want to exchange your disk for free" (extremely rough translation -- the link is here if someone else wants to take a shot at it).
Kent

Here's the link to a file about memory cards and exporting. It's dated 3/3/00
If anyone's into reading PDF files, go ahead.

http://www.scei.co.jp/corp/pdf/000303.pdf

It's prolly in Japanese too.

Wasn't there just an article about the Playstation 2 being banned for export from Japan?

This is correct. Tom's Hardware had a link to this article about it:

http://headline.gamespot.com/news/00_03/01_vg_impo rt/index.html

Digging through Sony's pages, I can't find anything about this in the North American page. The Japanese pages, naturally, I can't read :). If someone with knowledge of the language could confirm that there's an actual announcement there, it would be much appreciated.

URL for the Japanese playstation pages is:

http://www.scei.co.jp/index-n.html

Also Wouldn't make exporting Illegal wouldn't North American Companies have some trouble developing for it?

Official PSX Site

The hardware is entirely proprietary,

Like those USB ports? or the FireWire (IEEE1394, isn't the IEEE a standards group?), or are you referring to the Type III PCMCIA slot?

meaning that the upgrade possibilities if you replaced your computer with a gaming console are ... limited.

Unless you slap in a few standardized PCMCIA devices... or chain a few USB devices... or drop your camcorder on the FireWire port.

Similarly, there are other strange quirks. Sure, all the new consoles will have keyboards and everything, but they require special internet service -- I highly doubt they're PPP compliant, and Ethernet compliance? Probably not, in all fairness.

Yeah, because you can't put a Ethernet card as a standard feature... oh, wait... they are going to ship with one. They say that they prefer that you use their broadband network optimized for games, but you can put a modem into one and dial into any ISP, or use DSL or a cablemodem. Funny... it sounds like they've got a Ethernet and PPP stack.

Lastly -- text on TVs is hard to read. It's getting better, but it will never be a computer monitor, because it's designed for an entirely different effect. Those of us who sit near our computer screens, for lack of a better `ergonomic' setup, can tell you that it looks vastly different from close up from a television.

So, until you can afford HDTV, just in case I'm remembering wrong about it having a VGA output (it just lists a multi AV cable), slap a HTDV converter on your monitor.

Oh, and it comes in a tower configuration when you buy the workstation model... or you can put the regular model and it runs the DVDs sideways.

Just in case you think I'm a rabid gamer, the last game system I owned was an 8-bit Nintendo. I have no clue what's come out since then, never seen a Nintendo 64, just recently found out that GameBoys are now in color. The specs and positioning for the PS2 (it looks like a sterio component!) are nice. I'm holding off on a DVD player for it.

Links:
Sony Japan (specs are in english:) http://www.scei.co.jp/ps2/hard.html

--
Evan

I've made a small list of what seems to be a pretty complete list of the new PS2 info. If I've missed any, feel free to add-on.

Sony of America

Sony of Europe

Sony of Japan

PSX Nation

IGNPSX

Gaming Age

Next-Generation

Gamespot

The Magic Box

And then I'd also recomend you check out the MB's connected with some of those sites because there are some very interesting discussions in there. Also expect the major news organizations (MSNBC, ZDNET, CNN) to pick it up sometime tonight too.

Yea, it's so fake, someone cracked both Sony of Japan's and Sony of Europe and Sony of America and planted all those pictures and stories.

The links that are in the article arent' the only ones that have news about it you know, try to do some checking before you automatically assume it to be false.

The proof is that:
A. It's on every single major videogame website
B. It's on Sony of Japan's site

Check out:

The TOOL

What is this thing? It looks so bad-ass I must have one whatever it does!

Salieri