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It's not free in the slightest, Windows OEM licenses that are included with computers cost anywhere between USD 50 and 150 depending on the version of Windows XP, Vista being much more expensive for the top of the line releases. If you go through all the steps to get a Windows refund, your vendor will be legally bound to give you back that amount.

I'm looking at a Lenovo laptop right now where the cost of the forcefully included Windows license is 14% of the purchase price. If we have the budget to buy this thing, you bet I'm going to get that money back from Redmond.

Ok, where is your proof of this claim then?

Where is the proof that Nintendo hasn't ever sold the Gamecube at a loss? It's nothing more than Nintendo fanboy mythology, as Nintendo has publically stated at least twice that they were taking losses on the Gamecube hardware.

May 24, 2001
In the GameCube business, industry specialists estimate the company will lose 5,000-10,000 yen per console, each carrying a 25,000 yen price tag, at least for the first year.
http://archives.cnn.com/2001/BUSINESS/asia/05/25/j apan.nintendotarget/index.html

Spaceworld 2001
We expect to incur a small loss on the GameCube hardware initially, and you're right that it hasn't been our habit in the past but we expect it to turn okay early next year. - Peter Main, Nintendo
http://terror.snm-hgkz.ch/mirrors/www.thegia.com/m irror/news/0108/n23r.html/

January 14, 2004
Perrin: I would say that our losses are really negligible. It's such a small amount. Plus with the amount of software that's being sold we're still definitely in a solid profit situation.
http://cube.ign.com/articles/463/463155p2.html

[A] new ninth planet has been glimpsed beyond Neptune, just as those influences had said it would be glimpsed. Astronomers, with a hideous appropriateness they little suspect, have named this thing "Pluto." I feel, beyond question, that it is nothing less than nighted Yuggoth - and I shiver when I try to figure out the real reason why its monstrous denizens wish it to be known in this way at this especial time. I vainly try to assure myself that these daemoniac creatures are not gradually leading up to some new policy hurtful to the earth and its normal inhabitants . . . Sometimes I fear what the years will bring, especially since that new planet Pluto has been so curiously discovered.

Check out this press release.

Is it fake? Maybe, maybe not, but I can tell you that it's not recent. It really does date back to 1999, as it caused a bit of a stir on comp.graphics.rendering.renderman at the time.

I seem to recall quite a stir in the magazines way back when too.

RPG dream team? it already happened back with Chrono Trigger.

Akira Toriyama doing the characters, Yuji Horii of Dragon Quest doing the story, and Nobuo uematsu doing the music.

I Don't know how many have heard it (probably lots) but there was a concert put on by the Tokyo Philharmonic on 2/20/2002. They performed a wonderful mix of songs from the early Final Fantasy games all the way to songs from FFX. It is a fantastic concert. To hear your favorite songs from some great video games performed by a full orchestra is incredible.

SaGa Frontier was a console RPG from Square for the Playstation 1 that passed almost unnoticed in the USA (the weird and argueably broken gameplay presumably had something to do with it). One of the playable characters was a woman, Asellus, who developed a somewhat romantic relationship with another female character. I remember finding out about this in the GIA review, and corraborated later when I had the chance to play the game.

For some reason I didn't consider this that shocking... I've always found that anime and manga are open to same-sex relationships and gender-bending characters (like the lesbian couple in Sailor Moon and the affeminate Pisces Aphrodite in Saint Seiya), so I wasn't that shocked to find it out in a japanese videogame. But it was pretty novel for american released videogames for that time - I don't think Nintendo would have allowed during the NES or SNES eras!