Oops, forget to mention that the commercials (and a crappy intro by the head of Pixar) play before the movies. They can be skipped, but they play automatically. The Lacster interview just seems to be validating the films for an American audience.
Why is everyone so elated about this? I picked up the three movie set of Laputa, Spirited Away, and Kiki the day they came out as I love Studio Ghibli's movies. And frankly, Disney screwed them up real nice.
The packaging is substandard. Those of you with Region 2 DVDs know, the Japanese DVDs are much better put together. The menus are beautiful watercolors, the DVD covers look real nice. Unlike the American DVDs, which look pretty cheap.
Additionally, Disney put in a lot of crap on Laputa and Kiki, including commercials for one or the film. I can see a small anime company feeling the need to do something like that, Disney ought to know better.
Despite that, there weren't many decent extras on Laputa and Kiki discs. Some crap with the American voice actors, but nothing of real interest. Sen to Chihiro had a great Japanese documentary on the creation of the film, though.
But the big bugaboo with the three discs is that, at least on the release I got, there were major typographical and grammatical errors. For example, several times as combinations are shown as a;. Other typos and mistakes are abound.
I love these films, I wish Disney would show them some respect. They're nto shovelware, they're beautiful creations of art.
I hope the rest of the Ghibli canon (including Umi ga Kikerou, Ocean Waves) is treated better.
which are an extension of classic Quake speed runs.
Uh...no, Quake came out in 1996, Super Metroid in 1994 and the original Metroid long before that - and people were doing speed runs back then (I know my friends did). The internet has made it easier to show off good runs, but it started long before Quake, so they're not an extension.
I don't see why everything has to be tied back to crappy PC games (especially cool console stuff).
I must say that, though I can't speak for India proper, everything said here jives completely with my experiences in Bangladesh from the family compounds to the auto rickshaws and the beggars (indeed, both my mother and father just sold their "family compounds" in the last few years).
The impression I got in Bangladesh was that IT and programming were do-able ways out of poverty (or even the country) for lower middle class people. Most upper class people didn't consider programming (though my kid cousins for example, loved chatting on IRC) since they could go to college in the U.K. or America if they so chose.
I think the reason for it seeming like an easy out for them is two-fold: One, hardware, even over there can be gotten relatively cheaply (though many of the machines are ones we'd consider ancient). The other is that software costs next to nothing and is readily avaliable. When I was over there in the summer, one could get Longhorn betas on CD, which a cover and the whole shebang. Secondly, unlike say the Chinese, any Indian who goes to school knows a smattering of English. Many people in my parents generation went to religious/missionary schools (my parents, both Muslim, went to Catholic school) and English was, of course, required there.
Also, money can truly get you around in the country and the rules are easily pliable (I remember our driver talking one of the older militar guys into letting us go down the wrong way on a one way street in Bangladesh). But people will try to jip you left and right as well.
As for Japan, they have plenty of software/tech projects/etc. You never hear about them because they tend remain in Japanese.
If you check out the Mac scene, especially for little applets or GUI stuff, there are plenty of Japanese people there (indeed, Japanese tend to gravitate towards design - I joke that every Japanese I've ever met is an artist, even on the hobby level - which isn't far from the truth; I think it has to do with the importance of kanji and calligraphy). One of the big OSX dock simulators for Windows, for example was made by a Japanese guy (who later was threatend by Apple). He didn't do any translation himself - and that's why you don't often see Japanese software.
Let's not forget console programming and PC games, like dating sims, which of course, the Japanese have completely owned since the Nintendo and until the Xbox .
There are hard and fast rule's to a word's meaning, the kanji associated with it. Because Japanese uses a sound system based on (in English) what are two syallables (a i e o u, ka ki ka ko ku) in English becomes one in Japanese (some Arabic sounds are the same and I'm sure it's the same for most other langauges - a sound considered "one" in their language is differnent sounds mixed together in ours) there are a lot of homophones in Japanese. However, the kanji always points to the correct meaning.
Words don't have different spellings. A word can be written in hiragana (phonetically) or in a combination of kanji and kana, and that's it. Words don't change spellings, because they have either their kanji or the phonetic spelling, which doesn't change.
You are right that a words meaning can be based on context - but take the phonetic word hashi for example; which can mean edge, bridge, or chopsticks - you'd be in bizarre circumstances to not understand which one is being referred to. In fact a lot of Japanese humor comes from the fact that there are so many homophones and they can so easily be punned.
You're thinking about Japanese entirely the wrong way: it's not that ONE WORD has many different meanings, it's that many words sound the same. It seems like a little thing, but that's a fundamental concept. You'll never speak a foreign language like a native if you continue to think in English terms like that.
I find Japanese to be an elegant mix of Chinese characters and a phonetic alphabet that combines the beauty and inherent simplicity of characters (if you grow up with them) and the flexibility and amalgamative qualities of a phonetic or alphabet based system. It's less unwieldy than Chinese in incoporating new words but it has the same beauty as Chinese or Arabic (which is phonetic, but Arabs put a lot of stock in calligraphy, as do the Chinese and Japanese).
And I actually helped the local district preview the new touch screen machines at my college. The damn things are frightening - they don't look well built and the lack of a paper trail is scary. There is some murmur down here that Max Cleland lost his race (despite giving three limbs for his nation) because of "voting irregularities."
I hope the Republicans don't use these machines to pull a fast one - if we find out after the fact, we won't get to change Presidents, as happened in 2000.
Someone needs to mod the parent up: he's completely right, Nintendo's been doing this kind of thing for years. I mentioned Scheff's Game Over above and this and other books on Nintendo's history detail the things Yamauchi had Nintendo do via the Famicom, many of which seem like ideas game makers want to put into games today.
A couple of people have said that Yamauchi and/or Nintendo's desicions boggle the mind - the fact is they should (and perhaps shouldn't; the man's had a history of being crazy like a fox - anyone remember him talking smack about the Sony president?). Yamauchi isn't known as Mother Brain for nothing - he is a bizarre combination of loud mouth crank and brilliant businessman. He took a hanafuda company into the player in the a high tech industry.
Though he's (thankfully) retired, I'm sure he's pulling strings behind the scens
A GREAT look into Yamauchi and Nintendo's corporate culture is David Scheff's Game Over, which has a lot of in-depth history on Nintendo as a company.
You mean Gunpei Yokoi, who not only pioneered the Gameboy and the Virtuay Boy, but created such series as Metroid and Kid Icarus. He died in a car accident after having to quit Nintendo in shame over the Virtual Boy debacle.
Acting? Cinematography? Sorry, but who the heck cares? The difference between us is that I go to a movie to be entertained for 2 hours, not to find a new philosophy in life.
Good movies do both. Take Kurosawa's films for example. His movies entertain, they impart strong messages, and part of that is because he pays attention to great acting (Toshiro Mifune, Takashi Shimura) and cinemoatography. A great actor can make people feel something (and that is entertaing!) in 1 motion which would take normal people 10 to convey (Kurosawa said something similar about Mifune). Great actors a part of the story and they make it their business to play their role and show the audience their role in the film. By your logic, blocks of wood be as entertaining as actors (even the masses don't believe that - look at Keanu in the last to matrix films and fan reactions).
Cinematography too does the same thing; the way a shot is light, balanced, etc. subtly imparts a mood or vibe for a movie. Take the balances in Seven Samurai - they show a lot of how the samurai see other, the villagers, etc. Take The Royal Tenenbaums for example - the cluttered Tenenbaum house says a lot about the family themselves. Unless you're stuyding it, you might not see it the first time through, but it does affect your perception of the characters.
Cinematopgrahy and acting are paramount to a great, entertaing film. It's the difference between a 2 page plot synopsis of Lord of the Rings and reading the novels; there's no comparsion.
Take a film class somewhere, I promise you'll learn quite a bit about visual story telling.
I wish Nintendo would recapture some of that old magic and do Space World again this year. For you kids, Nintendo used to have it's own trade show where Nintendo and third parties showed of their new games.
As mentioned in the comments, Nintendo's E3's have been rather underwhelming, but they have enough stuff to do a proper SW this year. However, I think the era of Nintendo having it's own little circle jerk (even a fun one) is over.
Don't get me wrong, I'm drooling over a myriad of things scheduled and rumored for this year, most defintely including Prime 2, Mario, Pikmin 2, Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories, and some others.
Because it's legit crippleware. People are never going to pay for software they can't afford, but if some people pay for software they can afford, Microsoft makes more money. And some people, some companies will. In the end, Microsoft has another line of OS they can sell to third world countries for a song, more customers are locked in, and Microsoft wins.
I'll bite.
No they won't. There's no culture of buying legitimate copies over there (indeed, most of the Bangladeshi bootlegs came from Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, et al). There's no nagging guilt, no RIAA swoop downs, no MPAA bleeding heart commercials. The average person over there either doesn't know or doesn't care that their software is copied. Believe me, for most people it's the least of their concerns.
Even assuming one could find the legit copies easily (which, with market economics at play, isn't easy), you'd have to be off your rocker to buy them.
I can't speak for Thailand specifically, but I know it's the same as Bangladesh, when I was over there you could get the Longhorn betas pre-burned and with covers and the whole deal. And they cost next to nothing to boost. You could get them at malls, street vendors, Internet cafes. About the only draw back was that the CDs were so cheap they stop working in a few month or so, but that's plenty of time to use it.
Why would the average Thai pay for crippleware when they can already get XP for next to nothing?
Using Windows Media Player, it is quite difficult to get a screenshot of a playing DVD. If you take a screenshot while a DVD is playing, you'll see a big empty black box where the movie should be.
I'm no fan of WMP (I use BS Player or Windows Media Player Classic) but it's easy enough to get a screenshot from it, just turn down hardware acceleration.
I use an XP box at home (themed to look OSX-ish) because there is some software I have to use with Windows and I don't have the heart to dual boot, but I can't ever remember accidently editing a file name when I attempted to open a file.
I know this is/. and all, but can we keep the anti-MS FUD in check?
Not entirely kosher perhaps, but you could get zSNES or Nesticle or some emulator that supports Netplay and chat and play such classics as Bomberman and Mario Kart. If she's at all familar with console games, getting a PC control pad or an USB adaptor for a console one would put her right at home.
My gf is not gamer but she plays casually, and she took a crazy shine to Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. So much so that she was playing it more than me (not for lack of interest on my part). She probably would have beaten before me, but lost access to her game, while I was able to beat the game during Christmas break.
The parent mentions Final Fantasy 6, which defintely evokes emotion (if the printed word can, surely so can an audio/visual experience).
Other recent games of note:
Metroid Prime: Fear:) My heart would thump before I opened a new door in the game, as you never know what could be lurking in the next room. The area in Prime in which pirates start attacking you around the enclosed metroid larva and the lights go out was evoked hysteria, I was afraid of hitting the metroids (some got out because of missed shots and attacked the pirates and me) but I had to take down the pirates, in the dark.
Eternal Darkness: Fear, in a different way. It was creepy in an H.P. Lovecraft kind of way. I changed my gaming schedule around from playing late at nights to in the afternoon because I wouldn't play the ED late at night by myself.
Disgaea/Final Fantasy Tatics: Both SRPGs with simple plots, but I empathized with the characters. The excellent Japanese voice acting defintely made Laharal and his crew more human.
In the Illustrated Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, an edition of the first book with photo illustrations, Zaphod was black and it worked really well.
Ford isn't a color, he's an attitude and I think Mos Def can pull that off.
Is, as I have said before, less a director and more like a creature from Mirkwood.
The man's a B-movie director and his use of slow motion, adding "tension," and other changes he made all fit in line with the idea that he's stuck in that way of making films. While I am saddened by the changes he made, I'm suprised the films came out in a watchable form at all, considering Jackson's resume.
Personally, I think the film would have been much better made by a younger director and a largerly unknown cast (why did Liv Tyler have to be Arwen? Agent Smith was the worst conciveable Elrond ever! Only Gandalf and Saruman were truly great).
In Japan, the names were different; M.Bison was the boxer (rhymes with Mike Tyson), Vega was the U.S. M.Bison, and Balrog was the guy with the claws/mask. The Japanese names make much more sense than the changed around English ones.
As an American, I really have to speak out: why is it the Japanese are always made fun of for their (admittedly "creative") English? How many Americans can speak Japanese? How many Americans can speak another language even (not to mention how many can speak anything other than the German/Latin/French/Spanish poorly taught in high school)? The average American doesn't have an idea of any culture outside of their own.
So, get back to me when you can hobble together a sentence or two in Japanese.
Metroid is not an FPS like Quake; I don't need the number keys to switch to 10 different weapons, for example. It's perfectly suited for the Gamecube - I had no problem with the controller after getting used to it (which took an investment of all of 20 minutes) and, indeed, became pretty proficent. There are a lot of games (mostly PC ports of RTSs and FPSs) that suck on because of console controls, but Metroid Prime, built from the ground up to use the GC controller, is not one of them.
I should add that I've played some PC FPSes, but I don't really like them as a genre and one aspect of that is the control. OTH, I really enjoyed Prime and warmed up to its controller pretty quickly.
Slashdot Mirror
Oops, forget to mention that the commercials (and a crappy intro by the head of Pixar) play before the movies. They can be skipped, but they play automatically. The Lacster interview just seems to be validating the films for an American audience.
Why is everyone so elated about this? I picked up the three movie set of Laputa, Spirited Away, and Kiki the day they came out as I love Studio Ghibli's movies. And frankly, Disney screwed them up real nice.
The packaging is substandard. Those of you with Region 2 DVDs know, the Japanese DVDs are much better put together. The menus are beautiful watercolors, the DVD covers look real nice. Unlike the American DVDs, which look pretty cheap.
Additionally, Disney put in a lot of crap on Laputa and Kiki, including commercials for one or the film. I can see a small anime company feeling the need to do something like that, Disney ought to know better.
Despite that, there weren't many decent extras on Laputa and Kiki discs. Some crap with the American voice actors, but nothing of real interest. Sen to Chihiro had a great Japanese documentary on the creation of the film, though.
But the big bugaboo with the three discs is that, at least on the release I got, there were major typographical and grammatical errors. For example, several times as combinations are shown as a;. Other typos and mistakes are abound.
I love these films, I wish Disney would show them some respect. They're nto shovelware, they're beautiful creations of art.
I hope the rest of the Ghibli canon (including Umi ga Kikerou, Ocean Waves) is treated better.
which are an extension of classic Quake speed runs.
Uh...no, Quake came out in 1996, Super Metroid in 1994 and the original Metroid long before that - and people were doing speed runs back then (I know my friends did). The internet has made it easier to show off good runs, but it started long before Quake, so they're not an extension.
I don't see why everything has to be tied back to crappy PC games (especially cool console stuff).
I must say that, though I can't speak for India proper, everything said here jives completely with my experiences in Bangladesh from the family compounds to the auto rickshaws and the beggars (indeed, both my mother and father just sold their "family compounds" in the last few years).
The impression I got in Bangladesh was that IT and programming were do-able ways out of poverty (or even the country) for lower middle class people. Most upper class people didn't consider programming (though my kid cousins for example, loved chatting on IRC) since they could go to college in the U.K. or America if they so chose.
I think the reason for it seeming like an easy out for them is two-fold: One, hardware, even over there can be gotten relatively cheaply (though many of the machines are ones we'd consider ancient). The other is that software costs next to nothing and is readily avaliable. When I was over there in the summer, one could get Longhorn betas on CD, which a cover and the whole shebang. Secondly, unlike say the Chinese, any Indian who goes to school knows a smattering of English. Many people in my parents generation went to religious/missionary schools (my parents, both Muslim, went to Catholic school) and English was, of course, required there.
Also, money can truly get you around in the country and the rules are easily pliable (I remember our driver talking one of the older militar guys into letting us go down the wrong way on a one way street in Bangladesh). But people will try to jip you left and right as well.
Again, this was a fascinating article!
As for Japan, they have plenty of software/tech projects/etc. You never hear about them because they tend remain in Japanese.
If you check out the Mac scene, especially for little applets or GUI stuff, there are plenty of Japanese people there (indeed, Japanese tend to gravitate towards design - I joke that every Japanese I've ever met is an artist, even on the hobby level - which isn't far from the truth; I think it has to do with the importance of kanji and calligraphy). One of the big OSX dock simulators for Windows, for example was made by a Japanese guy (who later was threatend by Apple). He didn't do any translation himself - and that's why you don't often see Japanese software.
Let's not forget console programming and PC games, like dating sims, which of course, the Japanese have completely owned since the Nintendo and until the Xbox .
You're not studying very well then:
There are hard and fast rule's to a word's meaning, the kanji associated with it. Because Japanese uses a sound system based on (in English) what are two syallables (a i e o u, ka ki ka ko ku) in English becomes one in Japanese (some Arabic sounds are the same and I'm sure it's the same for most other langauges - a sound considered "one" in their language is differnent sounds mixed together in ours) there are a lot of homophones in Japanese. However, the kanji always points to the correct meaning.
Words don't have different spellings. A word can be written in hiragana (phonetically) or in a combination of kanji and kana, and that's it. Words don't change spellings, because they have either their kanji or the phonetic spelling, which doesn't change.
You are right that a words meaning can be based on context - but take the phonetic word hashi for example; which can mean edge, bridge, or chopsticks - you'd be in bizarre circumstances to not understand which one is being referred to. In fact a lot of Japanese humor comes from the fact that there are so many homophones and they can so easily be punned.
You're thinking about Japanese entirely the wrong way: it's not that ONE WORD has many different meanings, it's that many words sound the same. It seems like a little thing, but that's a fundamental concept. You'll never speak a foreign language like a native if you continue to think in English terms like that.
I find Japanese to be an elegant mix of Chinese characters and a phonetic alphabet that combines the beauty and inherent simplicity of characters (if you grow up with them) and the flexibility and amalgamative qualities of a phonetic or alphabet based system. It's less unwieldy than Chinese in incoporating new words but it has the same beauty as Chinese or Arabic (which is phonetic, but Arabs put a lot of stock in calligraphy, as do the Chinese and Japanese).
And I actually helped the local district preview the new touch screen machines at my college. The damn things are frightening - they don't look well built and the lack of a paper trail is scary. There is some murmur down here that Max Cleland lost his race (despite giving three limbs for his nation) because of "voting irregularities."
I hope the Republicans don't use these machines to pull a fast one - if we find out after the fact, we won't get to change Presidents, as happened in 2000.
Someone needs to mod the parent up: he's completely right, Nintendo's been doing this kind of thing for years. I mentioned Scheff's Game Over above and this and other books on Nintendo's history detail the things Yamauchi had Nintendo do via the Famicom, many of which seem like ideas game makers want to put into games today.
A couple of people have said that Yamauchi and/or Nintendo's desicions boggle the mind - the fact is they should (and perhaps shouldn't; the man's had a history of being crazy like a fox - anyone remember him talking smack about the Sony president?). Yamauchi isn't known as Mother Brain for nothing - he is a bizarre combination of loud mouth crank and brilliant businessman. He took a hanafuda company into the player in the a high tech industry.
Though he's (thankfully) retired, I'm sure he's pulling strings behind the scens
A GREAT look into Yamauchi and Nintendo's corporate culture is David Scheff's Game Over, which has a lot of in-depth history on Nintendo as a company.
You mean Gunpei Yokoi, who not only pioneered the Gameboy and the Virtuay Boy, but created such series as Metroid and Kid Icarus. He died in a car accident after having to quit Nintendo in shame over the Virtual Boy debacle.
"It'll be like the Swiss Family Robinson, only with more cursing! We'll live like kings! Damn hell ass kings!"
Acting? Cinematography? Sorry, but who the heck cares? The difference between us is that I go to a movie to be entertained for 2 hours, not to find a new philosophy in life.
Good movies do both. Take Kurosawa's films for example. His movies entertain, they impart strong messages, and part of that is because he pays attention to great acting (Toshiro Mifune, Takashi Shimura) and cinemoatography. A great actor can make people feel something (and that is entertaing!) in 1 motion which would take normal people 10 to convey (Kurosawa said something similar about Mifune). Great actors a part of the story and they make it their business to play their role and show the audience their role in the film. By your logic, blocks of wood be as entertaining as actors (even the masses don't believe that - look at Keanu in the last to matrix films and fan reactions).
Cinematography too does the same thing; the way a shot is light, balanced, etc. subtly imparts a mood or vibe for a movie. Take the balances in Seven Samurai - they show a lot of how the samurai see other, the villagers, etc. Take The Royal Tenenbaums for example - the cluttered Tenenbaum house says a lot about the family themselves. Unless you're stuyding it, you might not see it the first time through, but it does affect your perception of the characters.
Cinematopgrahy and acting are paramount to a great, entertaing film. It's the difference between a 2 page plot synopsis of Lord of the Rings and reading the novels; there's no comparsion.
Take a film class somewhere, I promise you'll learn quite a bit about visual story telling.
I wish Nintendo would recapture some of that old magic and do Space World again this year. For you kids, Nintendo used to have it's own trade show where Nintendo and third parties showed of their new games.
As mentioned in the comments, Nintendo's E3's have been rather underwhelming, but they have enough stuff to do a proper SW this year. However, I think the era of Nintendo having it's own little circle jerk (even a fun one) is over.
Don't get me wrong, I'm drooling over a myriad of things scheduled and rumored for this year, most defintely including Prime 2, Mario, Pikmin 2, Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories, and some others.
Because it's legit crippleware. People are never going to pay for software they can't afford, but if some people pay for software they can afford, Microsoft makes more money. And some people, some companies will. In the end, Microsoft has another line of OS they can sell to third world countries for a song, more customers are locked in, and Microsoft wins.
I'll bite.
No they won't. There's no culture of buying legitimate copies over there (indeed, most of the Bangladeshi bootlegs came from Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, et al). There's no nagging guilt, no RIAA swoop downs, no MPAA bleeding heart commercials. The average person over there either doesn't know or doesn't care that their software is copied. Believe me, for most people it's the least of their concerns.
Even assuming one could find the legit copies easily (which, with market economics at play, isn't easy), you'd have to be off your rocker to buy them.
I can't speak for Thailand specifically, but I know it's the same as Bangladesh, when I was over there you could get the Longhorn betas pre-burned and with covers and the whole deal. And they cost next to nothing to boost. You could get them at malls, street vendors, Internet cafes. About the only draw back was that the CDs were so cheap they stop working in a few month or so, but that's plenty of time to use it.
Why would the average Thai pay for crippleware when they can already get XP for next to nothing?
Using Windows Media Player, it is quite difficult to get a screenshot of a playing DVD. If you take a screenshot while a DVD is playing, you'll see a big empty black box where the movie should be.
I'm no fan of WMP (I use BS Player or Windows Media Player Classic) but it's easy enough to get a screenshot from it, just turn down hardware acceleration.
I call sheningans:
/. and all, but can we keep the anti-MS FUD in check?
I use an XP box at home (themed to look OSX-ish) because there is some software I have to use with Windows and I don't have the heart to dual boot, but I can't ever remember accidently editing a file name when I attempted to open a file.
I know this is
Not entirely kosher perhaps, but you could get zSNES or Nesticle or some emulator that supports Netplay and chat and play such classics as Bomberman and Mario Kart. If she's at all familar with console games, getting a PC control pad or an USB adaptor for a console one would put her right at home.
My gf is not gamer but she plays casually, and she took a crazy shine to Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. So much so that she was playing it more than me (not for lack of interest on my part). She probably would have beaten before me, but lost access to her game, while I was able to beat the game during Christmas break.
The parent mentions Final Fantasy 6, which defintely evokes emotion (if the printed word can, surely so can an audio/visual experience).
:) My heart would thump before I opened a new door in the game, as you never know what could be lurking in the next room. The area in Prime in which pirates start attacking you around the enclosed metroid larva and the lights go out was evoked hysteria, I was afraid of hitting the metroids (some got out because of missed shots and attacked the pirates and me) but I had to take down the pirates, in the dark.
Other recent games of note:
Metroid Prime: Fear
Eternal Darkness: Fear, in a different way. It was creepy in an H.P. Lovecraft kind of way. I changed my gaming schedule around from playing late at nights to in the afternoon because I wouldn't play the ED late at night by myself.
Disgaea/Final Fantasy Tatics: Both SRPGs with simple plots, but I empathized with the characters. The excellent Japanese voice acting defintely made Laharal and his crew more human.
I have to ask...can I have your M.D.?
In the Illustrated Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, an edition of the first book with photo illustrations, Zaphod was black and it worked really well.
Ford isn't a color, he's an attitude and I think Mos Def can pull that off.
Is, as I have said before, less a director and more like a creature from Mirkwood.
The man's a B-movie director and his use of slow motion, adding "tension," and other changes he made all fit in line with the idea that he's stuck in that way of making films. While I am saddened by the changes he made, I'm suprised the films came out in a watchable form at all, considering Jackson's resume.
Personally, I think the film would have been much better made by a younger director and a largerly unknown cast (why did Liv Tyler have to be Arwen? Agent Smith was the worst conciveable Elrond ever! Only Gandalf and Saruman were truly great).
In Japan, the names were different; M.Bison was the boxer (rhymes with Mike Tyson), Vega was the U.S. M.Bison, and Balrog was the guy with the claws/mask. The Japanese names make much more sense than the changed around English ones.
As an American, I really have to speak out: why is it the Japanese are always made fun of for their (admittedly "creative") English? How many Americans can speak Japanese? How many Americans can speak another language even (not to mention how many can speak anything other than the German/Latin/French/Spanish poorly taught in high school)? The average American doesn't have an idea of any culture outside of their own.
So, get back to me when you can hobble together a sentence or two in Japanese.
Metroid is not an FPS like Quake; I don't need the number keys to switch to 10 different weapons, for example. It's perfectly suited for the Gamecube - I had no problem with the controller after getting used to it (which took an investment of all of 20 minutes) and, indeed, became pretty proficent. There are a lot of games (mostly PC ports of RTSs and FPSs) that suck on because of console controls, but Metroid Prime, built from the ground up to use the GC controller, is not one of them.
I should add that I've played some PC FPSes, but I don't really like them as a genre and one aspect of that is the control. OTH, I really enjoyed Prime and warmed up to its controller pretty quickly.