The DS is doing amazingly well in Japan. I got mine outside of Osaka in early December and boy am I glad - there are places selling used machines for $200 American dollars. Kids are using their New Year's money to snap up the machines (If I weren't so convinced that Nintendo will soon have a handle on production again, I'd buy a load of the machines in the U.S. and bring them over).
The only machine that has the shelf space in nearly all the consumer oriented video game stores (as opposed to the holes in the wall in Den Den Town which cater to more hardcore gamers) is the PS2. The DS is well on its way to being a ubiqutious platform just like the PS2.
There are shelves for the PSP, but the games are crap and there's not nearly as much advertising, compared to the brochures, banners, and boxes for Nintendogs, Brain Training, Mario Kart, and Animal Crossing.
They probably didn't mention it because they didn't notice. It didn't even occur to me until I read your comment. I don't play FPSes (or the other Resident Evil games, since the first, for that matter) so that may have something to do with it, but from what I can remember, the system is very much in-line (in that aspect) with shooting in previous RE gamse.
As another poster mentioned, it's more accurate for a trained professional to stop and aim to fire. It also gives the game a cinematic quality, fixes the RE attack mechnaism, and for me, it simply worked. In the context of this game it doesn't seem to be a big deal - I didn't try to play RE4 like an FPS and it worked out fine - I played the game, had fun, and finished it.
My brother bought the game and I had zero interest in it, as I hated previous RE games (and knock offs like Onimusha). But after seeing him play for a while I picked it up and was very pleasantly surprised: I played through the game at least twice.
I went from complete disinterest and low key hostility to being in love with the game. RE4 is a damn good game and it deserves the game of the yar titles its earned.
Fry: "My God! What if the secret ingredient... is people!" Leela: "No. There's already a soda like that. Soylent Cola." Fry: "Oh. How is it?" Leela: "It varies from person to person."
Simpsons has been on a very steady decline since about the time Futurama cmae out (even before than, perhaps). The SImpsons was very much running out of steam and while Futurama channeled some of its style and wit, it also brought a lot of fresh ideas to the table. I feel like the first few episodes are a bit slow, but after that I feel pretty much the entire run compares very favorable with even the Pax Simpsona (say seasons two through six).
As far as Family Guy is concerned, during both program's initial runs I might ahve agreed with you. But especially when they are put back to back, it is obvious how much intellectual humor is in Futurama. It ages well becaues in someways it is a standard sitcom, but with a sharp sense of humor and intellectual writing. Family Guy mostly relies on shock value and easy jokes. While they were funny, its not a show I personally can watch over and over again (and this is discounting the post cancellation Family Guy, which lacks even the heart of the original). Family Guy simply does not stack up well - Futurama's humor is smarter, better written, and ages much better. Care was taken with Futurama and it shows.
Furthermore, Futurama had some of the best animation on TV. Unlike the poor art of Family Guy (the creator of Ren and Stimpy lambasted FG for it's art style, saying any 10 year old can do it, according to FG's wikipedia page), Aqua Teen (which I love, but still, is no prize pig as far as animation is concerned), Futurama was extemely well done and even the first season looks good these days.
The Simpsons is a bit of a send up of the family sitcoms of its periods, while Futurama riffs on Friends and Seinfeld style shows of the 1990s. The sense of humor is far more bizarre, but its grounding in some sort of reality means it pairs up really well on adult swim with shows like Aqua Teen.
After all, it's not like leaders in democracies who act contrary to the will of 75% of their populace on major issues tend to have trouble getting reelected.
Uh, this is the act situation Japanese PM Koizumi found himself in.
He got re-elected just fine, despite leading Japan into a war 75%+ of its populace didn't want to get into.
The story is a bit misleading - basically Windows Vista will only support drives that do something in hardware, rather than the old style drives that required it to be done in software. It's not a DRM issue, just dropping of support for older drives - and saves them a bunch of problems building a driver layer in for what are legacy devices.
This is a bit disingenious: while what you say is probably correct, the RCP1 drives were well-knoen for being hackable. The firmware could be changed to make drives region free. This is much harder on the RPC2 drives, which is probably at least part (if not much of the reason) for Microsoft dropping RCP1 support.
Disc isn't less used. "Disc" usually refers to optical media, such as DVDs, CDs, Gamecube discs, and MDs. Disk usually refers to floppy disks, hard disks, etc.
Though your point remains correct, that the sentence needs remain consistent.
FFXII has a Japanese release date. March 6th, announced at the Jump Fiesta and I saw a banner for it at the big DVD/game store Tsutaya with the same date.
DNS is exactly right. Not only is the sentence terribly written, despite Tycho's use of "big words," fancruft is not even a word (nor should the abomination be).
When we were first considering making Epic Legends Of The Hierarchs available as a publically manageable satirical metanarrative, we dropped the basic timeline on Wikipedia because I liked the way their software went about things. Of course, a phalanx of pedants leapt into action almost immediately to scour - from the sacred corpus of their data - our revolting fancruft.
Holy crap, was that English? I've been out of the U.S. far too long.
no one's ever tried to make Nethack-style random gameplay work in a commercial product.
Uh, the entire Fushigi no Dungeon series (Including Chocobo's Mysterious Dungeon and Pokemon: Fushigi no Dungeon) which are commercial versions of Rogue and Nethack? I know for a fact there was a Gameboy Advance title along the same lins as well (Monster Dungeon or something along those lines).
I'm pretty sure I had to pay for those and they were nethack-style (to the point of being random).
THe Japanese have (more or less) adopted Christmas and New Year's for this kind of thing (I had an ex-girlfriend whose mom would give me money for new years and a lot of that money, especially for kids, goes to gaming stuff), but the thing is that no one wants this damn thing.
I think most hardcore gamers care. Most gamers I know play Japanese games. Even if Japan is the smallest of the three markets (which I seriously doubt, I remember reading that Europe is slightly smaller than Japan, and having been to games stores in Britain and Japan, I'll believe it - do you have any numbers to back your claim up?) it's the creative epicenter of gaming. The Japanese make games that the Japanese (and many Americans and Europeans) like and there are none of those out for the Xbox 360 right now.
You heard wrong. They almost nothing outside of the trendy parts of Tokyo. I'm outside the second largest city in the country, Osaka, and there's next to nothing for the Xbox.
I was in Ise last month and even though one of Japan's most famous shrines is there, you'd think there is no farther place in the world (or at least in Japan) from the fashionable districts in Tokyo. Slashdot's gaijin patrol thinks that Tokyo culture (especially Akihabara/Shibuya) is all over Japan, but it's not.
And the parent is also right about Microsoft's push in the rest of Japan: they're doing nothing in Kansai for the Xbox360 that I know of. They're ignoring the entire country outside a couple of small (but trendy) neighborhoods in Tokyo - it's like if they advertised and released the 360 only in SoHo.
Ah, we talk about the Japanese market, and Slashdot's Japan patrol comes out. Most of them haven't been to Japan and are talking about Japanese culture from what they've learned from TV, anime, and porn.
Most Japanese love American stuff, especially in terms of creative stuff: books and music, for example (in fact a lot of my friends listen exclusively to English music, American and/or British). I was at Tsutaya last night and there were a ton of American/English books in Japanese. Da Vinchi Code, Harry Potter, and Memoirs of A Geisha come to mind.
Having said that, the Xbox360's a failure here. No one cares that the machine is out. I didn't even know it was released (I knew it was soon, as I commented on a story before, but I didn't know the exact day). I'm outside Osaka, the second biggest city in Japan, and nothing is happening outside of Tokyo. It's nuts. Microsoft really doesn't care about getting the machine popular. Armchair American pundits say that its because the Japanese are racist against Americans. The truth is Microsoft is making zero effort to be popular in the U.S., and the normal xenophobic American response is to say its the Japanese fault.
I was in Lawson's (a convince store) this morning and there were a couple of Xbox magazines out on the shelf. I picked one up and the only games in it were games that aren't out: DoA, Mist Walker's RPG, games Japanese people are interested in, but they are not even avaliable!
And Christmas is celebrated here. Not only are there many Christians (one of my good friends is Japanese Christian, not to mention Koreans and other foreigners), but as a secular holiday, its huge. There are Christmas decorations everywhere (my favorite is the huge light up Santa near Kobe Harbor, but even in my little town there are decorations).
Are you kidding? I see just as many Christmas decorations here in Japan as I do in the U.S. It may not be celebrated as a religious holiday, but Santa is everywhere in Japan.
You've obviously never been to Kobe Harbor, they have a huge Santa display near the port.
I remember reading once that Japanese baths used to be co-ed many years ago before the white man
There was actually an interesting period of time in Japan when bare chested women were racey in urban areas (which were influenced by western models), but not in rural areas. So men would come from rural areas, aftr working with shirtless woman in their homes, and girls with their tops exposed would suddently become this taboo hottness for them.
The Xbox 360 is set to make exactly the same splash in Japan that the original Xbox made. Which is to say, not very much.
There are ads for the 360 around - mostly in convience stores (Lawson's and 7/11, that I've seen). These are more like general stores in Japan - you can get games at some convience stores, its not considered a real hardcore gaming place. And the ads aren't even that big.
I recently purchased a DS and in actual game stores there is next to nothing about the 360.
On TV I've seen the commercial for Resident Evil 4 for the PS2 a dozen times in the last few days. I've seen exactly one Xbox 260 ad (for Perfect Dark) and that was at 3 a.m. (granted game commercials play mostly at those times, but I saw the Resident Evil/Biiohazard commercials during prime time too).
The DS on the other hand is eating up the game market. It looks to be the next PS2 (and that is still running strong out here).
I read the BBC article right before it was posted to slashdot and I don't think hardcore gamers here will buy the machine. There are zero Japanese interest games for the machine. Without even Dead or Alive, the machine's sunk. There's no interest that I can see here (granted I'm outside Osaka, and not Tokyo, but even considering Denden town, there's no interest).
Slashdot Mirror
The DS is doing amazingly well in Japan. I got mine outside of Osaka in early December and boy am I glad - there are places selling used machines for $200 American dollars. Kids are using their New Year's money to snap up the machines (If I weren't so convinced that Nintendo will soon have a handle on production again, I'd buy a load of the machines in the U.S. and bring them over).
The only machine that has the shelf space in nearly all the consumer oriented video game stores (as opposed to the holes in the wall in Den Den Town which cater to more hardcore gamers) is the PS2. The DS is well on its way to being a ubiqutious platform just like the PS2.
There are shelves for the PSP, but the games are crap and there's not nearly as much advertising, compared to the brochures, banners, and boxes for Nintendogs, Brain Training, Mario Kart, and Animal Crossing.
The place to be is the DS.
They probably didn't mention it because they didn't notice. It didn't even occur to me until I read your comment. I don't play FPSes (or the other Resident Evil games, since the first, for that matter) so that may have something to do with it, but from what I can remember, the system is very much in-line (in that aspect) with shooting in previous RE gamse.
As another poster mentioned, it's more accurate for a trained professional to stop and aim to fire. It also gives the game a cinematic quality, fixes the RE attack mechnaism, and for me, it simply worked. In the context of this game it doesn't seem to be a big deal - I didn't try to play RE4 like an FPS and it worked out fine - I played the game, had fun, and finished it.
My brother bought the game and I had zero interest in it, as I hated previous RE games (and knock offs like Onimusha). But after seeing him play for a while I picked it up and was very pleasantly surprised: I played through the game at least twice.
I went from complete disinterest and low key hostility to being in love with the game. RE4 is a damn good game and it deserves the game of the yar titles its earned.
(You knew it was coming)
... is people!"
Fry: "My God! What if the secret ingredient
Leela: "No. There's already a soda like that. Soylent Cola."
Fry: "Oh. How is it?"
Leela: "It varies from person to person."
I think you're very much mistaken.
Simpsons has been on a very steady decline since about the time Futurama cmae out (even before than, perhaps). The SImpsons was very much running out of steam and while Futurama channeled some of its style and wit, it also brought a lot of fresh ideas to the table. I feel like the first few episodes are a bit slow, but after that I feel pretty much the entire run compares very favorable with even the Pax Simpsona (say seasons two through six).
As far as Family Guy is concerned, during both program's initial runs I might ahve agreed with you. But especially when they are put back to back, it is obvious how much intellectual humor is in Futurama. It ages well becaues in someways it is a standard sitcom, but with a sharp sense of humor and intellectual writing. Family Guy mostly relies on shock value and easy jokes. While they were funny, its not a show I personally can watch over and over again (and this is discounting the post cancellation Family Guy, which lacks even the heart of the original). Family Guy simply does not stack up well - Futurama's humor is smarter, better written, and ages much better. Care was taken with Futurama and it shows.
Furthermore, Futurama had some of the best animation on TV. Unlike the poor art of Family Guy (the creator of Ren and Stimpy lambasted FG for it's art style, saying any 10 year old can do it, according to FG's wikipedia page), Aqua Teen (which I love, but still, is no prize pig as far as animation is concerned), Futurama was extemely well done and even the first season looks good these days.
The Simpsons is a bit of a send up of the family sitcoms of its periods, while Futurama riffs on Friends and Seinfeld style shows of the 1990s. The sense of humor is far more bizarre, but its grounding in some sort of reality means it pairs up really well on adult swim with shows like Aqua Teen.
After all, it's not like leaders in democracies who act contrary to the will of 75% of their populace on major issues tend to have trouble getting reelected.
Uh, this is the act situation Japanese PM Koizumi found himself in.
He got re-elected just fine, despite leading Japan into a war 75%+ of its populace didn't want to get into.
The story is a bit misleading - basically Windows Vista will only support drives that do something in hardware, rather than the old style drives that required it to be done in software. It's not a DRM issue, just dropping of support for older drives - and saves them a bunch of problems building a driver layer in for what are legacy devices.
This is a bit disingenious: while what you say is probably correct, the RCP1 drives were well-knoen for being hackable. The firmware could be changed to make drives region free. This is much harder on the RPC2 drives, which is probably at least part (if not much of the reason) for Microsoft dropping RCP1 support.
if yes, then microsoft loses new zealand to linux in ten seconds flat.
Somehow I doubt this keeps Bill Gates up at night.
So that makes the slashdot average, like, 1.5?
Disc isn't less used. "Disc" usually refers to optical media, such as DVDs, CDs, Gamecube discs, and MDs. Disk usually refers to floppy disks, hard disks, etc.
Though your point remains correct, that the sentence needs remain consistent.
You mods need to get a clue!
FFXII has a Japanese release date. March 6th, announced at the Jump Fiesta and I saw a banner for it at the big DVD/game store Tsutaya with the same date.
DNS is exactly right. Not only is the sentence terribly written, despite Tycho's use of "big words," fancruft is not even a word (nor should the abomination be).
When we were first considering making Epic Legends Of The Hierarchs available as a publically manageable satirical metanarrative, we dropped the basic timeline on Wikipedia because I liked the way their software went about things. Of course, a phalanx of pedants leapt into action almost immediately to scour - from the sacred corpus of their data - our revolting fancruft.
Holy crap, was that English? I've been out of the U.S. far too long.
no one's ever tried to make Nethack-style random gameplay work in a commercial product.
Uh, the entire Fushigi no Dungeon series (Including Chocobo's Mysterious Dungeon and Pokemon: Fushigi no Dungeon) which are commercial versions of Rogue and Nethack? I know for a fact there was a Gameboy Advance title along the same lins as well (Monster Dungeon or something along those lines).
I'm pretty sure I had to pay for those and they were nethack-style (to the point of being random).
THe Japanese have (more or less) adopted Christmas and New Year's for this kind of thing (I had an ex-girlfriend whose mom would give me money for new years and a lot of that money, especially for kids, goes to gaming stuff), but the thing is that no one wants this damn thing.
I think most hardcore gamers care. Most gamers I know play Japanese games. Even if Japan is the smallest of the three markets (which I seriously doubt, I remember reading that Europe is slightly smaller than Japan, and having been to games stores in Britain and Japan, I'll believe it - do you have any numbers to back your claim up?) it's the creative epicenter of gaming. The Japanese make games that the Japanese (and many Americans and Europeans) like and there are none of those out for the Xbox 360 right now.
You heard wrong. They almost nothing outside of the trendy parts of Tokyo. I'm outside the second largest city in the country, Osaka, and there's next to nothing for the Xbox.
It's not just anime and manga, though most Slashdot Japan experts seem to only know it from that.
I can't tell you the number of school papers I've gotten back with nice, big batsu (Xs) on them. The pain, the pain of school!
True/false questions on my exams are X for false, O for true.
Mod parent up.
I was in Ise last month and even though one of Japan's most famous shrines is there, you'd think there is no farther place in the world (or at least in Japan) from the fashionable districts in Tokyo. Slashdot's gaijin patrol thinks that Tokyo culture (especially Akihabara/Shibuya) is all over Japan, but it's not.
And the parent is also right about Microsoft's push in the rest of Japan: they're doing nothing in Kansai for the Xbox360 that I know of. They're ignoring the entire country outside a couple of small (but trendy) neighborhoods in Tokyo - it's like if they advertised and released the 360 only in SoHo.
Ah, we talk about the Japanese market, and Slashdot's Japan patrol comes out. Most of them haven't been to Japan and are talking about Japanese culture from what they've learned from TV, anime, and porn.
Most Japanese love American stuff, especially in terms of creative stuff: books and music, for example (in fact a lot of my friends listen exclusively to English music, American and/or British). I was at Tsutaya last night and there were a ton of American/English books in Japanese. Da Vinchi Code, Harry Potter, and Memoirs of A Geisha come to mind.
Having said that, the Xbox360's a failure here. No one cares that the machine is out. I didn't even know it was released (I knew it was soon, as I commented on a story before, but I didn't know the exact day). I'm outside Osaka, the second biggest city in Japan, and nothing is happening outside of Tokyo. It's nuts. Microsoft really doesn't care about getting the machine popular. Armchair American pundits say that its because the Japanese are racist against Americans. The truth is Microsoft is making zero effort to be popular in the U.S., and the normal xenophobic American response is to say its the Japanese fault.
I was in Lawson's (a convince store) this morning and there were a couple of Xbox magazines out on the shelf. I picked one up and the only games in it were games that aren't out: DoA, Mist Walker's RPG, games Japanese people are interested in, but they are not even avaliable!
And Christmas is celebrated here. Not only are there many Christians (one of my good friends is Japanese Christian, not to mention Koreans and other foreigners), but as a secular holiday, its huge. There are Christmas decorations everywhere (my favorite is the huge light up Santa near Kobe Harbor, but even in my little town there are decorations).
Are you kidding? I see just as many Christmas decorations here in Japan as I do in the U.S. It may not be celebrated as a religious holiday, but Santa is everywhere in Japan.
You've obviously never been to Kobe Harbor, they have a huge Santa display near the port.
I remember reading once that Japanese baths used to be co-ed many years ago before the white man
There was actually an interesting period of time in Japan when bare chested women were racey in urban areas (which were influenced by western models), but not in rural areas. So men would come from rural areas, aftr working with shirtless woman in their homes, and girls with their tops exposed would suddently become this taboo hottness for them.
Who gave the Grinch posting privleges?
Where's the "+1 You got served" moderation?
The Xbox 360 is set to make exactly the same splash in Japan that the original Xbox made. Which is to say, not very much.
There are ads for the 360 around - mostly in convience stores (Lawson's and 7/11, that I've seen). These are more like general stores in Japan - you can get games at some convience stores, its not considered a real hardcore gaming place. And the ads aren't even that big.
I recently purchased a DS and in actual game stores there is next to nothing about the 360.
On TV I've seen the commercial for Resident Evil 4 for the PS2 a dozen times in the last few days. I've seen exactly one Xbox 260 ad (for Perfect Dark) and that was at 3 a.m. (granted game commercials play mostly at those times, but I saw the Resident Evil/Biiohazard commercials during prime time too).
The DS on the other hand is eating up the game market. It looks to be the next PS2 (and that is still running strong out here).
I read the BBC article right before it was posted to slashdot and I don't think hardcore gamers here will buy the machine. There are zero Japanese interest games for the machine. Without even Dead or Alive, the machine's sunk. There's no interest that I can see here (granted I'm outside Osaka, and not Tokyo, but even considering Denden town, there's no interest).
A great book about Time Management (by the way) is "The Time Trap" by R. Alec MacKenzie.
I am not a time burgler!
Thanks, I feel really, really old now. Final Fantasy VII is the good old days? God, just hand me a walker or a Rascal motorized scooter, I'm done.