Canada bans the Bloody Hell ads, but it's because of the beer
The ad shows a half drunk glass of beer - and Canada's advertising rules object to this because it shows people actually drink the stuff. If it was a full glass of beer, on the other hand, there would be no objection. Wow.
Following in the footsteps of the PSP, the Playstation 3 will supposedly be released without region encoding for games. This is a very, very good thing, and only sensible for Sony to do - now it can tell game developers their potential market is the world. I’m curious what the Xbox 360 currently does - because if it doesn’t allow region-free gaming, that’s a sizeable potential market lost right there.
Of course, with the earlier High Court ruling that these region-specific measures were allowed to be circumvented in Australia the issue was kind of dead in the water anyhow, but to have it built right in saves a good bit of effort.
Final Fantasy XII has been released in Japan, and inevitably it’s had ripple effects elsewhere. The opening movie is out on teh intarweb for everyone to have a peek at (just poke around the torrent sites and you’ll be able to find it). The one I have is 7 minutes long, and covers a very quick “Hello this is the game’s worl- battle!”
Immediate impression? something about it screams Star Wars. But before I delve into that minefield, I’ll say that the animation is pretty & clean, and clearly produced by the same guys as FFVII: Advent Children; however, it doesn’t have the effort that was put in to Advent Children. It looks very much within Square’s style, and in-game footage will be interesting to see. It’ll also be interesting to see if this ends up much like FFIX - a last hurrah for a console nearing the end of its lifespan.
Somehow, I doubt Square put in this much effort to produce a half-hearted work - do they ever? - but you can clearly see this shares much with FFIX, and the imminent release of the PS3 suggests its killer-app Final Fantasy XIII can’t be too much more than a year or two down the line. It’ll have to be a quick release cycle though, which suggests that perhaps Square is going to take its time - possibly leading to something more like FFVII, released two years after the PS1’s debut, as opposed to FFX, which was a early system release and successful for a whole host of other reasons.
Why is it Star Wars, and why is it like FFIX? Well, the opening suggests we’re seeing a techno-medival age with royalty marching about as nations go to war - the context is somewhat like FFIX, and one of the characters it looks like you’ll be using is similar again to FFIX. The bad guy hasn’t been spotted yet, however. As for the Star Wars aspect, you feel it near instantly when you see the lines of troops and the transports lifting off, followed by airships surrounded by dogfighting smaller flying things… yeah, it’s fairly clear where the influence is here. I’m not entirely sure yet whether this will be a good or a bad thing, as it could have been done badly, or it could have been done very well. I wouldn’t want this to turn into a Star Wars-esque RPG because that’s not the sweeping majesty & intricacy of the Final Fantasy stories; they’ve always had something more magical about them, and I hope that comes through here.
I suppose further evaluation will have to wait until I can get my hands on this hot little beasty.
It's finally been done, and some guy is lucky enough to score $13,000 for his work - and I'm sure it wasn't easy work at that. But reading the instructions, which you can find from here, it's fairly straightforward - no more complex than installing Linux on a PC. Technically, Windows isn't being hacked - it's just a bootloader. And I suppose in the same way it's not Mac that's being hacked, although I can't imagine Apple would encourage it. It'll be voided warranty, that's for sure.
I'm also sure Apple's site is being hit with a number of orders for MacTels today =)
Update (09/Apr): Last week Apple released Boot Camp, an officially sanctioned "beta" software to let people do this without the technical know-how of the solution posted by blanka & narf. Given the comprehensiveness of this solution, and Apple's statement that it will include this capability by default in the next release of OSX, 10.5 "Leopard", suggests to me that Apple has worked on this behind the scenes already, and have had their hands forced by narf & blanka's solution for EFI booting. All credit to the solution worked out by hand, but Apple seem to have known it would happen and pre-empted this. Not that those guys are complaining - $13,000 is a decent payout in anyone's terms.
So what does Boot Camp mean? Officially sanctioned - if not supported - Windows installs on Mac machines. Which translates into sales for Apple, and sales for Microsoft. Who's complaining here? I don't think anyone really would be. Had this occured before the days of OSX and Microsoft's anti-trust case, there would have been uproar and despair and claims of Apple selling out. Instead, this is a very smart marketing move from a company moving from strength to strength and gaining the confidence to fight the war of public opinion on their own terms.
Apple hasn't made a mistake yet in moving to Intel chips, and if past experience is any real guide, their only real competition in the iPod market is themselves constantly one-upping themselves and moving away from the competition. Viva la Apple!
Check out this video first:
It looks pretty authentic - I can expect Microsoft to have produced that ad, and it’s pretty slick.
But from the looks of it, the device is a little too chunky to be truly convenient. The reason the iPod sells so huge is that it can slip into your pocket no worries. The Origami, or whatever it will be called, looks just big enough that you’d have to keep it in a bag. The tech it demos is probably by and large already there - they’re just repackaging it into a smaller device than a laptop or tablet. I’m not sure how exciting it will actually be until I get my hands on it.
Props to Microsoft though for their approach in marketing this.
