Quote:Microsoft chairman Bill Gates has told a German financial magazine that he remains interested in buying Nintendo, stating that "if Hiroshi Yamauchi phones me, I will pick up at once."
Gates told WirtschaftsWoche magazine that he would immediately make an offer for the company if Yamauchi, who remains the largest shareholder in the firm despite retiring from his position as president over two years ago, indicated willingness to sell.
However, his comments seem to be largely in the realms of wishful thinking, as Yamauchi retains a keen interest in the running of the company, which has been in his family for over a century, and is highly unlikely to consider a sale to the American software giant.
Indeed, Yamauchi rebuffed an offer from Microsoft only a few years ago, just after the firm decided to enter the console market with the Xbox. The final decision to develop its own console operation is believed to have been taken only after attempts to buy both Nintendo and Sega failed.
The fact that Gates is still keen on acquiring Nintendo can be seen as a statement of his respect for the Japanese company, which remains the most profitable business in the games industry, but is unlikely to lead to any business deal - with the two companies, whose US headquarters are only a stones throw away from each other in Redmond, Washington, set to continue battling for second place in the current generation of console hardware.
File this under "Not going to happen EVER.", which I do believe is famous last words, but whatever.
What does Yamuachi have to say about this?
Yamauchi: *yells incoherently in Japanese while bashing his fists against his desk and making slashing gestures*
Translator: Mr. Yamauchi respectfully declines your offer.
Games Industry
Oh man, Gates makes EA look like a child buying candy in a corner store, why buy small developers when you can buy entire pioneers of an industry. On that note, I could imagine Yamauchi ringing bill late at night getting Mr Gates all worked up about being able to buy his childhood idol Mario, and instead hears.
"I am Mr Yamauchi's translator, he is sorry for this interuption at this time and hopes you can accept his appologies"
"Uhh yeah don't worry about it, what can I do for him?"
"Mr Yamauchi was sending an email to the gaming department and the email was returned saying the pop3 address was not configured properly and wondered if you could help him out over the phone, as you can understand your help desk requires a long wait and Mr Yamauchi is a busy man"
Wouldn't everyone want to own Nintendo? :)
Ok, What would you do if you owned Nintendo.
Tell ya what I'd do:
1)Get Armored Core onto gamecube or some thing
2)Make sure they make a damn portable SSB game for DS
3)Make the DS online, this is already in the air, but it would be mad to ensure it.
Of course, after all this, I'd just give it back to Yamauchi.. I might keep a few shares just so I can get the games early, that would be fun.. yessir.. yup..
Nintendo is never, ever going to be owned by Microsoft. Or Sony. Or anyone else. They will never sell the company to the highest bidder. Nintendo has said repeatedly that the day that they stop making consoles is the day they stop making games. Nintendo is still the most famous, most storied name in video games of all time, and such a legacy will not change hands for a check from Bill Gates.
Long live Nintendo, Bill Gates die soon.
If he actually bought Nintendo it'd be bad. But him wanting to? I'd just call that understandable.
I'm just saying it'll never happen. They'll go bankrupt and disband before they sell out to Microsoft.
In current circumstances, of course. But I'd think Bill Gates would have something seriously wrong with him if he wasn't dreaming about owning Nintendo. :)
Yamauchi's too old school Japanese to ever sell out to Bill Gates [an American]. Of course if for some reason he allowed it to happen he'd have to commit sepuku to redeem his family's honor.
....that being?
Anyway, if they stop making consoles, we'll see if they stop making games :D. Somehow I think they'll keep making games so long as they have creative control...
Seppuku is the act of commiting suicide, usually with a sword, if I'm not too terribly mistaken.
"Everything I need to know, I learned from Soul Calibur II's Yoshimitsu" :D.
Ritualistic suicide, to be more specific.
Or, harikiri.
Watch enough samurai movies and you remember that kind of stuff.
Ritualized suicide eh? You mean like the comet UFO cult?
I hear N_A supports suicide, because he's an immoral freak.
No, more like if you've done something terrible or dishonorable. Or in the Edo period, if you were a Samurai and your Daimyo was murdered, because the Samurai were supposed to exist only for the Daimyo.
It's complicated.
I think that in Japanese that's actually Hara-Kiri, not Hari-kari or anything... not certain, but I believe so. :)
OB1 Wrote:No, more like if you've done something terrible or dishonorable. Or in the Edo period, if you were a Samurai and your Daimyo was murdered, because the Samurai were supposed to exist only for the Daimyo.
It's complicated.
Wouldn't the samurai then become a Ronin? My knowledge of such things is sketchy at best.
I suppose some didn't kill themselves and thus would become wanderers.
Right, no hyphen. They don't use hyphens. As for spaces, is it actually one word? I thought it was two...
Quote:Wouldn't the samurai then become a Ronin? My knowledge of such things is sketchy at best.
You could, but some would rather kill themselves than be so dishonored...
Those wacky Japanese and their "honor"...
Yeah, honor is one of the most important things to them and this is especially true in the earlier periods.
Until we spanked it out of them. Honestly, so very many of them died due to their ridiculous notions that "to die is far better than to surrender", and this attitude resulted in them never taking our people prisoner. When we finally deployed the most powerful thing anyone had ever seen, they realized their previous twisted values had failed them. Sure, they are loosing their old Bushido code (not that there's been much around for the last few generations I think), but that's a GOOD thing because those values are wrong, and it was proven during WW2 that they only resulted in horribile tragedy. So they are loosing a big part of their old culture, good riddance!
So many innacuracies... I know I did posts about WWII/postwar Japan several months back (I did take a 'Japanese History, 1880s-present' class last semester... :)). But they'd be pretty hard to find... don't you people remember? We did a whole post discussing WWII and Japan, I think...
Anyway, Japan is indeed now relatively pacifistic. Bushido hasn't completely gone away, but you can't totally avoid something like that in any society...
Anyway, it is true that in WWII because of their code the Japanese didn't take many prisoners or allow themselves to be taken prisoner (the number of Japanese war dead is many millions and the number captured is quite small). And in the Pacific American troops quickly responded by doing the same... remember, the first rule in war is to dehumanize your enemy. If the common soldier thinks of them as subhuman or 'different' in some way it makes it a whole lot easier to get them to kill them.
You're wrong about some things though. First, the WWII code wasn't quite the same thing as the ancient Medieval Bushido code. It was a perversion of that code, manipulated by the men in power to get the people of Japan to do as they were told. It's not exactly totally historically accurate, but the film 'The Last Samurai' does a mostly decent job of discussing it... though they might romantisize bushido a bit much. ;) It was about not taking prisoners and death before dishonor, after all. But it had a whole code of service to the lord and humility and other aspects of life that the Japanese crown (once the King took power from the shogun in the 1860s and quickly started modernizing the nation) were dropped... it was a totally different code, really, designed to get the Japanese warriors to fight harder. If you look at old, Medieval Japanese Bushido, it isn't THAT different from a lot of old European ideals of honor... the biggest difference is probably that the Japanese followed the 'death before dishonor' stuff more seriously than most Europeans did (if you want proof that 'Death before dishonor' is a Western ideal too, look no farther than Thermopilai (sp.). The classic ancient Greek battle where the 300 Spartans fought for several days defending a narrow pass against a massive Persian army then, when the enemy found a route around the pass and surrounded them, fought to the death...).
But the Samurai way also had, as I said, things like vows of poverty, defending the weak, continuing the old ways (yes, that's extreme conservatism, not wanting ANY change, but at least it's an honest ideal...)... arts (tea ceremony, poetry, etc), and the rest... not the best ideals in some ways to be sure, but a whole lot better than the stuff the soldiers were believing in WWII.
Anyway, what World War II proved was that people are easily led, especially when they are conditioned to be that way. The Japanese had only ever known strong authoritarian rule (oh, that's one other huge myth -- Hirohito, the Emperor of Japan in WWII. He wasn't exactly a shrinking pacifist being held down by a club of violent warmongerers...). They had been conditioned to follow what the government said and do as they were told no matter their personal feelings, and that is exactly what they did. By the end of the war the whole nation was most probably at the point where millions would have died willingly to protect the Emperor if we had invaded and he had commanded it... on that accord the A-Bomb might have actually saved more lives than it killed. But that's a really tough question. By the very end there was a sizable group in government that wanted peace (it had been obvious for several years that winning was impossible) and was just looking for an excuse... the A-Bomb provided that, but who knows if given a few more months something might have happened? We'll never really know, so it's one of those perfect 'what if' scenarios, I guess. :)
Science kicks the arse of idealism :D.
Anyway, honestly I don't know much about ancient Japan, so all I know is what they thought during WW2. Yeah, it's true a lot of it was conditioned into them...
Anyway, the Americans sure noticed their total lack of common sense when the Japanese would fight to the last man standing (no intelligent army would do that, it's pointless).
A lot of it? Japan is one of those countries where all they'd ever done is do what the person above them in the ladder told them... it's still to a very large extent like that, actually. Us defeating them can do some things, but it can't totally change their society in every way. So when the government was run by a militarist/expansionist/indulstrialist group, which it was a lot from the 1860s on, the people mostly follow along. Sure there are a few dissidents but when the government decides to crack down, like they did in the '30s, they can be very effective.
Quote:Anyway, the Americans sure noticed their total lack of common sense when the Japanese would fight to the last man standing (no intelligent army would do that, it's pointless).
Okay, think about this... from a most basic sense, the point of war is to defeat the enemy. Does it make sense to not kill the enemy, but to take them prisoner? That's something that comes up from the side of the human mind that is more enlightened, but in some senses you can see how 'don't take prisoners' is something that makes sense in a way we would consider twisted. As for no surrender, that's simpler. It's a way for the people in charge to get their people to fight really hard. If you think that if you surrender not only are you shaming yourself, but you are also shaming your whole family... your whole village... and, most important, the Emperor himself... you will fight very hard to the last. Why fight to the last and not surrender? Well, what advantage is surrender to the government? Seriously. What advantage is it to the government if their people surrender? If they die they can talk about noble sacrifices to defend the homeland from the evil westerners, after all... that's harder if your people are merely captured. I know it sounds cold, but you cannot be in a position like that and value human life, even of your own people, above what you consider to be your ideals (especially when said ideals include many ways that human lives should be ended). The government wasn't immune to the warrior spirit, after all... remember this. Japan always has been and still is a very, very racist country. They considered themselves a superior race to everyone else in the world. Their soldiers went out to the field essentially brainwashed to kill the enemy or be killed... and they cared not at all for other Asians either -- witness the horrific things they did to the Chinese, the Burmese, Vietnamese, Indonesians... everywhere they went they left a trail of corpses of the locals as well as themselves and their enemies...
So, when you look at their tactic of never surrendering and fighting to the death, it does look from a objective viewpoint to not be a one that will lead to great success in war, even when you consider the realities of an island-based campaign like the one against the West mostly was. But when you look at how they had been taught, and how they had taught their people, it was the most logical choice. Not the best choice, but the one that you could most likely predict that they would follow, I believe. It's a whole lot harder to say 'wait, I think that we should have some respect for the lives of our new subjects in [name conquered nation here]' than it is to merely say nothing and let them do as they wish...
Quote:Until we spanked it out of them. Honestly, so very many of them died due to their ridiculous notions that "to die is far better than to surrender", and this attitude resulted in them never taking our people prisoner. When we finally deployed the most powerful thing anyone had ever seen, they realized their previous twisted values had failed them. Sure, they are loosing their old Bushido code (not that there's been much around for the last few generations I think), but that's a GOOD thing because those values are wrong, and it was proven during WW2 that they only resulted in horribile tragedy. So they are loosing a big part of their old culture, good riddance!
Heh, don't let N_A hear you say that. :D
Quote:They had been conditioned to follow what the government said and do as they were told no matter their personal feelings, and that is exactly what they did. By the end of the war the whole nation was most probably at the point where millions would have died willingly to protect the Emperor if we had invaded and he had commanded it... on that accord the A-Bomb might have actually saved more lives than it killed. But that's a really tough question. By the very end there was a sizable group in government that wanted peace (it had been obvious for several years that winning was impossible) and was just looking for an excuse... the A-Bomb provided that,
Dude! I totally said that during our WWII/Japan debate and you got mad at me!
Quote:Dude! I totally said that during our WWII/Japan debate and you got mad at me!
Find the thread then. And anyway, as I said, it's a really hard question... it could have saved lives, it could not have. We'll never really know. But you are right that I didn't go into full depth there... I should have remembered to say that one of the prime reasons (heck, probably THE prime reason, given that it was Truman...) for using the Bomb was to stop the Russians from taking over any more Japanese territory. Not to save American lives, but to stop the Commies...
Not much to say about the rest of that, but regarding surrender (AND retreat, I forgot to mention that they would never retreat or back down from a mission), that IS a valid tactic that DOES benefit the nation doing it! They didn't see the reasons, but here's what the History channel has taught me...
Surrendering and retreat do two things. First, the obvious, more of your men will survive. Near the end, they really were running low on soldiers. Even surrender gives the chance that some will somehow escape or be released... The second thing only applies to surrendering. If you surrender, you have now succesfully burdened the force you surrendered to. They are now less effective a unit, much less effective, as they are now locked in place for a good while until they at least find another unit to take the prisoners to a camp, and that camp must be manned. Japan's adherence to this part of bushido in particular was disasterous. Another thing that failed the Japanese was their ultimate incarnation of this system. This was the infamous kamekaze flyer, the person willing to kill themselves for the good of the Emporer. It didn't work, and it failed on so many counts. First off, while it DID catch the allies off-guard to see the enemy suddenly flying straight AT them in a suicidal manner, when they caught on, it was easy to gun down these things before they even got close enough for the dive bomb. The problem with this tactic is the soldiers and equipment lost in the process. Fight to live, and you get to serve another day, fight to die, your nation just lost another bit of it's fighting force. Think Starcraft. How often does someone doing a suicide run, the person figuring "I'll loose most of my soldiers, but the enemy will FALL!", ever win? Hardly ever (I speak from my own sad experience :D), because the person fighting to keep their units alive has more firepower at the end of that fight, and thus can easily push onwards to victory.
Japan's bushido code (in the form it was in during WW2), while it may not have been THE deciding factor in their loss, was a MAJOR one to be sure. It wasn't just an immoral code to have, it was also a terrible strategy.
Oh and, current day Japan certainly seems a lot less racist than you make it out to be. That could just be on the surface, but you know, that's just how it seems. They sure have a lot of caucasians in positive roles. I will admit just about every black(african american just doesn't work when referring to japanese characters :D) character in Cowboy Bebop was a bad guy (almost, and those 2 or so guys that weren't were enough to make things equal in a sense).
I'll also say there's enough stuff in their various fiction to support that at least a large number WANT whatever's left of WW2 Bushido to die away...
And GR, I kinda figure N_A would be VERY angry to read that, but ya know, that blind anger would kinda go to show how... *prepairs to state this in a way that would offend N_A the absolute most* PRIMITIVE and ILLOGICAL that OUTDATED "morality" TRULY is.... TECH BUZZ WORDS!
DJ, it's simple really. The major factor in why Japan lost is because they provoked us by attacking Pearl Harbor. They totally and utterly underestimated Americans (Japanese 'spiritual power' was so much greater that it alone would win them the war...) and American endurance to war (yes, America was very slow to react to that war and didn't want to get in until attacked. But once they provoked us, nothing could stop us from winning that war...). We won because we had more land, more men, more workers left at home, a better intelligence service (that cracked most of their codes well before the war started), and, yes, a better tactical plan. Honestly, once the war started in earnest they didn't have much of a chance against the US. Their only hope really was somehow forcing a armistice...
As for "Bushido" (as I said it really wasn't), one other aspect that they followed that was idiotic was that "spiritual power" belief. The great spiritual power of Japanese belief would crush all the nations' enemies... and the ardent believers of this became proponents of such fantastically unsuccessful stragetiges as Banzai (the equivilant of "Charge!" or something along those lines) carges.
Kamikaze ('divine wind' -- comes from the hurricanes that sank two Mongol invasion fleets, centuries back...) is an extension of that. And yeah, it was a monumental failure... after the first attacks. At first it was a huge success and they sank several ships. But once the US fleets figured out how to fight them, the problem was greatly reduced... it was really a one-time success weapon, but they kept at it after that because of their increasing desperation and utter fervor and passion to do everything for the Emperor, no matter what they felt inside... sure, a lot of them were scared and might not have wanted to die. But in that society you don't let that show outside of your diary (Japanese military people were also big on diaries...). You just show your devotion to the Emperor and in time some of that must rub off on most anyone.
Quote:Oh and, current day Japan certainly seems a lot less racist than you make it out to be. That could just be on the surface, but you know, that's just how it seems. They sure have a lot of caucasians in positive roles. I will admit just about every black(african american just doesn't work when referring to japanese characters ) character in Cowboy Bebop was a bad guy (almost, and those 2 or so guys that weren't were enough to make things equal in a sense).
They are probably most racist against other Asians. I've read articles about how even immigrants who look like the Japanese and have lived there for many years are still considered not Japanese and are treated poorly... there's a reason that Japan has such a low amount of immigration allowed and it isn't because that they would find it impossible to place all of those people. They certainly could use more people, or will soon, given how their population is heading for a steep drop...
They've improved, sure, but it's still a major issue. Along with things like how they really aren't dealing with their war guilt and just try to whitewash the whole era out of the history books...
Quote:And GR, I kinda figure N_A would be VERY angry to read that, but ya know, that blind anger would kinda go to show how... *prepairs to state this in a way that would offend N_A the absolute most* PRIMITIVE and ILLOGICAL that OUTDATED "morality" TRULY is.... TECH BUZZ WORDS!
Just be glad that he's not here. :)
Haha, yeah that's probably true come to think of it. If anyone's played Shenmue 2, it's almost hilarious to see the biased stuff about Hong Kong spewing out of it. I mean, they make a concentrated effort to make EVERYONE in Hong Kong look distinctly different than the Japanese, and make a good number of the people say "hmm, you must be Japanese". I mean, it's hilarious. It's effectively like us walking up to Collin and saying "hey, you must be Canadian!".
Yeah, they look essentially identical racially... but the Japanese sure don't really want to admit that.
Of course that's not just them, everyone is like that to some extent... the Chinese for instance... but it is definitely a fact about Japan. Oh, it's somewhat true in Europe too... they do NOT want immigrants in a lot of European nations, even ones losing population, because that'd weaken their nationality and special identity as a unique people or something... immigrating to a lot of European nations is also quite hard.
Quote:Find the thread then.
Maybe I will!
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Nevermind, it's was actually Fittisize I was thinking of.
Quote:Wouldn't the samurai then become a Ronin? My knowledge of such things is sketchy at best.
Some would become ronin, some would commit suicide. I suppose it depended on how well they could live with that dishonor.
Quote:Yeah, they look essentially identical racially... but the Japanese sure don't really want to admit that.
That's not true at all, and is actually one of the more racist remarks in this thread, as innocent as it may be. Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Thai, Vietnamese, etc., do
not all look identical to each other, generally-speaking. On average you could usually tell apart a group of Chinese people from Japanese, vice versa and the same with all of the other Asian races, the very same way you could (again, on average) tell the difference between a group of French people and a group of Italian people, or Swedes from Russians, Croatians from British, etc. These aren't as great differences as people from say, Africa and Findland, but there are very noticable differences if you've seen enough people from each nationality. Hell, Austria was just right above Yugoslavia but when my mom was a little girl (she's half-Austrian), she would sometimes get teased for looking too Austrian.
But what DJ said about Shenmue II is mostly true, a lot of the Chinese people in that game looked weird.
Quote:That's not true at all, and is actually one of the more racist remarks in this thread, as innocent as it may be. Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Thai, Vietnamese, etc., do not all look identical to each other, generally-speaking. On average you could usually tell apart a group of Chinese people from Japanese, vice versa and the same with all of the other Asian races, the very same way you could (again, on average) tell the difference between a group of French people and a group of Italian people, or Swedes from Russians, Croatians from British, etc. These aren't as great differences as people from say, Africa and Findland, but there are very noticable differences if you've seen enough people from each nationality. Hell, Austria was just right above Yugoslavia but when my mom was a little girl (she's half-Austrian), she would sometimes get teased for looking too Austrian.
I meant mostly Japanese, Chinese, and Koreans. And I was making the comment based on a article I read (NY Times Online) several months back about, I believe, Vietnamese immigrants in Japan who had been there for many years, were virtually indistinguishable from the rest of the Japanese population, but were not exactly being accepted as Japanese... Japan is not accepting of immigrants. That's a fact.
Oh, and I'm sure that some of them look similar and others different... maybe in some cases it's like what you said with Italians and French, but I'd think that in some cases it'd be more like Swedes and Danes... :)
Quote:I meant mostly Japanese, Chinese, and Koreans. And I was making the comment based on a article I read (NY Times Online) several months back about, I believe, Vietnamese immigrants in Japan who had been there for many years, were virtually indistinguishable from the rest of the Japanese population, but were not exactly being accepted as Japanese... Japan is not accepting of immigrants. That's a fact.
I'm also talking about Japanese, Chinese, and Koreans. They do
not look identical to each other. And I wouldn't believe everything I read in NY Times if I were you. This is nothing unique about Japan, just about any place you go to that's 95% or more of one particular race, religion, or nationality will show discrimination against foreginors. I'm part Croatian but I still look and sound very American, so while I lived in Croatia a lot of people hated me soley for that reason.
Quote:Oh, and I'm sure that some of them look similar and others different... maybe in some cases it's like what you said with Italians and French, but I'd think that in some cases it'd be more like Swedes and Danes...
No, it's definitely like French and Italians. I can usually tell if someone's from China, Japan, or Korea pretty quickly, though I'm not right 100% of the time. I'm right as often as I am with French and Italians, Croatians and Austrians, etc. That's a very ignorant thing to say, ABF. I'd expect some other people here to say such a thing, but not you.