Hibin wa roboto des! (‘Naaza’ means snake in Japanese, so I have no idea what that actually means, but the presenters sound very excited about it.)
My gods, these things will kill us all:
There is no confirmation yet, but it is thought that Nintendo is already designing their next interaction system based on fighting a hoard of robotic snakes while being cheered on by excitable Japanese television women with microphones. Shigeru Miyamoto might have said ‘Yes, it is a super new professional play method! It is a new gaming opportunity!’
As Kent Brockman would say, I for one welcome our snake-robot overlords!
2mins 50 secs is quite fun, where the two female presenters are clearly amazed by the robot snake as it swims around behind them.
In other technology news, $ony have said that the PS3 will be released worldwide at nearly the same time in November this year, 2006. This means that the Xbox 360 will have had a one year head-start in the market, so it will be very interesting to see $ony’s sales figures. There were earlier reports that the PS3 would be released around spring-summer time, but there appear to have been delays. $ony states that this is due to optimising the release date, but there has been some speculation that this is due to $ony trying to reduce component costs. The system is believed to be going on sale for an initially high price, even compared to the full 360 pack, which in the UK retailed for around £400. I’m looking forward to the system, but over £400 would definitely be enough to make me pause for a while.
Some good news about the system though: it will be 100% backwards compatible with existing PS1 and PS2 titles. While this isn’t an essential for a new system it is a very nice add-on, and certainly helps during those early months when the new titles are thin on the ground. Interestingly, they are also saying that there will be a 60GB hard-drive fitted as standard in the machine, which suggests that they won’t be going down the two-tiered road that Micro$oft used when releasing the 360 (the standard system lacked a hard-drive and various other useful bits).
I thought they were saying “Hibingata robotto desu!” However, upon looking at the text at the bottom I realized they’re saying “Hebikata robotto desu!” In this case it basically just means, “It’s a robot shaped like a snake!” I’ve always learned “hebi” as snake, but I don’t actually speak Japanese (and vocabulary is my most lacking feature in it besides kanji), so “naaza” is probably right too.
Ah yes, that would make more sense. That first bit really did sound like it had some sort of ‘ing’ noise, but I knew that it it would be very strange to have a consonant without a vowel after it in Japanese so my transcription couldn’t be right.
I’ve only been learning spoken Japanese for a few weeks, so I don’t know enough to start translating many things yet.
Thanks for the info!