HypoCee

This gets answered over and over. Long story short, there are two big reasons for region-coding:

1. The Dicks version: Fighting imports. If (big "if") they choose to spend money and time translating a game into English/Japanese/the umpteen PAL languages and converting it to PAL, they want to be able to charge for the work and not have their market dampened (especially in the UK) by cheaper imports.

2. The Victims version: There are different content and age-rating laws everywhere. There's a risk of nice fat government lawsuits if they bypass or weaken their region-coding scheme, and making a different region for every country is an impossible logistical nightmare. So it's basically Germany's fault :P.

Thank you for using "rein" correctly. I was afraid it had completely died out.

I don't ever want to meet the "child" who can get all 120 Shines.

Djork, sorry, but just *no*. They just ordered the first of the chips. You can't build a launch stock that fast, you just can't...At least not and have a decently debugged product, and Nintendo's admirably chosen quality on all but two of their releases.

In my case Revo's BC is the GCN's downfall. I'm probably not ever buying a GCN, at whatever price; I'm literally stockpiling the games now (before the rush) to play on the Revo in November.

Hey 35, guess what. The vowel's longer. Different word.

"free rein"
"...before all...understand..." OR "...for all...to understand..."

Maybe because they cost 1/3 as much.

Regarding the hardware-software dual-development thing, I rarely see this article brought up as much as I think it should be in this kind of discussion.

http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/hardware/revolution.ars/4

Nintendo's insistence on their own hardware isn't just ideological; in this generation, at least, it's leading to very real differences in what the machines' processors can do. The 360's and PS3's processors are very heavily 'pipelined' for predefined media-pushing calculations - which is great, but leaves them very weak, cycle-for-cycle at least, in AI, complex control, physics processing and unusual visual effects. If Nintendo intends to pursue design innovation in those areas, they would have been hindered if they hadn't made their own generalist hardware.

Let's try this again: "wary of offering"

"It'll take 'More Than a Feeling' to win..."

Now I've got CANCER, so THANKS.