gryson

It is exceedingly rare for an adult to undergo true attrition of their first language when it is the dominant language throughout childhood.

On the other hand, it is very easy for children to completely lose their first language (sometimes in as short as 6 months when exposure is entirely removed).

In this case, it seems that the author was not a Cantonese-dominant speaker from school age, and their Cantonese input was limited, so I imagine the attrition really occurred during childhood. Now, they just retain some slowly fading scraps of the language.

Such speakers are termed heritage language learners, and they're the focus of a huge body of research, especially focused on the Spanish-speaking communities in the US.

The article brings up categorical perception when it says one shouldn't assume they are hearing sounds in another language correctly, since our brains will map those sounds to the nearest English equivalent.

What the article is really addressing is how different orthographic romanization systems map to English sounds. It's not advocating (as far as I can tell) that English speakers attempt to produce non-English sounds, which is, as you say, a difficult issue and probably not realistic without phonetic training.

What do you mean? Why should the reviewer's experience playing the game as a kid influence their seemingly objective review of that game? Wouldn't it be a bit silly to say "I think the first Wing Commander is a better game than Wing Commander 3 because I played it as a kid"?

I'm claiming the reviewer is couching their review in objectivity but is (seemingly) biased towards games from a certain time.

Jimmy Maher does a great job documenting the history behind these games, but I think he lets in a bit too much personal bias in the second half of his articles where he reviews the game from a modern perspective.

I first started noticing this with his review of Wing Commander III:

"if you ask me whether Wing Commander III is a good game in the abstract, my answer has to be no, it really is not. It’s best reserved today for those who come to it for nostalgia’s sake, or who are motivated by a deep — not to say morbid! — curiosity about the era which it so thoroughly embodies."

Yet his review of the first Wing Commander ends on a very positive note--despite the game's (numerous) flaws, he calls it a "hugely engaging, hugely fun" game that he still recommends to new players.

Being closely familiar with both games, that's a bit of a hard pill to swallow. The gameplay of WC1 (if you can get it to run at the correct speed) is just so much more rough than WC3 that I would never recommend it to any but the most diehard retro game masochists. I would say that WC3, in contast, is still very accessible and enjoyable (if not the most varied space sim ever).

I think what's happening--and this is all too common in these kinds of retro game reviews--is that he's showing bias for the games he preferred/played first when he was younger.

He really seems biased against the later, big production games of the mid-90s: Wing Commander 3, Myst, Full Throttle... and I suspect we'll see more of this bias as these later reviews increase.

https://www.filfre.net/2021/03/wing-commander-iii/ https://www.filfre.net/2017/04/from-wingleader-to-wing-comma...

The "active display area" of a CRT is 224 vertical pixels - all of those pixels are intended for display. The actual number of scanlines is 240. The top 8 and bottom 8 rows of pixels are not intended for display. This is the overscan area. 90s era CRTs were generally very accurate in their overscan calibration. Although there might have been a very small range of error, generally, the intended 224 scanlines were being displayed.

I might be wrong, but it seems you are under the impression that a percent of the active display area was used for overscan. That would only occur if the TV was not calibrated correctly. That's the reason hardware manufacturers instructed developers to not put important content too close to the edge of the screen. However, developers absolutely would have assumed most TVs were displaying the active display area accurately, which is why in the 90s most games had HUDs extending to the edge of the active display.

But this is all really beside the point, because if you watch the posted video, you can see countless examples of how GBA developers had to account for the massively reduced vertical resolution. Look at the Super Mario World example - the GBA version is massively zoomed in, greatly reducing the amount of the screen that is visible.

You're referring to differences in individual TV overscan settings. For that reason, developers were told to not use a particular area around the outside of the screen for important information. However, by the 90s, most recent TV models were accurate in their overscan settings and a lot of games included HUD info right on the edge of the screen. Developers could be fairly certain that MOST users would see all or nearly all of the 256x224 output area. Certainly far more than 160 vertical pixels. So it's not really a surprise that ports to the GBA sometimes had to work around the limited resolution.

Jimmy Maher criticizes the gameplay aspects of Full Throttle, saying they pale in comparison to games like Day of the Tentacle. However, I remember Full Throttle's simplified gameplay as one of the reasons I liked it so much when I got it. It was a breath of fresh air compared to the enormously complex Day of the Tentacle. In that game, you had to control three characters at once, each with a full inventory of items (and they could exchange items!). With Full Throttle, the story held my attention the entire time and the puzzles were just difficult enough to require some thought / trial and error, but not so much that it seemed hopeless without a guide. Sure, the action segments were rough, but they were a tiny part of the game.

Are you familiar with the Yakuza series, Persona series, or Puyo Puyo series of video games (among many others)?

Sega is one of the top publishers of video games in the world.

In 2020, they were ranked #1 publisher by metacritic based on average game score:

https://www.metacritic.com/feature/2021-game-publisher-ranki...

They were also #1 in 2016, and are usually in the top 5.

It's a running meme on social media that despite Sega's success as a publisher, many people only know them for Sonic the Hedgehog :)

The focus here should really be on output signal, not CRT. Specifically, composite vs. RGB output.

And yes, at least in some cases, designers very carefully took into consideration how the art would look on a CRT via composite, in contrast to how they saw it on the high end monitors they were designing on via RGB.

Here are two of the designers of the original Sonic the Hedgehog games discussing the point:

https://twitter.com/MegaDriveShock/status/139046602041917849...

Small correction: Hayao Nakayama, the long-time president of Sega Enterprises who is made out to be incompetent in Console Wars, is still alive.

He, along with Sega co-founder David Rosen, were interviewed in the excellent 2014 book Sega Mega Drive/Genesis: Collected Works, and their accounts don't really go along with Kalinske's. Rosen flat out rejects the (absurd) idea that the Japanese parent company was trying to sabotage Kalinske (a claim Kalinske has made many times in recent years). Rosen says Kalinske just had a hard time understanding why the Japanese side had to make the decisions they did.

As someone who is currently writing a book tangentially related to the Japanese history of Sega (plug: https://rasterscroll.com/product/legends/ ), I feel the need to say that Console Wars (however entertaining it might be) is not very accurate.

For one, it omits what I consider to be one of the biggest factors in Sega's decision-making from 1993 on--the massive drop in revenue that occurred in the U.S. and European markets. I've written about this recently with some interesting data on export revenues:

https://mdshock.com/2021/04/14/segas-financial-troubles-an-a...

As I recall (I was active on TribalWar then), the images in the original animation were taken from other sites (including SomethingAwful) by Bad_CRC, who made the animation and posted it on TribalWar. It then took off big time after that and people made a lot of new images.

A clue as to the origins of the Zero Wing translation in this interview with Masahiro Yuge of Toaplan:

>-Toaplan also ported Zero Wing to the Megadrive. Who came up with the broken English “ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US” from the overseas attract mode?

>Yuge: It may have been this guy who was in charge of our exports at the time. He was always having business meetings with people from overseas, and I went to a few of them myself, and his English was really terrible (laughs).

http://shmuplations.com/toaplan-yuge1/

And you can see the original All Your Base thread posted by Bad_CRC archived here on Tribal War (all image links are dead, though):

http://www.tribalwar.com/forums/showthread.php?threadid=2453...

I can remember when this was posted on Tribal War and the deluge of mediocre photoshops that it generated. Back then, your internet cred was measured in your photoshop ability. Good times.

Yes, the 'natural approach' to language learning is definitely popular. But in most classroom settings I would be surprised if students weren't exposed to the translated meanings through homework or the textbook. Class would not get very far once students started learning abstract concepts otherwise. Of course, translation is just the very first step in lexical acquisition - it's still a long journey to acquire a word.

>Less philosophically, each language you master gets its own language center in your brain, just as each finger you can control individually maps to an identifiable region of your motor cortex (and if you can't control your pinky, it's because they've blended together).

That's not really true, though, and it also depends on what aspect of language we're talking about (phonology vs. syntax vs. lexical acquisition, for example). In the case of the lexicon, there's good experimental evidence that bilinguals, when hearing one language, activate lexical competitors from both languages (i.e., they are not fully able to inhibit activation of one language in listening). The mind is far more complex than having different "centers" for different things. It's a complex network of signal activation and inhibition.

Of course, that doesn't relate to my original point, which was simply that language learners should not purposefully limit themselves. The incredible amount of time it's going to take to learn abstract concepts without translation far, far outweighs the possible co-activation of translation equivalents.

Have you tried more traditional textbooks? I understand there's a desire for an easy-to-use interactive app, but I've never come across anything remotely as good as a textbook like Minna no Nihongo (I used this book 20 years ago when I started learning Japanese - maybe I'm biased?).

You can see sample pages here: https://omgjapan.com/products/minna-no-nihongo-shokyu-1-hons...

It is 100% in Japanese, but it has a companion book with translated grammar notes if needed. The majority of the book is excellent content in the form of dialogs and readings designed for beginners. I suppose the exercises work better in a classroom setting...

But... why?

Translation is not something to be avoided for the adult language learner. We should use every advantage at our disposal.

You can spend hours trying to guess the meaning of a word through pictures and context (and not getting anywhere far), or you can spend a minute reading the translated meaning and then spend hours understanding it in context (and reinforcing it, and learning its semantics).

I wonder if this idea of "avoiding the mother tongue" stems from all the misguided marketing surrounding products like Rosetta Stone which advertise "learn like children learn." Spoiler: it takes children years and years of near-constant, directed input to acquire their native language to a high degree.

Edit: But I can see the value in doing this as a thought experiment ("what if translation isn't possible?"), and for that it's interesting.

You don't have to look far to see the interest in the article: a pianist with near-profound hearing loss stating that Beethoven's compositions become more interesting to her the later they were composed, coinciding with Beethoven's loss in hearing.

"More pitch distance and difference, and more vibration and resonance, create a recipe for happiness for a hearing-impaired person."

That, in turn, leads to the consideration of whether Beethoven's later music was defined in some way by his deafness.

For the curious:

The history between Sega and Microsoft actually goes back further. In 1994, they announced a partnership for an OS on the Sega Saturn, although it was never realized:

https://mdshock.com/2020/06/22/sega-and-microsoft-announce-p...

But the first contact between the two companies was reportedly during the development of the Game Gear. Bill Gates was in Japan at the time, and he requested a meeting with Sega, possibly about an idea he had for a handheld device. It's not clear what his idea was, since nothing ever came of it, but that meeting helped forge the ties that led to their later relationship. This info comes from a recent interview with Hideki Sato, a former president of Sega.

Setting aside their interpretation of the results, which is a bit heatedly contested (and I believe they were focused more on syntax rather than speech), there are really two questions to ask that I think are relevant to the discussion:

1) Is it POSSIBLE for the speech of an adult language learner to be indistinguishable from a native speaker?

2) If (1) is true, are such instances common?

The reason (1) is important to ask is because a strict critical period hypothesis may rule this out by saying once the brain has matured beyond a certain point (age ~12, for example, or possibly younger for phonology), you can no longer acquire a language to the extent of a native speaker.

But there is plenty of evidence that (1) is true. In the Hyltenstam and Abrahamsson literature, they are able to find quite a few learners whose speech is indistinguishable from that of native speakers. They then run a battery of more strict tests (syntax/knowledge tests IIRC) against these learners that reveal slight differences.

However, (2) is certainly false. It's somewhat rare to find an adult learner who truly sounds like a native speaker. That, however, isn't evidence in favor of a strict critical period/maturational effects hypothesis, since there can be many reasons for failure.

My intuition is that there is much less support for a strict critical period hypothesis these days. Most people now talk about a 'sensitive period', which reflects that there are a broad range of factors that favor successful acquisition in children but that adults have decreased sensitivity to.

Sure, it's somewhat rare but not that uncommon.

The Swedish researchers Kenneth Hyltenstam and Niclas Abrahamsson have a series of studies looking at immigrants in Sweden who began learning Swedish as adults and who are judged to be native speakers by true native speakers who heard their speech.

In one study, they gave a very thorough battery of linguistic tests to these adult learners, and for some of them, the only test they failed to perform equal to native speakers was on their knowledge of proverbs and idioms.

The place you're most likely to find such near-native speakers is in immigrant communities.

There is extensive research going back many decades that strongly implicates the role of perception in the difficulty that second language learners have with pronunciation.

Basically, learners have a tendency to hear the second language through the phonological 'filter' of the first language. They assign incoming speech sounds to categories based on the cues that are used in their first language rather than the second language, so they actually perceive the sounds in a different way from native speakers. This is a concept known as categorical perception. For example, Japanese learners of English tend to perceive English /l/ and /r/ as the same sound and cannot discriminate them reliably in perception experiments. Therefore, we can speculate that they have trouble producing the sounds differentially because they don't actually hear a difference between them.

So, the first step in overcoming pronunciation issues is not necessarily to teach tongue positions, but to train perception.

The Sonic waterfall is an example of dithering. If you degrade the quality of the signal enough (using a composite video signal, for example) the output will become blurry enough that the dithering blends together, and you can achieve certain special effects, such as the waterfall transparency.

However, there is a big trade-off in the form of the entire game being blurry. That's why many enthusiasts back in the day (and today) preferred RGB output, even though the higher quality would ruin the blending of the dithered pattern. The Genesis/Mega Drive therefore supported RGB (Sega released an official adapter in Japan, and there was a SCART output in Europe).

And, of course, if you were playing a game on a PC with a CRT monitor, dithering remained visible since PC monitors coupled with VGA signals were of much higher quality than composite signals on consumer TVs.

It's definitely not the case that pixels could not be seen on a CRT - it just depends on the signal and the CRT type.

Bizarre comment - are you taking the old PNAS = "Passed over by Nature And Science" joke a bit too literally?

PNAS is one of the top general-science journals. Yes, there are better field-specific journals, but PNAS is pretty damn respectable and not that easy to get published in.

Regardless, a publication should be judged on the strength of its research, not on which top-tier journal it is in.

Ken Williams' initial comment there:

"It does seem obvious that I was fooled by Walter Forbes, but so were most people. He was the Jeff Bezos of his time. He had a big-four accounting firm who signed off on their financials every 90 days. Henry Silverman (Avis, Howard Johnson's, and many other companies) believed in him, as did everyone. He had been on Sierra's board for five years. I thought I knew him well. I also thought we had structured the deal such that the software business couldn't be screwed up. And, I had so much faith that Sierra's market dominance was so strong that no one could ever screw it up. As you might imagine, I've looked back on the crash many times, and still believe I made the right move based on what I knew at the time. The problem was that I was dealing with snakes and didn't know it. MANY people lost their jobs and had their net worth wiped out. It was indeed a sad event, but I wasn't the only person fooled by CUC. Tens of thousands of people directly or indirectly were hurt by the financial scandal."

There are others, too, that are worth reading for the interested.

By the mid- to late-1990s, Sierra's publishing output was far more diversified than just adventure games. They owned a large number of subsidiary development companies (such as Dynamix, Impression, and Papyrus) that were creating games in a wide range of genres.

They also published a little-known game called Half-Life in 1998...

I don't understand your criticism. Foone (a rather famous user of Twitter with 62k followers who posts enormously interesting content in my opinion) is successfully engaging his audience in a casual style that they appreciate. How is this "really stupid"? Because it doesn't live up to your expectations for the form that such content should take?

As others have pointed out, the timing of this is a bit suspicious. Another searcher was just found dead in March of this year, and Fenn was also sued in Dec 2019 (links available on the Wikipedia page).

Without proof, it's impossible to know if Fenn is just trying to call the whole thing off to avoid future troubles (and impossible to know if the treasure ever existed).

Even if he posts pictures, I'm not sure that will be adequate proof.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fenn_treasure

This is an excellent piece of research on game history by Phil Salvador. Well worth reading.

Trying to assign strict genre labels to games is probably not the right approach here.

Many games contain aspects of 'iyashikei' games. Persona 5 is a good example. Half of the game is spent doing 'ordinary life simulation' activities - meeting friends, eating out at restaurants, going on dates, etc. This part of the game is focused on story-driven events, many of which could be classified as iyashikei (although there are certainly darker elements mixed in). The other half of the game is spent on RPG turn-based battles and puzzles.

The Shenmue series is the same. A lot of it is iyashikei - wandering around, talking to people, enjoying the sights. Along with that are battles and stressful mini-games.

Oops - made a mistake here. The American side wanted the PlayStation to be WHITE, not black. I went back and checked the book. Quote:

>First he [Michael Schulhof - CEO of Sony Corp of America] objected to the color of the console. [He] insisted that gray was unacceptable in the U.S. market, and that the console must be white. Neither did he like the design or the logo mark. Their approach was to object to everything on grounds such as the results of market research: "We can't accept such an unusual controller. The design is too small for American hands." What is more, they insisted that they would set the U.S. list price themselves and they disapproved of the name PlayStation. The "Play" in PlayStation, they said, was reminiscent of "Playboy" and might be misconstrued. With one issue after another, the criticism was relentless.

>...Maruyama carefully assessed the likelihood that U.S. management would respect the intentions of management in Japan. He concluded that it would be impossible for managers steeped in the conventions of the game industry, and he decided to replace the lot except for a select few. In January of 1996, Sony established subsidiary SCEI America in San Francisco, simultaneously replacing most of the managers and launching a new management team. Maruyama comments: "We swept the organization clean of all the old obstacles. We realized that we had to manage our own business."

I previously transcribed more of this excerpt here:

https://www.sega-16.com/forum/showthread.php?34167-Sega-and-...

And here is the news story about Michael Schulhof being forced to resign:

https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-1995-12-06-19953400...

I wouldn't say that the Japanese side of Sega wasn't aware of the issue of pricing the console too high. In fact, Hayao Nakayama often spoke of this in 1994 - he was very sensitive that a high-priced console would not sell in America (and used the 3DO as evidence). He was quoted a few years back as saying that the reason he approved the 32X was because Sega of America were insistent that the Saturn was priced too high to ever sell there (the quote is in the book Sega Mega Drive Collected Works).

However, the 32X failed spectacularly, and that left Sega with nothing but the Saturn. Their response was to price-match the PlayStation, which seriously pushed them into the red. There wasn't much that could be done at that point.