Late Night Consoling

Okay, see if you can get your head around this one...according to an article on Red Herring, Microsoft had planned to buy a controlling interest in Sega, which in turn would use that money to acquire SquareSoft. It sounds ludicrous, but the 'Herring's not one to run outright rumors, and this article is written by the author of the recently released Xbox expose book, Opening the Xbox. The article also says that back in 1999, Microsoft tried to buy Square themselves, although the publisher wanted $2.5 billion for a mere 40% of the company, which exceeded their entire market capitalization at the time (makes you wonder how Sony got away with only spending $125 million on their 19% stake, don't it?). It's no secret that Microsoft tried to buy Sega way back when, but this was recent. Very recent, which came as a big surprise to me. If this was happening in the past few months, who knows what else MS is considering?

	Did Nintendo even attempt to block this stuff? Well that didn't take long...according to import shop NCS, a UK company will be releasing a boot disc that removes the need for a GameCube mod chip. You gotta wonder why Nintendo even bothered saying the thing was region-locked. This came out even faster than the one for the Dreamcast.
	Lord of the Rings Previews GameSpot continues their Tolkien week tonight with separate looks at the PS2 and Xbox games based on The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.
	Buffy on GBA THQ and Fox Interactive announced today that they have reached an agreement to bring Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The Simpsons Road Rage to the Game Boy Advance.
	MGS Interview An interview with Hideo Kojima of Metal Gear Solid fame is up at XenGamers tonight. Hideo explains all the extra stuff that will be included with Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance, and he also comments on MGS2: Document, the upcoming DVD of bonus extras (that has not been announced for an American release).
	Yuji Naka Q&A Also at XenGamers is a Q&A with Sega's Yuji Naka. He comments on a number of things, and says " I think we're going to stop the Sonic Adventure series at 2 for the time being" and also seems to be warming up to the idea of a new NiGHTS title.
	Mark of Kri Preview Parts one and two of PS2.IGN's massive Mark of Kri preview are online tonight. This originally ran in IGN's subscriber-only publication Unplugged, and goes into great detail about the game.
	StarFox Date Bumped Just when you thought you finally knew the release date for StarFox Adventures, Nintendo goes and bumps it again. But that's a good thing in this case, as it's been moved up a week to September 23rd. Also announced were dates for Mario Party 4 (Oct. 21), Super Mario Advance 3 (Sept. 23) and Game & Watch Gallery 4 (Oct. 28).
	Sega's New Venture Sega has announced a new project: they will be opening an Internet lounge called Net-Bit in the Hokkadio airport in Japan. The lounge will have Internet-ready PCs, and "the latest in music and games." Nutty.