Microsoft have said today that Kinect will only accept voice recognition in American English, British English, Japanese and Mexican Spanish until Spring 2011.

That means gamers in mainland Europe are not going to be able to use the voice recognition features of Kinect- even if they can speak one of the supported languages. The region-locked nature of the Xbox 360 will mean the features will be completely locked out to them anyway. Microsoft have defended their choice of Mexican Spanish over Spanish with words to the tune of ‘there’s more of them that will give us money.’

It’s all a bit ridiculous really; couldn’t they have held off on the whole thing until they had it finished? I think not; this way, they’ve projected to make more money, I expect. I don’t even see how it’s going to work- a Scouser in the UK has a completely different way of talking to someone from the Home Counties, and a Alabama born-and-bred American is going to sound completely different to a New Yorker. They’ll have had to do a lot of testing, so why couldn’t they have done it for other languages as well?

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It was revealed last month that a Blu-ray disc wasn’t big enough to hold all languages for the upcoming Metal Gear Solid 4. Since all previous Playstation 3 games have resorted to the more constricted 25GB Disc, it was unclear whether MGS4 was to stray from this trend.

In a Konami retailers meeting yesterday, it was exposed that the game would be produced on a 50GB Blu-ray disc.

Ryan Patyon announced on the Kojima Report Podcast that US/European copies of MGS4 would not contain a Japanese voiceover and visa versa:

Unfortunately because of disc space, we don’t have the space to include other languages, other voice over files for the respective versions.

So the Japanese version’s not gonna have English voiceover, and the North American and European versions won’t have Japanese voiceover.

Many presumed that Kojima decided to go with a 25gb Blu-ray disc to save on costs, but it was yesterday revealed in a Konami retailers meeting that the game is the biggest of the series, and will be presented on a 50GB disc.

What’s taking up so much space we can only imagine. There will be hours of high-quality surround sound, and perhaps HD movies even though previous series had cutscenes rendered in real-time. How much space is taken up by game assets is unknown, but the release of MGS4 might be the greatest production of double-layer Blu-ray discs in the format’s short history.

Source: Gamesmaya

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