I'm back! That didn't take long.

The Golden Flower Building (E-2) is very small and easy to miss. It has no outside entrance, stairwells or elevators of its own, so you'll have to use the ones in the adjacent buildings, which are Moon Child and Black Heaven. Its main purpose is for housing Yuan's apartment.

Now, let's begin the raid! Grey Sapporo soft drink machines are on floors 1, 4, 7, 10, and 13 for your convenience.

101 - locked
102 - locked
103 - locked
104 - locked
105 - locked

201 - Occupied by some old lady
202 - locked
203 - Open. Some nice coffee tables.
204 - locked
205 - locked

301 - locked
302 - locked
303 - Open. A scary doll on the far table.
304 - locked
305 - locked

401 - locked
402 - locked
403 - Open. A sign in Chinese. Can anyone translate it?
404 - locked
405 - Yuan's Apartment . And what an apartment it is. Too bad it's locked.

501 - locked
502 - locked
503 - Open. Moody ceiling fan.
504 - locked
505 - locked

601 - locked
602 - locked
603 - locked
604 - locked
605 - locked

701 - Occupied by a middle-aged woman.
702 - Occupied by a nubile young woman.
703 - Open. Vase of red roses on far table. Looks kind of pretty in an otherwise hellish room.
704 - locked
705 - locked

801 - locked
802 - locked
803 - Open. Three beds nicely made to your left. And a hot ensemble of clothes to the right with some umbrellas to match on those rainy grungy Kowloon days.
804 - locked
805 - locked

901 - locked
902 - Occupied by some guy who could also be a girl if he tried real hard.
903 - Open. Nice wood desk. What's this barrel looking thing on the right? Empty box of wine glasses with Chinese writing on it, leftover from New Year's perhaps? Also, the wall dorns the same sign with Chinese writing as in 403.
904 - locked
905 - locked

1001 - locked
1002 - locked
1003 - Open. Rather large painting on right wall. Unopened box with Chinese on it to the left. Maybe umbrellas inside?
1004 - locked
1005 - locked

1101 - locked
1102 - locked
1103 - Open. Woah! Flourescent lighting!
1104 - locked
1105 - locked

1201 - locked
1202 - locked
1203 - Open. There's an ashtray that looks kind of cool in a primitive NURBS model sort of way. Who am I kidding, an ashtray? Is that what this room is known for?
1204 - locked
1205 - locked

1301 - locked
1302 - locked
1303 - Open. Wallscroll of a giant rabbit attacking a farm on the right. (Well what do you make out of it?)
1304 - locked
1305 - locked


Oh man. I'm ready for another one. Give me the God of Wrath Building.

Sony wanted to make it seem like they were backing it more than they actually were because they wanted to look good. They wanted the PR and later, while they were doing damage control, that's exactly what they said.

The reason they won't disclose how much they're contributing is because is so little that it would make them look bad (or less impressive than they want to look in any case).

All those comments from Corsi about "absolutely making this a reality" were in no context at all with $70 million or whatever bloated figures are going around for the original Shenmue budget. Corsi let his mouth run off in order to make himself and his company look good.

That's how it looks to me, anyways. That's WAY more plausible to me than the idea that Sony is throwing tens of millions of dollars at Shenmue after doing "market research" with the Kickstarter, I mean what? :roll:

If instead they would have stipulate "higher is your participation better is the game" with no numbers at all I'm sure that the amount would be more than 3.5 millions by now.

My thoughts exactly.

That's not how Kickstarter works. A "kickstart" gets a project going in a certain direction. We've done that. There will be a Shenmue III. Now we've got to keep the project moving and make the most of it we can.

The $2 million was a "something is better than nothing" target. People saying that number should have been higher have an "all or nothing" philosophy which frankly was not working for Shenmue fans after 14 years. We wanted at least something, anything.

You can tell us to take our something and be happy with it, but don't tell us we're being dishonest or wrong or unprofessional, and certainly don't tell us Sony is already fully funding tens of millions of dollars into this game to make it open world like the original but that's not even close to true.

Neither "big" nor "today."

Hey, OP, you should write headlines for IGN.

Guys, they're not just gonna do an MSPaint job here. Look at the reward image of our Saviour on the board:

https://ksr-ugc.imgix.net/assets/004/088/636/49b6c7ac70a36691b59469855b8029b5_original.png?v=1435939404&w=680&fit=max&auto=format&lossless=true&s=577de34412cdc02bad25dc222b2faf25

Why not? Lucky Hit boards are street art. For $4,000 it's not going to be cheap even if it's cheap-looking. For that kind of money why not have some fun?

It's probably not going to be in any obvious location. They'll probably have the backer boards in some underground place like an easter egg.

Right now no one's buying this reward and I think it's because it's boring, especially since there are already dozens of other places to put your face in the game.

My life fell apart after high school, I was homeless, I started losing my hair, I cut off all contact with my abusive family and any other toxic person in my life, I eventually got a bad efficiency apartment in a bad part of town, but it was my own, I worked part time jobs until I got a full-time one, saved up enough money to buy some nice things and then moved across the country to live in the desert far away from where I grew up, safe and free to rethink my life and start living for the first time truly on my own terms.

In that time I gained 80 pounds, then lost it after becoming a marathon runner, then an ultramarathon runner, I would run double marathons on the weekend for fun. Once I ran 100 miles in one go. I stopped. I realized what things I could never get or get back, even if I was an ultra-fit financially secure person. I started gaining weight again. I gained 150 pounds. I still live life on my own terms, although I don't care about much.

After June 15th I was forced to stop and think about everything in my life that I had given up on, about everything that I thought was dead, or impossible. I cried so much.

I remember 14 years ago having a conversation with the only long-term girlfriend I ever had. Things were not going well between us because I knew that I was not the kind of person who would be able to give her a stable life like she deserved and it made me depressed. I told her I had no passion for anything and that I didn't really like anything. "That's not true," she said with conviction. "You like Shenmue."

I had a dream last night that we got back together and lived happily ever after. I understand waking up that that's incredibly unrealistic, but deep inside a part of me feels like anything is possible, and I can dream again.

You gotta be kidding me if you think I'm going to click that. Kotaku should be put out of business.

I've been a Mac fan for over 20 years and even I don't want this. Apple has long given up on the Mac as a gaming machine and so have the card manufacturers.

I have a Mac Pro with dual Firepros but there are no Mac drivers that allow me to use both at once. None.

I mean what.

Man, that's pretty stupid. Gaming aside, wouldn't dual graphics card support be better for professionals using Mac Pros for CAD and the like?
Not necessarily. Dual graphics cards don't mean x2 GPU power. And if we're talking workstations, Macs don't really have a place.

Then what purpose does having dual GPUs in the Mac Pro have?

There are apps that are written specifically to use both. It's just that there are no drivers to make already existing apps use them both at once. Not on Mac OS X anyways.

I can still boot into Windows and use generic AMD Crossfire drivers, and then it's very nice.

No apologies. No regret for the completely unjustified smear against this fundraising campaign, which we've literally been waiting half our lives for.

People need to stop giving game journalists the benefit of the doubt.

I'm sorry but this looks very, very bad. It's not just the aesthetics that look bad or the animation or Ryo's weird face or anything that could be refined later, it's just plain cheesy. The firefly scene wasn't anything like that in Shenmue II.

I feel kinda sick.

Like, maybe I don't want my name to appear in this game.

I've been told this repeatedly recently as I would be either stupid or willfully ignorant not to acknowledge this. I have also been called cynical for expressing my dislike for the out-of-place-cheap-looking magic in the pre-alpha-still-in-development-proof-of-concept-totally-having-nothing-to-do-with-the-final-product firefly video just released. And I've been accused of threatening and intimidating behavior because I said I might lower my pledge. I have also been called a "looser" repeatedly, which I guess means "loser" because I guess I liked the realism of Shenmue too much and am having trouble with the direction of the series.

This is no way to have a discussion. Please don't harass me for expressing my thoughts on this game.

So, the topic is hard to avoid. Let's have it out here. From now on Shenmue has no intention of being a game that's as "realistic" as possible. It's a magical fantasy game with characters that shoot lightning and fireballs from their hands, control plant and animal spirits, summon mythical creatures like dragons and phoenixes. This is "obvious."

Right?

Lan Di and the Chi You Men want to summon a dragon that will destroy the world. This is not metaphor, myth, or superstition, but an accurate description of what could potentially happen in the game. Shenhua "clearly and obviously" moves dandelion seeds around with her ki. She even says so when Ryo asks her about it because he felt no wind. Magic. Also there's a scene at the end of Shenmue II with a floating sword and lasers.

If you played Shenmue I and II and fell in love with a game dedicated toward realism, you'll have to give that up and say goodbye. The game is Final Fantasy from here on out. This has been obviously true for 14 years so please don't say anything further or express your disapproval for it or else you'll ruin it for everybody else.

In fact it's so obvious that there's no need for this thread and I am just some cynic with impossible expectations.

Here are some articles that I found recently. I don't know enough Japanese to translate them, and they don't appear to contain anything we don't already know, but I thought you guys might enjoy them anyways. Maybe someone out there is making an online scrapbook or archive of Shenmue articles? That'd be a great thing to have.

Four pages Project Berkley coverage from Sega Saturn Magazine in 1998:
http://imgur.com/a/nlALB

Three pages of continuing coverage of Shenmue from Dreamcast Fan issue #04 in February 1999
http://imgur.com/a/3hmfM

Two more pages from Dreamcast Fan #14
http://imgur.com/a/LAD8r

And four pages from Famitsu DC in July 2001 about Shenmue II
http://imgur.com/a/ItuXr


They're scanned very large at 600 DPI so they'd be easier to read and for archival purposes. Probably wait to get home if you're on a mobile data plan.