See that picture of a supposed Wii hard drive? It's from a tipster, and a note on the Flickr page where it appears reads:
After several days, today I could shoot a prototype hard drive for the Wii. According to what we've been seeing these days, work is well underway and I think it could be submitted on July 15 at the Kodak Theatre.
I would like to have one to experiment ^_^
But this "prototype" is fake. Like, really, really, really fake. Hilariously so. Okay, let's say that Nintendo actually did put stickers on prototypes that read "Confidential Property of Nintendo". Hey, maybe they do! See that picture of the label? It's kind of hard to make out the Japanese, but there is Japanese. And Nintendo is a Japanese company. As a Japanese company, Nintendo does know how to use the Japanese language correctly. The person who made that sticker does not. At all. So let's look at where this "prototype hard drive" exposes itself as a big, fat faker. That, after the jump.
The top of the label reads:
特定の販売の禁止。これは従来のハードドライブのディスクではない、ハンドルを慎重にします。
Which makes little to no sense whatsoever in Japanese. You know when you see funny English with funny grammar written by Japanese people? This is the EXACT SAME in reverse. Right up there, that translates as (grammatical errors intentional) "Prohibited to be selling of specified. This is not prior art hard drive disk, we will treat steering wheel carefully!" As game localizer and author Matt Alt points out, the person who made this probably typed "Please Handle With Care" in a machine translator and got something about being nice to a steering wheel. See, the word "handle" in Japanese is "steering wheel" and a machine translator doesn't know the difference! If that wasn't enough, the label's bottom reads:
このモデルのみで使用RVT−R１！
Love the exclamation point. Even better, love what that translates to: "RVT-R1 that we use only this model!" Once again, grammatical errors intentional.
Robert334's photostream [Flickr]