October 10, 2002 - With Phantasy Star Online Episode I & II drawing ever closer to its October 29, 2002 release, IGNcube has been getting a huge amount of inquiries about the possibility of a GameCube keyboard. ASCII, a third-party hardware vendor, has one available in Japan, but it has not announced any plans to bring it stateside yet. With no clear answer in sight, we went straight to Sega for official comment. A company representative had the following to say on the matter:
"Sega no longer produces peripherals and is not planning on distributing the keyboard in the U.S. ourselves. However, we are working with thrid-parties and doing everything we can to make sure that a keyboard will be available in U.S. when the game launches in the U.S. this fall."
For all the fans that were worried they'd have to converse with companions across the world by tediously forming sentences with the GameCube controller, this should come as very good news. Hopefully Sega will make its official plans known very soon, especially since many have already pre-ordered the title.
More soon.<hr></blockquote>
<a href="http://cube.ign.com/articles/374/374064p1.html" target="_blank">IGN PSo Keyboard article</a>
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