JsARCLIGHT

Yeah the crashes are a spectacle to see but I'm not sure how "realistic" they are. It's kind of that weird "surreal real" that video games have. Someone who knows nothing about automobiles and their crash properties will see the game and say "wow that's sooooooo real" but anyone who knows much about crash dynamics will notice the "video game-iness" of it all. All the cars have "crunch zones" that will take damage in varying degrees but the "trunk" of the car (the passenger compartment) will never really deform that much. The front end, back and roof will smash flat and the fenders, doors and wheels will fly off but the cab will always maintain this "solid block" to it. It's also funny but I have yet to lose a hood... and I've done some pretty wild crashes. The hood always seems to crumple rather than pop off like the body panels and doors. My new favorite mode in the game is Road Rage. I can keep a takedown chain going forever. Last night I had about 30 some in a row before I "caught a bus".

I'm just used to Grand Theft Auto... You'd have a good run on and then suddenly some guy would walk out in front of your car and THWACK! Burnout Paradise just seems to have such emphasis put on crash physics that I just think it would be interesting to see what hitting a person would do. Or better yet wildlife... have a deer or a bull moose just walk out onto the road on some back street. Just imagine the complete surprise and shock a player would have burning around a corner doing 160 to come up on a freaking deer in the road. "Allright! I'm winning! WHAT THE... FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK!" THWAP! (deer flies up in the air, car flips out of control)

My nitpicks of the Megahouse design are quickly evaporating... however the CM's versions just keep looking cheaper and cheaper the more I see them. And by "cheaper" I mean in overall detail level. The Megahouse toys just look like they have more detail to them, more tiny flecks of complexity. I will probably get the Megahouse versions in the end as they are bigger. That is until that Beagle 1/10 comes out. If it looks as good as those CAD renderings then that will be a nice toy to have. Edit: there is also just "something" about a toy that gives you additional stickers for sunglasses and a that thin "child toucher" mustache so you can make your own custom Colonel Johnson toy. That is just ten shades of badass.

I got Burnout Paradise from a friend as a gift last night. Pretty fun game... it really has the sensation of speed to it. Am I sick individual for wanting pedestrians to mow down? Playing the game the whole time I kept thinking "this would be so cool if all of a sudden some unfortunate guy walked out of a building in front of me while I'm doing 150 down this sidewalk".

I thought Casino Royale was going to be the dumbest thing ever until I saw it. It changed my mind and I rank it as one of my top three favorite Bond movies now. I'm going to give this movie the benefit of the doubt and probably go see it opening week. The ball is in it's court to let me down and I won't badmouth it until I see it.

The robot character appears in the broadcasts of football on the Fox network. It's kind of a Fox thing, it really has nothing to do with the football games Fox shows outside of it being shown in brief "asides" as broadcast "fluff". A while back Fox had a big to do with these CG football robots and had a big animation with them... I think they premiered it during a past super bowl. Fans liked them so they kept the robots around and use them every now and then. The most prominent appearance of this "cleatus" football robot character currently is on a sidebar doing what can only be called "neutral motions" like jogging in place and doing stretches. Suffice it to say this robot is more of a Fox Sports mascot than it is a football mascot. They are very well done spots in the end and they add a lot of "techie flash" to Fox Sports coverage... better than the sleepy downright '80s coverage CBS musters.

Funny but true: I met the guy who designed those figures. Met him at a local gun show of all places... sold him one of my AKMs. Nice guy.

That show does not even exist in my world. (In other words I am one of those people who HATE Macross 7). And yes, Mylene's pink fighter with boobs is also over the top stereotypical. Oh look it's a pink girl jet piloted by a pink girl pilot! Weeeeeee!

Crap. I meant HDCAM. I get DigiBeta and HDCAM confused all the time. Stupid Beta family tree and it's Betaness.

OK so they used DigiBeta... So then it IS an HD master.

My hate for that pink trimmed fighter in Shadow Chronicles is because it is just so darned stereotypical. Look! It's a girl pilot of the female gender! Her fighter must have pink on it! Because all girls love pink! They love it so much that they'd paint their aircraft pink! If that fighter had been any color but pink I would probably not have an issue with it myself.

I feel the emotional impact of the movie will be drastically lessened if viewed on a small screen. It will change "form" to a degree from a "roller coaster" into a simple "video tape".

Not to feed an already stray fire but "shaky cam" does one thing and one thing well: add or magnify action and intensity where there really is little to none. It's a cheap trick to liven up a sleepy shot or to add more "oomph" to a staid action piece. You could film yourself walking down the street normally with a nice smooth shot and it would be boring as hell... but film it in "shaky cam" and add some bombastic music and suddenly you are an action hero engaging in dynamic action filled with intrigue! I feel in the case of the Bourne movies the "shaky cam" is a gimmick, a way to liven up a rather run of the mill spy movie. But the camera in Cloverfield is a character... it feels more "responsive" and "alive", because it is supposed to be. They want you know someone is holding that camera and experiencing what they are shooting. The usual approach in hollywood is to remove the cameraman, to make the audience feel they are observing without influence. I mean, you have many directors and cinematographers going out of their way to avoid lens effects because to them that takes the viewer out of the scene. To see a lens flare tells people they are seeing through a camera rather than looking through some magic window into these people's lives. The opposite is Cloverfield. They want you to know you are seeing pre recorded footage and not peering through some magical voyeuristic window into someone's adventure... you are watching what is in effect the remains, an afterimage or ghost of these people. Kind of like watching a video tombstone.

OK here is a retarded "JsARCLIGHT" question: What kind of camera was used to "film" the movie, both the assumed prop and the actual camera? The reason I ask is that certain films like 28 Days Later and Blair Witch look good on a cinema screen even though they use sub-par equipment to record... and that sub par equipment is what primarily contributes to the "look" of the movie, but it ultimately "hurts" the film when it comes time to release it on home video. My thrust is this: was this movie filmed using actual film resolution cameras and then "dirtied up" to get the look or was it filmed using actual low def hand helds in an effort to be more "original" to it's subject and context? My interest in this is whether or not this movie is going to be "worth it" on Blu Ray or HD DVD. 28 Days Later is NOT because it was originally shot in SD and it's master is SD to whit they upconvert it to put it on HD. Paying $30 for 28 Days Later on Blu Ray is retarded as you are in effect purchasing an upconverted rip of a DVD, which costs like $10. If Cloverfield is the same way (shot in SD, mastered in SD) then it does not behoove someone to purchase an HD release of it when the time comes. Then again the overall picture quality of this movie, if it is indeed a film res source, is so low that having it in HD would be a waste of money anyway.

I dunno about around you but here in Saint Louis I've seen quite a few places with "no returns" signs posted for 360 hardware. Mostly because rumor mill has it that so many people have been trying to return busted 360's that the stores couldn't keep certain models in stock. I know one of my local Best Buys no longer offers their extended warranty on them either.

As I was saying... logistics. Our military is spread out over the entire country and the best an individual state can muster in a disaster situation is a few platoons of soldiers, some light armor and perhaps a few helicopters and some air national guard planes. And all of that stuff alone takes time to execute and mobilize. I can believe the angle that the government knew the monster was coming / already there and had pre-deployed some units but the second the thing made landfall they had to up the ante... and upping the ante militarily takes time.

Well, you have to figure a metered response operating in a variable environment alongside a large scale civilian evacuation. You can't just fly in hundreds of units and blow the crap out of an area that millions of your own people are in. Plus you have the unknown element of the monster, the general chaos and confusion of an unexpected attack from beyond and the general logistics involved of mobilizing a large combat force into an area where they are not normally available. I think the movie was a pretty good facsimile of the first hours of what a real tactical response to a monster would be like.

Nah. I think it's more the old "the star that shines twice as bright shines half as long". Developers spend so much time weaving these complex and detailed levels that they really only make half a game duration wise. Instead of twenty mediocre levels you get ten good ones. It's kind of an even trade off.

OK so the whole "Cloverfield" thing is not really referenced inside the movie outside of the title. I thought I missed it.

I really feel for the people who have out of the box failures. Not only are they boofed out of the box, but the replacement program will give them someone else's old used unit refurbished in return. It's kind of like buying a brand new "improved" mustang that blows it's engine four days after buying it and Ford replaces it a different one with 20,000 miles on the clock that blew it's engine and had it replaced... one that some stranger farted in for nine months and all they did was wipe it down, put a new engine in and one of those little pine trees on the rear view and call it "even".

I had to do a double take just now... thought I was reading ARFCOM. So... this is probably a stupid question but what does "Cloverfield" mean? Is there some connection between the title and the movie?

Such is the dilemma of consumerism. People who get "a good one" wonder what all the fuss is about and think everyone with a negative opinion must be lying... and the people who get "a bad one" believe there is no such thing as "a good one" and the people touting the merits of such a shitty toy must just be so accepting that you could poop in a bag and they'd be overjoyed to have it. The truth is always in the middle. Out of personal experience the Toynami Alpha I got was terrible. The one my friend got was terrible. Ergo my opinion of the toy is that it is terrible. Am I lying? No because the entirety of my first hand experience with this toy is negative. Do I believe there are people out there who got "good ones"? Yes... I and my friend just were not lucky enough to have gotten one. Had we been then perhaps we would be defending the honor of this obviously misrepresented and maligned wonderful toy. As for the CM's offering. I still pass. It needs to lose half it's price and gain double the scale for me to come back into the fold at this point. I can forgive a lot if the price was not so high and the size was not so small.

That sounds like Super Fuzz. I could be wrong though as I have not seen Super Fuzz in decades.

That is part of the plot. Night of the Comet has like ten different things going on in it that all slam together. The movie is about two valley girls who survive the deadly radiation a passing comet gives off because they were enclosed in sealed rooms when it happened. Other people who were exposed to the radiation melted into dust, those that were only partially exposed mutate into zombies. The girls fight off the zombies and go to the radio station to find help. There they meet a truck driver (Chakotay from Voyager) and proceed to just mess around. Chakotay goes to find his parents (who are dead) and the girls go to the mall to "shop", where they are assaulted by zombie stock boys. In the meantime this secret government lab out in the desert are harvesting blood to try to make a cure for themselves (having been exposed because they left their shutters open). They track the girls to the mall and rescue them from the stockboys and take Regina (Catherine Mary Stewart) with them to harvest her blood and leave her sister. Chakotay comes back to find the sister and they team up to go rescue Regina. Meanwhile the creepy scientists are zombifying, they have these two kids, Regina rebels, Chakotay and the sister show up, all hell breaks loose. Fun! The movie is so '80s it hurts. Regina with a Mac 10:

The movie Roy is looking for is Night of the Comet starring my favorite '80s actress Catherine Mary Stewart (of Last Starfighter fame). I have it on DVD, it just got released on DVD like 6 months ago having been in limbo since the '80s. It's a great movie. Edit: misterryno beat me by a hair.