JsARCLIGHT

$60 is still quite high for what you'd be getting with those toys. I must be too far removed from the whole Japanese import toy market because these prices seem nuts to me.

What is starting to scare me is that while the $300 Legioss Tread is a complete no go for me the Ride Armors look very, very tempting... my fear is that if this lump of ass Legioss Tread set is $300, how much are the Ride Armors? $100 each? When I look at the pictures of all the toys sitting on that table the first thing I think is "Fighter sets should be $100, Ride armors should be $30"... and then we find out the fighter sets are triple that which makes me afraid the ride armor sets are also triple my guess.

Rumor or not the overall damage is done. Even if the story is erroneous it has created doubt... and in the business world once you have doubt you'll see everyone backing away from you like mad.

Abandon Ship!

Now that Reuters has it expect this to go wide...

Aaaaoooooooghaaa aaaaaaoooooooghaaa! Flooding in forward bulkheads! She is listing to starboard! Women, children and studio executives first!

OK so just how "insane" is this price to the target market for this thing, the Japanese fan? From what I have heard the Japanese fans will happily and routinely eat enormous price tags for collector stuff.

Paramount/Dreamworks announces they are still supporting HD DVD...but didn't announce any new titles for HD DVD at CES. Not looking too good.

Paramount CES 2008

Why am I imagining a room full of lawyers pouring over that exclusivity contract like mad for some kind of out clause?

Oh well, one side had to win and one side had to lose... I'm kind of glad that the side that is "losing" is the side I have the least amount of money invested in.

The sword is related to the dream sequence that Rey has in an episode when he imagines all the fighters as dungeons and dragons style warriors. The Legiosses and Tread all have bigass swords.

I own my own company and while at the office I can surf just about whatever I want without drawing heat from anyone. In fact, my people probably prefer I stay in my office reading crap about cartoons than walking the floor asking why anything isn't done yet.

I've also been looking for a way to re-read all those comics. I was just a teen when reading them and I treated them all like disposable junk... I'd read one when I bought it then throw it in my closet. Years later when I left home my mom threw them all away.

Ah, issue 45... that explains it. I never got most of the issues between 40 something and I think 50. The place I used to get them from (a grocery store) stopped carrying them and I had to "subscribe" and the first issue I got out of that subscription I think WAS issue 50.

I do remember the Balloon Bear truck chase with him, I think that was some issue in the 30's like 36 or something.

What issue was that? I remember the Bongo the Balloon Bear truck but I don't remember any of that other stuff.

Ripcord was an occasional character in the comics. If I remember right his earliest appearance was somewhere in the 20's issue wise. IMHO he was just another background ancillary character who had a few "star moments" in the comics but was nothing to write home about.

The thing that gets me is that this is kind of a glaring character redux. I mean, the "real" Ripcord is a white bread mild mannered white guy who is now slated to be played by an over the top comedic black actor. I really don't "see" the "new" Ripcord being the same old stodgy white guy background character with this casting... which means be prepared for Ripcord to suddenly become a mainstay front page character with most likely an over the top manic goofy humor streak. Which, taking that, makes me wonder what other "flavor" revisions are in line for the more mainstream namesake characters? What actor plays what character doesn't bother me as much as them handing a traditionally serious character to a comedic actor or vice versa. I mean, how would it feel if they suddenly cast Crispin Glover as Shipwreck?

AP appears to be offline again.

What 360 do you have? If you have an older one (without HDMI), 360 can only upscale DVD over VGA, which has its own set of issues.

I have a first gen Xbox without HDMI. I originally had it connected via component and it would only upscale to 480p, which looked... well... passable for regular DVD. I have since connected it with VGA and it should be running in 1080 on my Plasma and my plasma's display says it is (it has one of those on screen pop ups that says what resolution it is displaying) and I assume it is upscaling to that resolution. It still looks meh. The actual games and my HD DVDs look pretty good but regular DVD's played on the system just lack the pop that they do when played on my PS3. As I've said before, I don't know how the PS3 achieves it's look but it really does a very good job upscaling.

Addressing some comments a while back:

The upscaling for the PS3 is done by software. This wasn't available until several months after release. Upscaling is only available for DVDs via HDMI and Games that support it.

Upscaling on the 360 is done by hardware. It has a separate chip dedicated to scaling. Upscaling is available for DVDs via HDMI and VGA. Games can be upscaled or downscaled to match the resolution of the display. This is available for all games. Keep in mind that the resolution at which a game is displayed is often different than that at which it is rendered. Halo 3, for example, is rendered at a resolution of 1152x640 and then scaled to the 360's set resolution.

As stated in my posts on page 34, the PS3 cannot currently bitstream advanced codecs. It has to be converted to LPCM, before it is sent to the receiver, in order to get higher resolution audio. There shouldn't be much of a difference in sound quality.

Wow if that is the case then Microsoft's hardware upscaler sucks on ice. Makes me wonder how it can "upscale" games so well but it doesn't make standard DVD's pop off the screen like my PS3 does.

Well to be honest that is because that is what sells.

Regular DVD's are 99% of the market share while all HD media is hardly 1%. Figure it this way, the industry crapped it's pants with glee when Transformers sold 150,000 copies on HD DVD... meanwhile Transformers on regular DVD has sold over 10 million copies. TEN MILLION. I see that as an indicator of the market presence of HD media... in other words it's so niche it might as well be Yugoslavian downhill skiing videos. The installed base simply is not "there" to support HD media being pushed to the front of the shelves just yet. Think about when DVD was an infant and you went into a place like Target... they had an entire section of VHS tapes all priced near ten bucks, but their DVD movies numbered perhaps thirty, all cost $30 plus and were usually in their own section away from the big bad VHS moneymakers. It was years before DVD caught on enough to have the big chain stores retrofit their sales areas to push DVD to the forefront.

Excuses, excuses IMHO.

The media fields have been on a downturn for the last decade and have been grasping at straws for reasons why. They can do a million polls of a million different people and get a different answer every time. They just hear rumblings of what they want to hear and they pick up that ball and run with it.

From the retail side of things the only big "truth" to come out of all of this is that media sales in general are slumping. I will agree with them that a "format war" is possibly contributing to the overall industry malaise but it in no way is the reason for it. Speaking as bluntly as possible the industry is in a time of transition right now. The shift from SD to HD has still not fully occurred yet and until it does the HD media market as well as the SD media market are going to be in a period of uncertainty. It's kind of like those heady years when the color TV came onto the market. They still sold black and white TV's and no one really wanted to buy an "old" black and white TV while at the same time no one really wanted to buy some new, "unproven" more expensive TV until the market settled down a bit. IMHO as soon as February '09 rolls around and the digital conversion occurs you will probably see more and more people wanting HD... either that or there will be such an uproar in the consumer community that it will set the stage for MS to ride in on their big white horse and save us all with their glorious digital downloads.

My HD media collection was near 50/50 but it has been slowly moving towards Blu Ray dominance. Right now my collection is something like 65/35 in favor of BD. Not so much due to "picking a format" but simply because more quality properties are coming out on Blu Ray right now, and even more have been dual format. But now because Warner has moved to Blu Exclusive that means more movies I want will be on the Blu Side.

Heck, even when I had a movie that I wanted that was available on both formats I'd almost always chose the Blu Ray version... usually because it seemed to be easily available. I'm not sure about you guys but the local stores around here in STL are slow to restock their HD DVDs.

Edit: Then again the whole "slow to stock/restock" thing drove me to Amazon... and as we all probably know Amazon seems to be slanting towards Blu Ray ever so subtlety. They seem to be having Blu Ray BOGO offers more frequently than HD DVD, and those kind of things boost the numbers.

What pisses me off is Paramount holds the Indiana Jones license. With Lucas and Spielberg's hate of HD DVD chances are we won't see the new Indy film or the three old ones until that contract is up...

Interesting. The plot thickens... again.

Warner was really the only "solid" dual format supporter. For them to jump to BD exclusivity is going to be quite a nail in HD DVD's coffin.

... and I suppose now we'll see Batman Begins on Blu Ray.

On Mass Effect, is it my system? During conversations, the shadows on the faces suck.

Nope, it's just the way they do real time shadows. The DMap shadows are just too low resolution which results in that grainy nastiness. It looks good at a distance (mostly because it simply becomes a hue or gradient that far back) but not up close. I never looked but does ME give you an option to disable self-shadowing like Oblivion does?

Hasn't MS been denying that they were going to do this for the longest time?

If this does indeed pan out and it is actually quieter, cooler and and actually supports all the stuff it's claiming to then I might upgrade to this... for no other reason than to get the better audio output. Then again this could just be internet speculation run rampant.

Yes that is part of it. MS kind of shot themselves in the foot on the Xbox initially in regard to upscaling because the goofy HDCP "rules" that the industry put in place said that in order to upscale anything past 480p it had to travel over HDMI... and the original Xboxes never came with HDMI. When the elite and the HD DVD drive entered the picture it was my understanding they disseminated a software patch that allowed the system to upscale over VGA and HDMI but not over component.

(Edit: I should point out that DVD upscaling does not affect actual gameplay resolutions. I know a lot of people that swore up and down that their Xbox did everything in 1080i initially, including DVD playback, but that was untrue. It did play games at 1080i over component, and in some cases 1080p if you had a set that would take it, but DVD playback was and still is capped at 480p over component cables.)

I used to have my Xbox hooked up to my plasma over component and can attest that it never would upscale a DVD past 480p. After I switched to VGA output and that software patch came down it now upscales to 1080i (maximum my plasma can handle but I believe it will go to 1080p). Honestly I do not see a great improvement in the picture like I do on my PS3, which leads me to believe it is not just software but also hardware. The PS3 was built to upscale out of the box through it's 1.3 HDMI out, while the Xbox was kind of "retrofitted" to do it... and IMHO it feels like it. I suppose with further tweaks the Xbox could approach and even equal the PS3's upconverter but I highly doubt it is a priority for MS. Upconversion on the Xbox has always felt "tacked on" to me so I'm not really expecting to see it pick up that ball and run with it.

Plus the Xbox is just so darned noisy... compared to my PS3 which is seemingly near silent. Even if both of them had the exact same upscaling potential I'd always use the PS3 just so I didn't have to keep turning up my sound to drown out the drive noise.

Personally, I was always partial to your short-lived 80's anime, Gunhaver JsARCLIGHT (and it's even rarer OVA spinoff, Stop! Raspberry Coat-hangers JsARCLIGHT!)

Well you first have to break into the market with Buckaroo Banzai... then after the umpteenth Hong Kong Cavaliers spinoff, the mountains and mountains of BB toy merch (various Lectroid figures, Blue Blazers, Rug Suckers and several repaints of the Oscillation Overthruster Jet Car) you can finally do something that is your "art project" that you can stand to lose money on.

We just have to face facts... Buckaroo Banzai and the Hong Kong Cavaliers are the wave of the future. I'm already printing up Tshirts and getting a viral marketing campaign going.