JsARCLIGHT

The Mako needs headlights, so do you in some instances its to dark.

I never had any trouble seeing in ME and I felt the game was over lit most of the time. What areas are you having a hard time seeing in? It could be your display settings.

If this toy was in a nice big 1/32 scale (or larger) and closer to the line art I'd spend $300 in a heartbeat on it. As it stands what we have been shown is a teeny tiny mutant for that price. It might just be me but I'd like a kiss first.

I still sincerely hope that CM's has retooled the model and rethought the price... but at this stage of the game both those look like pipe dreams. A toy this size should be at best $150. Especially for one so far off model.

My anime would be to remake The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension and then make the unmade sequel Buckaroo Banzai Against the World Crime League.

BB is just goofy enough that it just might "work" in anime form these days.

That's assuming the cable company hires decent people to begin with. When I had cable I had a few problems and every person they sent was... well... a dull fork to say it politely. In all honesty the cable companies of America are totally behind in the HD market and I'd assume that translates to their workforce as well.

There are also limits with tube technology in big screens. You couldn't get a true "big screen" TV in a tube, they were all rear projection or front projection... and they all looked like a slide show on the back of a tarp. Plus the things were huge and required two guys and a dolly to move around. I think that is my aversion to "modern" DLP HDTV's as well... the whole "rear projection" thing just doesn't work as well as it sounds in practice.

One big thing that irks me about the new lines of LCD and Plasma TV's are that everyone seems to have discovered overnight the magic of a glass screen. The lion's share of the new models all sport highly reflective glass screen coatings rather than the older matte screens. From what I have heard the newer glossy screens are supposed to reflect more ambient room light, thus boosting the black levels of the screen matrix... but when you look at one in a bright room, or god forbid the Best Buy showroom, all I can see is ME staring back at me inside the TV picture. It's kind of creepy. Best Buy at least figured it out that they needed to create their new "Magnolia" sales area that has all this muted, indirect light which downplays those reflections on all the new high dollar sets. But that doesn't help those of us who have living rooms with huge windows looking out into the bright outdoors. It's great for keeping the room inviting but it's hell on electronic screens. When my new TV comes I think I'm going to have to invest in some better blinds.

But all in all if I had my druthers I'd opt for the new TVs over the old tube sets any day of the week, for mostly two reasons: size and weight. My older 1080i Phillips plasma is a good TV. It has a nice compact size and it's weight is quite slim. My wife and I can pull it off of it's VESA mount and move it around with ease. When my new TV arrives it is a VESA mounter so it will just hang right up in the spot the old one sits in. I contrast that to my last TV, which was a Toshiba 36" tube which I swear weighed something like 200 pounds, had to have a special reinforced stand for it to sit on and took two burly guys to pick up and move around. Plus it gave off more heat than the sun and it suffered from all the usual tube TV overscan issues. Having grown up through several generations of televisions, the more new stuff I see the more I like it. Memories of that old 13" black and white JC Penney set I had in my room in the '80s make me relish every plasma and LCD I see.

Oh wait, sorry, I was thinking CC. Yeah, best buy has SD sets. But at either store, the SD sets they have or no name brands or those little cabinet TVs. You have to admit, gone are the days when you could pick up a nice big screen SD WEGA. If you want anything over 30" you have to go for an HD set.

That is mostly because those sets are really no longer made. Those 30" WEGAs were the "big boys" of their day... the thousand dollar "elite geek level" sets. They have since been replaced by the HD sets. The retail outlets are a pretty good indicator of how the market is going. Right now the push is to HD because of the pending analog to digital conversion that will occur in a year. No manufacturer wants to keep making SD sets, they are a dead breed, so they have all switched over to HD sets.

My wife's father is a prime example. He wants a new TV and he is doing a lot of research... his problem is that he currently owns an old Mitsubishi 60" rear projector. He is not so much concerned about picture quality as he is about SIZE. He's an older gentleman and he wants a big BIG picture, 60"+. His problem is that all he can find in that size lately are hugely expensive HDTV's. He is going to get one here eventually but he is just so stymied by how expensive they are. I talk to him on the phone a lot and have been trying to get him to lower his size requirement so he can get a smaller, more affordable set but he is dead set on huge and it's going to cost him. BUT he has done so much research that when he does finally buy his set he'll know exactly what he needs for it and how to get it going. My concern is that he is old and I may be drafted to fly to Iowa and help him install it all.

Best Buy still sells SD sets... they sell tons of them. They just have them hidden away over in the corner where you can't see them because they are pushing the super expensive HD sets that require gobs of extra cables, players and parts.

Plus they probably don't want half their customers coming back in February '09 bitching them out that they were sold "obsolete" electronics.

Edit: and I still disagree. If you are spending all the money to buy something you should at minimum learn about it and know what you are getting into. People who don't are foolishly wasting money, electricity, you name it... and It's not just electronics, it's everything. You guys would positively crap yourselves if you saw some of the incompetent people who purchase firearms from my friend's store. Those are the same people who go out and buy $2K HDTV's and hook them up to a VCR with a coax cable. They never bother to learn anything about what they are buying, they figure they "know it all" already. Now just imagine that person with a revolver.

Not to sound crass but she didn't buy it then, did she? It was forced upon her. That is completely different.

I'm talking about the brainless consumer whores that see something and want it, then do no research (or very minimal research) and go out and get it only to slap it together in their living room, wipe their butt with the instruction manual and get on with their lives not knowing that all the money they just spent is for naught because they didn't bother to read the manual to know they hooked the thing up wrong. I know more people than I can count who "got the HD" just because they saw a commercial for it on their old TV or heard people talk about it. There is a guy (who will remain nameless) I know who went out and bought a LCD HDTV just because he heard me talking about them. Now I have become this doorknob's de facto technical support for that darned thing because he knows nothing about it... all he knew is that "the smart kids" had them and the Best Buy ad said it was the best thing so he had to have one too. Every time I'm in Best Buy I see people getting in over their heads talking to the blue shirts about HD stuff. Heck, just this Christmas when leaving I heard some guy loading a 60" HDTV into his truck "this will work with my DVD player... right?" Great time to ask that question.

Edit: What REALLY scares me is the analog to digital crossover that is set to happen in a year. I am fully expecting a downright public uproar when it happens. If "consumers" are as dense and "stuck in the past" as I think they are (and as much as everyone makes them out to be) then it's going to be a cold February next year.

A replicant in the Blade Runner movie lore is a genetically engineered being, they are living tissue. If you consider a "clone" to be duplicate of some genetic pattern then I suppose they also can be classified as clones because they are built from "plans". The "trick" is that while they are genetically engineered, they more closely resemble machines in that they are "designed", "built" and "programmed"... but it's all done with genes and cells rather than metal and wires. Once they are "built" they run out their programmed set of instructions and their life cycle and cannot be changed, because at that point they are sort of "hard wired" into being what they are (see the short back and forth between Tyrell and Batty about gene therapy to correct the incept date).

Dangerous Days shows a lot of pre concept work that depicts the replicants as mechanical, but the final "movie version" of them are genetic.

Edit: it should probably also be pointed out that PK Dick's book calls them Androids and not Replicants. Replicant is a term created in Blade Runner because Ridley Scott wanted something more ambiguous, something that would create doubt about "what is human".

I have to disagree. Anyone who purchases something without knowing the ins and outs of that thing is asking for trouble. To simply "assume" that something is as it has always been is a grave error. Times and technology change... and we have to change with them.

What I will do is recant the "stupid" and replace it with "lazy". Because I do realize that even a stupid person can read a manual and understand what to do, but a lazy person just doesn't care. They want it either done for them or so easy their kid could do it... and the scary thing is their kids CAN do it, which makes you wonder.

By "cutting edge" I mean buying something before it's even out. People who stand in line and put down payments on new electronics that are not even released yet scare me. They just have so much trust in the technology and then they all bitch to high heaven when the expensive machine they just bought turns out to be a doorstop. With all the sped up development cycles and rush rush rush to market these days a lot of products are shipping in states of "unfinished" or unperfected. The HD market is kind of glutted with a lot of half baked product these days that was rushed to market before it was really thoroughly tested or even basically tested. Then that whole situation is compounded by the internet and the dramatic "fanboy effect" it has. Can you truthfully trust early reviews, even from "trustworthy" sources? IMHO no, you can't. You need to wait until all the reviews are in and all the facts are out. The original Xbox 360 is a prime example. The thing is an albatross of a design that totally butt humped a lot of early adopters (and still is to a good degree)... but when it first came out it had glowing reviews and people waiting in line to jerk the thing off. Then there are all those super new Samsung LCD TV's that everyone raves about that have bad HDMI boards in them. Several of the early adopters had to suffer through board replacements, firmware upgrades, etc. etc. and only after the TV's were in the market for a good 6 months did all these problems come to light, as well as their remedies.

As for the people who don't even know how to hook up their equipment, that does not surprise me in the least. Think about how many people don't understand how their car works or how to do basic maintenance on it, or understand how to properly use their cell phones, etc. etc. etc. We are living in an age of a lot of stupid people engaging in "smart" activities and hobbies without knowing what they are doing... and most of them don't care simply because it's all about the consumer culture. About "having it" and not so much knowing it or benefiting from it. Most people buy something because someone else told them to, or because someone they know has one. Only the hardcore geeks research things, learn how they work, buy them and install them/operate them correctly. Your average man on the street just doesn't care to know... he just wants whatever is "new" that he saw on TV.

WEll I can't speak for that new upscaler but the one in the PS3 is fried gold. It does a wonderful job.

Also not to sound like a broken record but the PS3 also offers something that appealed to me: wifi. It's connected to my network which means any internet enabled stuff on the future BD discs will work as well as the benefit of getting firmware upgrades automatically from Sony without having to go looking for them.

As for the whole "format war" both sides have seemingly resigned themselves to stalemate if you listen to the CEOs and other folks in the know. IMHO this whole "format war" isn't going to be won by anyone. I bet digital downloads step up and kill off this generation of players in the next few years... so you sort of have to go into this whole "format war" knowing that you the consumer stand to lose right out of the gate. I think that is another reason I leaned towards the PS3 and the Xbox add on. They at least gave me this feeling that if either side "won" or neither side "won" I still had a video game console (speaking as someone who has a Mini Disc player still in his basement somewhere).

But in the end it's all about what you want and from the sound of it you've already made up your mind. I myself am skittish about purchasing the "cutting edge" before it's been out in the field for a while. I have this sad history of feeling like a beta tester when buying cutting edge stuff as most of my experiences have been negative... it taught me the hard way to be patient and wait to see how a product is going to "roll out" before blindly getting in line on launch day and then dealing with all the bugs and "teething" that the launch product has. But then again Samsung seems to have made a name for themselves lately in HD stuff. I have no doubt it's a good player... I'm just skittish about buying the new horse before I've seen it prance around the track a few times.

I myself would still wait. Wait until a good 3 to 6 months after release and see if the positive reviews stay positive. It's best to let other people find all the pitfalls and discuss them before you jump in. I've seen a lot of glowing reviews for Samsung stuff lately that turned into sour notes requiring firmware patches. Heck, their last big LCD line are hailed as the champs of the market but they suffer from HDMI issues that only now are finally getting fixed in the on shelf units.

Also with the holiday price war still being studied for all we know second gen player prices may plummet in the next few months. Right now really is a bad time to be shopping HD players. Until the market "knows" who "won" Christmas we may see first quarter power plays. January to March is always a terrible time to shop product.

Personally I'd hold off until it's released and the first consumer reviews start coming in before pre-ordering it. Then again I'm paranoid with buying consumer electronics until they "prove themselves" in the market.

I've been fiddling with this thing all morning... again... trying to see what is "wrong" with my setup.

A lack of a 7.1 source at the moment is hampering my efforts. Last time I had to rent that horrible Resistence game to test with and the tests didn't go so well.

I think I may have found the "issue". The issue is that when the PS3 does the decoding, my receiver will only accept that info and it will in effect "block out" it's own ability to tweak and bend the sound. What seems to be happening is that every single Blu Ray disc I have, even the ones with True HD soundtracks, are all 5.1 only. When the PS3 decodes the data and sends it using LinearPCM it only sends 5.1 data, my Oink only receives 5.1 data and seems to "lock" itself into 5.1 mode. It also seems to "lock" out some of it's audio tweaking tools. BUT when I use Bitstream, the data it receives it decodes itself and all of a sudden all these tools and tweaks open up to me. The receiver itself cut mixes the 5.1 info into 7.1 (or at least that is what I'm guessing it is doing) as the 7.1 option becomes available along with all the "tweak" sound field settings.

After fooling with it it's clear to me that the strength of my receiver seems to be in it's ability to tweak sound field settings. When it is playing back the "true" TrueHD 5.1 track over LinearPCM, the track just has this empty... almost hollow feel to it. But when I go Bitstream, the receiver can goose itself and seemingly remix the data into 7.1 as well as do it's own little sound field dance on it which noticeably boosts the lows and fills out the sound better.

My test this morning was using The Fifth Element (Remastered) on Blu Ray set inside the PS3 to use it's TrueHD track. From what I'm seeing I am probably not getting the actual TrueHD soundtrack through the receiver, but what I am getting to my ear sounds superior.

All I know is that my receiver simply will not engage 7.1 mode using LinearPCM from my PS3. No matter what setting it (the receiver) is on or what audio option is selected on the Blu Ray, my receiver will only play back 5.1 when LinearPCM is on. As soon as I switch to Bitstream the 7.1 option comes on on the receiver.

So either there is something wrong with my receiver, something wrong with my PS3 or something wrong with what everyone keeps saying. All I know is my PS3 is set to Bitstream, it is outputting through 1.3a HDMI to my receiver and my receiver says it is playing back 7.1 sound. I should also mention that switching to LinearPCM gives my receiver a tinny, hollow sound compared to using Bitstream. No receiver settings are changed... the only thing changed is changing the setting from LPCM to Bitstream on the PS3.

Edit: Also I'm not trying to say what is "right" and what isn't, I'm just saying that in my particular setup this is how it seems to work. I have nothing but problems using LinearPCM out of my PS3. People tell me up and down that my receiver is supposed to work one way and the PS3 is supposed to work another but the way I have the two configured with each other seems to work just fine and gives me the playback quality that I like.

Didn't they already try a subscription style RPG on the Xbox 360? I could have sworn they had Final Fantasy Online for the 360 and that they charged a fee in addition to requiring Gold for it to work. Then again I know no one who has that game or plays it so I could have heard wrong.

In it's meager defense, the Toynami fighter mode did look decent... so long as you had a decent toy. Those decent toys were one in ten at best and a good number of people got a droopy, clunky, mismatched, crooked mess. The Toynami problem was an overambitious design with abysmal execution. Kind of like designing a Ferrari and then building it out of balsa wood, earwax and thumb tacks. From what I have seen so far of this CM's toy it looks like it may be the exact opposite... a very weak near bad design but built with good materials and high QC (if everyone's experiences with past CM's products are any indication).

So we may end up with a really polished overpriced CM's turd to place next to our overdesigned bargain bin Toynami turd... BUT... I still think this is a prototype. I mean it HAS to still be a prototype. If THAT... thing... is the final toy proof then as I said before they really, really cocked this up.

I missed reading this, so what exactly happened? Was the Aoshima reissue of the Masterpiece Alpha good? and much better than the Toynami release? Can someone summarize for me please?

Thanks in advance.

The Aoshima release was plagued with issues and while it is debatable as being worse than the original Toynami release, everyone pretty much agrees that it was just as bad. In other words they really "fixed" nothing. Supposedly Aoshima has suffered a backlash from Japanese fans over the sub par quality of the toys and if you believe the internet rumor mill has reportedly "pulled out" from any further joint toy development plans with Toynami, causing their Tread, which was contingent on Aoshima's support, to once again fall into the realm of dream and myth.

In my personal slant: Aoshima hitched their cart to a falling star without doing much research, either that or they bought into all of Toynami's hype then got pumped in the rump on the final product. IMHO Aoshima cannot run away fast enough from Toynami and probably wish they'd never heard the name cross a boardroom table.

Edit: Third in line it seems. But the sentiment is the same: Aoshima Legioss toys = plastic dog balls.

It's worth it if you are like me and your only available network jack is upstairs behind two doors. It was far easier for me to just plunk the money down and have it ping my WiFi. But I guess if your Xbox is set up within 10 feet of a network plug then it is kind of redundant and expensive for what it does.

No, the tread is sitting way too far up. The chest notches where you see the two things that look like torpedoes are supposed to be covered up by the Legioss' arms... hence why it has those nice little notches there. Plus the tail fins apparently unable to fully tuck into the arms looks like pure balls.

Edit: Plus the Legioss' legs and feet look like they are bowing way far out when connected. I still say this linkup, if it is indeed the final product, looks terrible. Anime magic or not it looks like a toaster screwing a lawn dart.

Hence why I feel this cannot be the "final" "real" toy... if it is then they really, really dropped the ball.

I'll probably buy one as well but it's not "sitting right" with me at the moment.

While the linkup does look like a beach ball f'ing a lawn dart, my primary concern in those new pictures was the apparent loose fitting and sort of "half baked" look of the overall product. If you look at the four images that are linked in the bottom of that page's listing you can see some nasty seams in the Legioss' legs, what appear to be not quite moved into the right position parts, this sort of awkward, gangly, unfinished look to the toys and just this general intangible "blahze" sort of feeling. It just looks so clunky to me... like it's not quite ready for prime time. I mean even Toynami knew better and took these glorious pictures of their beautiful hand built, flush seamed prototype that was meticulously posed and shot to hide it's weaknesses... whereas all these photos we keep seeing of these toys give me this hastily thrown together with no real attention to how it looks vibe. And from what I've seen there as been little actual "alteration" in all these prototypes... they all look just about the same, just in progressing states of color molding.

I guess I'm still waiting for this epiphany glossy model shot that makes it look like a high quality, hardass finished toy rather than some slapped together garage kit made by some guy in his basement. Then again thanks to Toynami I feel I am overly critical of any new Mospeada toy... my eye is looking for failure as it is what I have come to expect from the license... and that is more or less bad on me and not this toy. But of all I've seen it has yet to impress me, outside of me gawking at it's high price tag.

I hope that is still a semi-prototype because IMHO it looks a tad clunky and ill-fitting. I guess for nearly $200 I'm expecting something... well... better.

I've had several people tell me that the PS3 will not output anything above 5.1 through the Linear PCM setting and my receiver would not show anything but 5.1 at that setting. Switch it to Bitstream and blip it goes 7.1.

Edit: plus that "workaround" for the PS3 is a ghetto hotwire way of doing things. It may work but you still have to admit it was a design oversight.

And is it just me or is the screen different as well?

Or maybe I've had too much to drink today.