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mikeszekely

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  1. mikeszekely
    And you remind me of a Chinese exchange student I knew who was buying a watch for her boyfriend back home and asked the sales clerk if she could charge her more for it. You want to pay more for your toys more out of some notion that a more expensive toy is more prestigious than out of any logical reason for a toy to cost that much.
  2. mikeszekely
    No one's posted this yet?
  3. mikeszekely
    This, pretty much. I mean, I've sold off most of my NES/SNES/N64 carts long ago, but I still have several GBA carts. Those carts are packed away in a box, stored in a closest, where they've been since I moved in almost two years ago. Meanwhile, I bought an Nvidia Shield, thinking it'd be awesome to stream PC games, but 90% of my time with it has been spent playing Pokemon GBA ROMs. Convenient save states, convenient Gameshark codes (no, I'm not going to spend hours upon hours grinding on wild Pokemon that don't go past 40 in the wild until I've got a team of 60+ to take on the Elite Four, sue me), no cart swapping, etc. It's great.
  4. mikeszekely
    Fair enough. Yes, 300 years is more than one century. That's not the problem; my issue was that for a tube buy to be 300, he'd have to have been born by 1959. Upon reflection, though, that might actually be probable. My problem was that I was thinking of Khan's war as being World War III, which we know was just winding down at the time of first contact in 2063. But that's incorrect, his war conflict was the Eugenics War, and The Wrath of Khan and the original series episode Space Seed actually but the Eugenics War in the 1990's. The augments were, in fact, supposed to have been created in the 1950s. So I withdraw this criticism entirely. I stand by my other gripes, though, and would like to add another to the mix. How'd Khan suddenly turn into a white guy? EDIT: Come to think of it, where'd Marcus even find Khan at? The departure of the Botany Bay was well before the timeline would have been changed. Even if I assume that Marcus was already an Admiral capable of directing Starfleet resources to look for the Botany Bay at the time the Narada destroyed the Kelvin, and he started such a search at that time, it seems a little incredible to believe that he'd find a ship that left Earth over 250 years earlier with no apparent destination in even 25 years. They wouldn't have known the velocity of the Botany Bay, either, just that it was less than C. Even if they could guess that it was around 1/2 C (which seems reasonable, since it was discovered in the original timeline in the same sector as Risa, which is supposed to be around 90 light years from Earth). Not knowing the direction, they'd have to use Earth as a starting point and assume that it could be in any direction; in other words, they'd have to search a sphere with Earth as the center, and at 1/2 C you'd have a maximum radius of about 130 light years. Volume = 4/3*pi*the radius cubed, so 1.3333*3.1415*2,197,000 = 9,202,270.6042. Nearly a billion cubic light years of space to search to find one tiny ship.
  5. mikeszekely
    Not just that, but that's not the Enterprise (or the Vengeance). That's the Excalibur-class from Star Trek Online. Looks like this wallpaper is some kind of photoshop of Into Darkness and STO art. No, and that's not the only thing that bugged me. There's the fact that Qo'noS had an exploded moon orbiting it... granted, they could have taken artistic license and just decided Qo'noS has an exploded moon, but if it was meant to be Praxis, well, I don't see how changes to the timeline would have exploded it 34 years early. And they make a big deal about how they can't kill Khan, because they need his blood to save Kirk. They do realize they have 72 other frozen supermen, right? And if I can be super nitpicky, Khan threatens to shoot Enterprise's life support systems, which he identifies as being "behind the aft nacelle." That flat out doesn't make sense. "Aft" means "towards the stern," or rear. Enterprise doesn't have an aft nacelle; it has a port nacelle and a starboard nacelle, and both nacelles are aft of the saucer, but there is no aft nacelle. He might have meant aft of the nacelle pylons, or behind the nacelle pylons, but that's not what he said. And even if he did say that, that would mean that life support for the entire ship is in the main shuttle bay. Oh, and Bone's says the guy in the torpedo was 300 years old, and Khan claimed to be sleeping for centuries. So the guy in the tube was born in 1959? Really? There's some other stuff about the Abram's-verse that seem a tad off to me, too. Like, the Narada destroyed the Kelvin in 2233. In the regular timeline, the Constitution-class was done, the Enterprise was built, and Robert April was serving as captain by 2245. I guess the Narada's attack might have changed Starfleet's plans a bit, but so drastically that the Enterprise isn't finished until 2258?
  6. mikeszekely
    I was pretty excited for this when I first heard about it, but the catch is that it doesn't work with games that use the touchscreen. So Wipeout, Uncharted, Gravity Rush, etc... basically most of the good games for the Vita are out.
  7. mikeszekely
    WebOS was awesome. I picked up an HP Touchpad when HP mega cut the price. It's a shame it didn't have more apps, because I loved that thing more than my original iPad.
  8. mikeszekely
    Conspiracy theorists have been saying it since Elop's first day on the job. I'm not saying that Elop did great there or anything, but I get his reasoning. Symbian/MeeGo was a dead end, no matter how much the supporters wanted to believe differently. And Samsung practically is the Android handset market, with no other maker cracking a double-digit share. Even players like HTC, which used to be major players and still make some of the best-reviewed handsets, have lost market share. Elop figured, probably rightly, that Nokia would have a hard time being a player in the Android handset market, and so they went with Windows Phone to differentiate themselves. It was a gamble that didn't pay off, but I'm not sure what he could have done better, short of focusing on dumb phones. I'm going to give him credit for trying something different and not giving up at the first signs of trouble. So I guess I'm not as inclined to automatically right him off as a bad idea, although I do agree that Microsoft would do well to look outside the company for some fresh leadership.
  9. mikeszekely
    Well... this could be interesting...
  10. mikeszekely
    It's a little sad that Inafune has to rip off IP he created because the owners of the IP can't/won't do jack with it these days. But if that's what it takes to get anything remotely like Mega Man, then I'm backing it.
  11. mikeszekely
    So, Season 3 of Transformers Prime is up on Netflix, which is great for people like me who don't get the Hub. I basically watched the whole season in three days. By and large, I've pretty much ignored the Beast Hunters toy line. My only exceptions until today had been Voyager Optimus (because he's Optimus), Voyager Shockwave, and Deluxe Smokescreen (because they didn't get a toy prior to Beast Hunters). No weird Predacons, no spikey re-released regular cast. After watching S3, though, I knew I had to get a Predaking. So, my choices were basically the Voyager one, who I can find pretty much anywhere (except Walmart, who I swear doesn't stock Transformers anymore... or much of anything, give the number of empty peghooks at my local store), or the Target exclusive Beast Fire Predaking. I went with Beast Fire Predaking. The Voyager one looks kind of... unfinished. Not to mention that he'd be kind of smallish, considering how much bigger he is that everyone else in the show. If anything, he's still too small in dragon mode! Still, he's a pretty good size, being a little bigger than most Leaders and a little smaller than the current MPs. His transformation's really simple, but he looks mostly good in both modes. I only have two real complaints. First, some of his joints seem a little loose. On mine, it seems like both his shoulders, especially the left, so he can't pose like he's going to strike with his claw, and his wrists, so holding the sword makes it droop in most poses. Second, they included a light up gimmick. Although the battery housing actually doesn't seem to make much difference in his transformation, it does mean that his dragon neck has no real articulation. In dragon mode, that's kind of a let down but not too bad, since his neck is already in an ok pose. It's actually bot mode that suffers the most, because more articulation would have allowed his head and neck to fold tighter against his back. As it stands now, from the back it looks like Predaking is trying to crap a dragon's head. With the addition of Predaking in my collection, I've got most of the TF Prime toys I want. I don't really care about non-show characters, so I guess I really just need Hardshell, Breakdown, the air Vehicon, Dreadwing, and Skyquake to have all the TV characters. I'm pretty sure they didn't make a Hardshell/Insecticon bigger than a Legion-class, so he's out. I can live without Skyquake, since he died in his first appearance. Dreadwing might not be in stores (if he ever was, in my stupid area), but he's still not too expensive online. And Breakdown and the air Vehicon are Japanese-only, right? Breakdown's way too expensive (especially since I heard he wasn't that good), but Silas Breakdown seems affordable. Maybe I'll pick him up...
  12. mikeszekely
    Seconded.
  13. mikeszekely
    Finally found the first round of IDW deluxes. Bought them all except Bumblebee, because I heard he's not that great, and if I only buy the mold once I want Goldbug. First up is Megatron. I've kinda wanted a toy of this Megatron ever since he got the body in the comics. Taken on it's own, it's pretty cool. In bot mode, he's got the beefy proportions, a good head sculpt (although the light piping is pretty much useless), and pretty good posability (aside from not being able to turn at the waist or the wrists). He's a tad on the hollow side, too, but that's pretty much par for the course for a deluxe these days. His alt mode's not bad either. Like most jet Transformers, he looks great from the top, if maybe a little longer than in the comic book. He's not too thick, either, although he's a little kibbley on the bottom, especially where his shoulders sit. For the most part, I can overlook his flaws. My biggest complaint with him is actually that he's too small. He's a head shorter than the Deluxe-class Optimus Prime from the first Classics line, and he comes a little taller than the waist of Voyager Optimus Prime or Megatron from the first Classics series. Considering that he's supposed to be extra big and tall compared to the average transformer, that makes him scale best with Legends-class toys. Second up is Orion Pax. Really, I'm not a fan of this version of the character. It's like he made a brief appearance in this body in Spotlight: Blurr, but at some point IDW decided to not do the data-clerk background. Instead, as depicted in Autocracy, we see he was sort of a cop, and he looked like the Optimus Prime we know. How to reconcile that? Do a (pointless) Spotlight issue where we show him getting this body from Wheeljack, for reasons that aren't really explained and probably wouldn't make much sense since Pax states pretty much from the get-go that he plans to switch back to his old Optimus-looking body later. It's too bad, though, because with a different, more Optimus Prime-ish looking head, he'd have a great bot mode. Aside from his forearms and the middle of his back, he's not as hollow as Megatron, and he's got great poseability. The part of his transformation where his chest separates from his torso is a bit frustrating, though, and mostly not worth it because his alt mode kind of sucks. Don't get me wrong, it's a pretty fair impression of his alt mode in the packed-in comic... it just looks a little sloppy from the sides, back, or top. As with other modern Deluxes, he's a little small, but it's more forgivable here. Last up, we have Trailbreaker. Hasbro can call him Trailcutter all they want, he's Trailbreaker to me. I think he might be my favorite of the three, but that might be because he's filling gaps in my Classics lineup instead of being yet another representation of a character already on that shelf, but I digress. As with the others, he's a tad too small, especially in alt mode where he's should be a good-sized truck/SUV but the result is similar in size to Classics Bumblebee's compact hatchback. Scale issues aside, alt mode looks pretty good, giving us a more modern vehicle while retaining his early 80s stripes. Everything seems to fit well in both bot and alt modes. My biggest beef with him is that, for all the little Trailbreaker touches like the way his windshield still shows at the top of his chest, the little gun/forcefield generator thingy on his back, and the way his "battle shield" and peg onto his back to give him the back-mounted weapons his toy had, he really doesn't look like Trailbreaker to me. Yeah, it looks a little like his comic book appearance, but I didn't even remember him being in the comics until I re-read the issue he comes packed with. I was hoping for something a bit more like his G1 cartoon appearance, with a black face, more white/gray arms, black hands, single shoulder-mounted gun, a gun hand, more red and less orange bits, no red/orange on his arms, more red on his thighs, and so forth.
  14. mikeszekely
    This. My 6-year old nephew told me he wants a 3DS for his birthday. Kid doesn't know how to take care of his stuff yet, and it's not like he's going to carry it around with him. He's going to play with it in the house, because his sisters don't want to play with him. 2DS should be fine for him.
  15. mikeszekely
    Multiplayer only? Forget what I said earlier about buying it if it were less than $20 on Steam. No single player, no sale.
  16. mikeszekely
    How is it that this game seems to be getting a crap ton of hype, yet it's not even on my radar? And I don't mean that in a "What's this game you keep talking about, I'm not familiar with it?" way. I mean it in a, "another shooter... meh" kind of way. I'm not saying that it looks bad or anything, but it looks like the kind of game I'd buy for $20 or less on a Steam sale while crossing my fingers in the hopes that the single-player campaign is longer than 4 hours. Certainly not a game that would sell me a console. In any case, it probably shouldn't sell you one, either. It's almost certainly coming to PS4 eventually.
  17. mikeszekely
    Isn't that the Supreme-class Starscream from the TF Cybertron/Galaxy Force line?
  18. mikeszekely
    I did it with a Nexus 7. I just downloaded the Chromecast app from the Play Store, plugged in the Chromecast, turned on the TV, and started the app. The app was able to find the Chromecast, change the name from the default "Chromecast8573658" (or some such) to the more generic yet pleasing "Mikecast", and teach Chromecast my network settings. The app is awesome, because it seriously does all the work for you. It's kind of useless after that, because the actual "casting" is done from other apps. I don't know if Chromecast is for everyone, or if it's good for you. I wanted one because I don't have cable, but I watch a lot of Netflix. In the living room, I use my PS3 for Netflix, but in my bedroom I was using a Netgear NeoTV. The NeoTV is slow in general and horribly unresponsive when it comes to detecting a button press on the remote, so I wanted to replace it, but I didn't want to spend a fortune on a Roku. Considering that I mostly use my Nexus 7 as an e-reader, and it's almost always in my bedroom, pairing it with a Chromecast for a mere $35 made sense to me (especially since Best Buy gave me the 3-months of Netflix credit, making the actual cost more like $11). It also makes Google Play movies slightly more attractive, since I'm not stuck watching them on a computer or Android device. Streaming local media would be great, but for me Netflix was my top priority. And the Netflix experience on the Chromecast is pretty great.
  19. mikeszekely
    Are you kidding me? I haven't even been able to find the first IDW wave in stores.
  20. mikeszekely
    Because of Steam Guard?
  21. mikeszekely
    I've never really needed any support from Steam. What issue are you having?
  22. mikeszekely
    Not to change the subject too much, but has anyone else tried Chromecast? My only other experiences with streaming devices are my PS3 and a Netgear NeoTV I got on clearance. (The NeoTV sucks, BTW, with an unresponsive interface and long loading/buffering times). Chromecast was really easy to set up, and I dig the tiny form factor. Both my TVs have USB ports near an HDMI port, so I didn't even need the AC adapter. Setting it up, I realized that Chromecast is basically useless by itself. There's no remote. You need to sync it with a phone, tablet, or computer, a process that involves installing an app or Chrome extension. In my case, I used a Nexus 7 tablet. Once synced, you start a Chromecast-compatible app, like Netflix, on the tablet. There will be a button, and tapping it will give you a choice to play on the tablet or on the Chromecast. Once the video is playing, the app on the tablet acts as the remote for Chromecast. A part of me kind of wants to ding it for being functionally useless without another device to control it with, but honestly who doesn't have a phone, tablet, or at least a PC to use these days? Honestly, it was so simple to set up and the experience of controlling it from the tablet was so smooth that, for $35, I'd actually recommend it to anyone with a Netflix subscription.
  23. mikeszekely
    I don't think anybody is denying that's the direction personal computing is headed. The question is whether or not Microsoft succeeded, and I think the answer is an unequivocal no. Part of the problem, I think, is the notion that smartphones and tablets becoming the form-factor of choice for casual home use means that smartphones and tablets are going to be the form-factor of choice for computers period. It's not. Yes, for casual net surfing, Facebooking, and emailing most people can get away with a phone or an iPad at home. However, they're a lousy form-factor for work that involves multiple windows, editing large documents or spreadsheets, coding, etc. They're lousy work computers.
  24. mikeszekely
    Grats. I have a 660ti in my box, and I pretty much buy games with impunity. If it can't run a game with the settings maxed, it'll get pretty darn close! One assumes that you have an adequate CPU and at least 4GB of RAM, so... Nvidia Shield now?
  25. mikeszekely
    Fair enough, but like I said, they're both going to be available for PC, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3. So you and your friends could buy the games for whatever consoles you all already have, without having to pay a fortune, camp out, or whatever for the (inevitably flawed in some way) launch units that you hope all of your friends are able to get a hold of too.
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