mikeszekely

I'm just not turning on my PS3 today. Really, as long as it's fixed in time for God of War III, I'll be happy.

If you're going to use a 32-bit OS, and you know you're only ever going to use a 32-bit OS on this machine, stick with the 2GB you have, or maybe buy a third 1GB stick. If your graphics card has 1GB of VRAM, you'll be wasting your money by moving up to 4GB because your computer will only be able to use 3GB of it. And frankly, you're fine with that amount. My system is a Windows 7 Pro 32-bit with a Intel Core 2 Duo E8400, 3GB of DDR2, and a GeForce 9800GTX+, and it has handled pretty much every game I've thrown at it at the highest settings (except for, of course, Crysis). While you might want to aim a little higher, I expect to get another two years out of that hardware. And while games certainly like to have plenty of RAM, unless you plan on running the game windowed while surfing the net, listening to iTunes, and encoding video all at the same time, you'll be fine with 3GB. If you're going to go with a 64-bit OS, though, or are thinking you might in the very near future, you'll definitely want at least 4GB, because Windows itself will use more RAM. Of course, even if you want to go that route, you might buy one 1GB stick now, and one 1GB stick when you actually move to the 64-bit OS.

Backlighting is nice (I have it on my laptop), and it would almost tempt me to go back to wired. But like I said, I need the wireless so that I can move the keyboard off the desk to make room when I need to. As for batteries, none of my keyboards used anything but double-A, and I'm still waiting to see how the new MS keyboard pans out battery-wise, but the old one would go a year or more on a trio of them, and that keyboard got extremely heavy use. I'd say that's a fair trade to ditch the cords.

They always struck me as being overly large, and for what? Some gaming buttons off to the side, where I'm going to have to lift my hands off the WASD keys anyway? Pass. I'd rather have a mouse with some extra buttons to remap. Since I do a lot of stuff at my desk besides computing (including eating), I also like to have a wireless keyboard so I can move it off my desk sometimes. To that end, I've now owned two Microsoft wireless keyboards and two Logitech ones. They've all be solid, comfortable keyboards, but the Microsoft ones tend to have better battery life. Specifically, I think I was replacing the batteries in the one Logitech I use more about every two or three months, and my old MS one would get at least a year. I can't comment on the new one yet, since I've only had it for less than a month. I'd still be using the old one if I hadn't knocked over a glass of Pepsi on it...

Not my whole away team, buy my captain had some fun on Risa...

Hot damn! I'm broke right now, but I might have to seriously consider that one. In 90 days, I can probably get my fill of the game and quit after that.

Yeah, I mean, I ran Dragon Age with a Core 2 Duo E8400 and a GeForce 9800GTX+, 1680x1050 resolution, everything turned up to the highest settings, and three GB of slower RAM. Since a Radeon 5870 should handily beat my graphics card, you think I'd have an experience worse than their average of 37.1fps/24fps minimum. I can safely say that my actual performance never went below 30fps.

Ah, you're all over-thinking it. I actually don't mind speculating about how a Valkyrie's engines would work as much, but Gundam labeled its Anime Magic™ "Minovsky Particle" and has been running with that ever since. It's seriously like one step removed from saying "a wizard did it," and I've been pretty content not to think about it too hard. Nuclear-powered giant killer robots with laser-beam swords? Magic particles explain it all.

If you've got two sticks already, it's cheaper to simply add another pair of sticks. I don't think there's a big difference in performance having 2 2GB sticks vs. 4 1GB sticks. Just remember that to take advantage of that much RAM, you need a 64-bit version of Windows (don't remember if you mentioned having one or not). The most RAM a 32-bit version can address is 4GB, and that includes any RAM on your graphics card. As for your processors, I suppose it would depend a lot on which Core 2 Duo you were thinking about getting. The E6500, IIRC, was pretty good for the Pentium Dual Core series, but if you can afford it an E8400 would definitely be a boost. Finally, while I wouldn't say that SLI is "just a gimmick," I'm not convinced that it's necessary. A single GTX 260 should be able to play most games at the highest settings possible. A GTS 250 is around $130, and a GTX 260 can be had for under $200. If you buy a single 260 and save the difference, by the time the 260 isn't cutting it anymore you could always just buy a new graphics card. If you haven't bought a motherboard, another plus is that non-SLI compatible motherboards are usually cheaper than SLI compatible ones. Mine's gotta be older than that. I got this router back when I first got cable internet. 802.11g wasn't even an option at the time. As for interference, it seems unlikely. It's been in the same spot for all those years, and the newest item to go anywhere near it was the Wii I put there two years ago. Last time I unplugged it, it seemed on of the lights that I think should be green was orange. I don't know. Like I said, I don't mind if I have to replace it, but I hope it can hang in there a few more weeks.

I seriously didn't know that. I'm glad you told me! I'm off to find some new armor now!

If you have to do the Exploration missions to get the crap to upgrade, wouldn't you wind up with the badges you need to buy the stuff in the first place? Honestly, between quest rewards and loot drops, I'm pretty content with most of my stuff. I could use some better consoles and some better torps, but I've got a Plasma-Disrupter Hybrid Beam Array Mk IV in the front and a Phaser Turrent Mk III and Disrupter Beam Array Mk III in the back. In one Defense mission I was out-damaging a Nova with two levels on me. As for ground gear, that's even less of a concern for me. I don't even wear armor, because I don't think it's as authentic as a plain uniform. EDIT: Is my character still going to be around after my 10-day pass is up? I'm enjoying the game enough that I want to buy a retail copy and subscribe and all that, but financially that doesn't really work out for me until probably April sometime. If I can pick up where I left off then, great, but I'm not going to bother if I have to start over again. I'm still doing stuff I did in the beta for crying out loud.

About how long would you expect a router to last if it's been on more or less 24/7? I kinda forget how long I've had mine, but I think it's starting to go. My wife, who uses a laptop, mentioned the other day that she wasn't getting any internet. All the lights on our modem were fine, but I did the ol' unplug it all and re-plug it (henceforth referred to as "the Procedure"). A day or two later, she casually mentioned that it wasn't working for her again, but she did the Procedure and it was fine. I was kind of starting to wonder if the problem wasn't her laptop, though, since internet problems usually will cause one of the lights that should be solid on the modem to start blinking. Just tonight, though, I was playing Star Trek Online on my desktop, but I had my own brand new laptop set up so I could surf the net during some of the longer trips through sector space. And wouldn't you know it, I try to open a page and I get a "not connected to the internet" message. I didn't drop the game on my desktop, though, so I know it's not an internet problem, and since it's happened on two laptops the culprit seems to be the router. Under other circumstances, my router going might not be a big deal. I mean, the thing is 802.11b, and it dying would be a good excuse to upgrade. Problem is, my wife just dumped a ton of money into an IRA to lower our taxable income, so our budget's kinda tight for the next couple of weeks. And it seems like you have to pay a premium if you want a router that's both 802.11n WAN and gigabit LAN.

What's the use in doing the Memory Alpha crafting stuff? I swung by when I had a quest to go there, and it seemed like mostly what they do is take something you've already got and improve it... like take a Small Hypospray and make a Large Hypospray. Which seemed kinda of stupid, since I sell all the hyposprays I find anyway. I decided to do the Defense missions I hadn't done... they're kind of easy, since the highest level one I have available is LTC 1. They don't seem to be worth much xp, though. I also tried doing a Hostile Engagement for Calhoun. I think they need to balance those better... my team (Federation) lost 15-1. I was the only one to score a kill on the Fed side, because the first Klingon I saw happened to be two levels below me. Unfortunately he was hanging out near a player four levels above me, and another six levels above me. I guess the other Feddies were close to me in levels. About the only good thing I have to say about the experience is that I seemed to get a decent amount of XP, and even though the quest said I needed to win I still got credit for having done it. If I can make it to LTC 5, I should be happy. I'll only be one level below my next patrol mission, and once I've done that (and maybe another Defense mission) I should make it LTC 6 before the next story mission.

Do yourself a favor, quit playing Oblivion and play Fallout 3 instead. Same game engine, way more awesome game.

Are there some quest-givers I'm missing? Right now, I'm a Lt. Commander 4. I have two quests, both LC 6. One is from Admiral Quinn, and it's the only one available to me from him at the moment. One is from Commander Sulu, and it's the only Patrol mission available from him at the moment. I can get 3 Defense missions from him, if I want them, but they're kinda boring. The only other quest-givers I have are Lieutenant Grall (three available, all repeats), Commander Makza, Captain Calhoun, and Admiral Yanishev. The quests from the last three are all the sort where you jump into a conflict that's already in play and spend an hour sniping at a couple of ships while you wait for the rest of the players to take out the other 50 required to finish the mission... again, not the sort of mission I want to play. Am I stuck doing them anyway? I didn't mind doing a quest or two that was one rank above me, but I just finished one that was two above me, and it was a pain.

Should I mention that Lion's version of the Transformers theme song from the '86 movie is my ringtone? Or that the alarm on my phone plays "The Touch"?

That's not the point (although one could argue that the pseudo-scientific Minovsky-based reactors in Gundam operate differently than the overtechnology-based ones in Macross). The point is that they did in the original Gundam (Amuro wrecked the colony so bad when he destroyed one Zaku that the residents had to be evacuated to Luna II). Subsequent Gundams have downplayed that, and it was nice to be reminded that (regardless of actual science) when you blow up a mobile suit inside a colony, you're going to have serious problems.

I just finished watching the first episode, and man, it totally makes up for the last few years of SEED and 00. In recent Gundams, even UC ones, they're really gotten away from the Newtype themes, as well as the fact that a mobile suit is powered by a tiny nuclear reactor. I really like how Unicorn managed to bring it all back. Most of all, I love how Unicorn feels like Gundam in a way that SEED and 00 never did.

New War for Cybertron trailer is up. This one looks like it has snippets of actual gameplay.

I hate how the game forces you to spend X amount of skill points before you can get promoted. I maxed a couple of skills I knew I'd want, then invested into crap I didn't care for just to move up to Lt. Commander. Oh, yeah. I forgot to mention, I'm playing again. A friend of mine bought the collector's edition and gave me a 10-day pass. I'm 72 hours or so in, and I hit Lt. Commander this morning. I'm trying to learn from my mistakes in the first one, but the Lt. Commander Escorts may be the ugliest ships in the game, so I stuck with my Constitution/Excalibur hybrid (I tried to make it look as much like the one I had in the beta as possible, even modifying the Registry number to be the "B" version). It was either that or a Nova, since the Science ships look like a good balance of Escort's speed and the Cruiser's strength. If I can make it to Commander before my pass expires, I'm definitely going to go with an Akira.

Ace Combat X was a great game, much better than Ace Combat 6. In fact, my only gripe about Ace Combat X was that it didn't get a PS2 port like so many other PSP games at the time, as the control just didn't feel as precise on the PSP. If we're lucky, X2 might be out by the end of this year. Talking about X2 reminds me that I never got to play Ace Combat Xi... it's too bad they didn't release that for something besides the iPhone.

Yeah, I'm not claiming that the 360 version of Final Fantasy XIII will be better, nor am I claiming that the 360 version is always better. Just that it happens often enough that, combined with a few other reasons, I feel like I've been conditioned to favor the 360 for gaming and the PS3 for media. As far as sales go, I do think FFXIII will do well on the PS3 mostly because I think that a lot of FF fans had already adopted the PS3 as their platform of choice since it was first announced for the PS3 before the console was even available (some of these people would be the same people who wailed about how Squeenix "betrayed" them when FFXIII was announced for the 360, because heaven forbid a series you like reach a wider audience). I don't know that it's really fair to say that an Xbox 360 gamer is a certain type of gamer. The 360 has had plenty of JRPGs, and games like Resistance and Killzone have done well enough for the PS3. I rather think that in the past few years there's been a trend away from Japanese games in general. That's not to say that there haven't been Japanese games, or hit Japanese games, being released. But when you look back at some of the biggest titles in the last few years (Uncharted, Assassin's Creed, Mass Effect, Fallout 3, Call of Duty, Portal, Arkham Asylum, Bioshock, God of War, etc) they come out of Western studios.

I'm just guessing, but I suspect that 95% of MW'ers are getting it for PS3. I mean, between Achievements and the fact that most multiplatform games wind up better on the 360, my inclination is usually to go with the 360 version now. Like, the 360 is a box for gaming and the PS3, which I actually use more, is a box for media. I'm holding off for more reviews (and maybe a demo) before I buy either version, but even if I get it for the 360, I figured I'll swing by the PS3 thread if I want to talk about it.

Heh. Seriously though, IIRC the Japanese release had English language options. I remember several of the board members importing it and discussing it in the PS3 thread at the time. Given that a lot of FF fans went PS3, and the percentage of PS3 fans on this board seems to be a bit higher than the general populace, I expect that most of the FFXIII discussion will just take place in the PS3 thread.

Version? I've been using 3.6, and I'm not having any issues.