mikeszekely

I completely and utterly disagree. Kubrick's film starts out ok, with a lot of drawn out shots that helped capture the atmosphere on the Discovery One. Things really go to hell when Bowman enters the monolith, as Kubrick's vision plays out like a long acid trip, while Clarke's novel actually made some sense. Also, while Kubrick does a lot of things well, I don't think he managed to capture the scientific enthusiasm that Clarke's writing had. I'm not saying that 2001 is a bad film, because it's not. It's an excellent film. I just think that the book captured my imagination more. Can't comment on 2010, though... I've never seen the film. I enjoyed all four of Clarke's novels, though 3001 was definitely the worst.

He looks great in alt mode, but I'm not digging the bot mode. Doesn't really match my Classics, which is really all I care about.

Unless you bought a computer with a Pentium dual-core. Speaking of, I got tired of waiting for the Samsung to restock online, so I dropped the extra $100 on an Asus G60. Currently setting it up right now (man, I love ninite.com).

Yeah, I have one for the original Xbox, one or two for the PS2, one for the SNES, and I know I could easily get one for the NES if I wanted. Hell of a time finding one for Saturn or Genesis/Megadrive controllers.

It's an interesting idea, and one I'd really like to get behind, but it seems like there's a lot of hurdles to overcome. For instance, will it be wired or wireless? If it's wired, is it going to have plugs for USB, PlayStation, SNES, NES, etc consoles? If it's wireless, how do they plan to get around Microsoft's encryption for the the 360? Or how do they expect it to work with older consoles? How about the differences in buttons? Their patent drawing seems to indicate that it would have an LCD, but I'm not sure that an LCD would have enough tactile feedback. Would it support the PS3 and Wii's motion controls? If yes, would it have support for the various Wiimote attachments? Or would stuff like the Wii Motion Plus be built into it?

Totally worth it. Drift as a serious character sucks, but Peg as a joke just jumped into my top five favorite Transformers of all time.

Sure... STALKER is showing it's age, Final Fantasy XIII seems like it's going to be a love it or hate it affair, and for all the hype Alien Vs. Predator is getting lousy reviews. Oh, and Mega Man 10 is 8-bit. Of course, as a Mega Man fan, it's actually my most-anticipated game for March. God of War III would be my second. Bioshock 2 is getting great reviews (although not as good as the first, perhaps). And Dragon Age: Awakening is an expansion pack for what was easily my favorite game of 2009. I also left off plenty of other games. Like Dante's Inferno, which got mediocre reviews, but which I'd actually really like to play, or Torchlight, which has been available on Steam for awhile but recently came out on disc. There's also some other titles that looked good but might be more "niche", like Yakuza 3, Command and Conquer 4, and Blur. Not only is there plenty of stuff to play, but this assumes that you played all of the good holiday games like Batman: Arkham Asylum, Assassin's Creed II, Borderlands, Ghostbusters, Modern Warfare 2, Uncharted 2, Dragon Age: Origins, Ratchet and Clank, Forza 3, etc. Or early (and non-sequel) standouts this year like Bayonetta and Darksiders. In short, there's a ton of stuff to be playing.

He's referring to himself, where after a period of re-reading the old Marvel comic book he was buying a ton of G1 Transformers. Then the movies came out, plus Animated, and he'd post more than the rest of us combined in this thread about how he hated all the new TF stuff coming out, and why he hated it, and how much better the old stuff was, until one day he just snapped. Sold off his TF collection and never looked back. Personally, I think he's happier now, although he does still turn up in this thread.

Your point? I don't think a lot of people sat around and said, "Empire Strikes Back? Screw that, it's just a sequel." A good game is a good game, and in Mass Effect 2's case a good game that's a lot better than the already incredible original. You wanna skip good games just because they're sequels, be my guest. But don't complain about the self-imposed perpetual "drought" you'll always be in.

The Samsung lappy's still out of stock. Went to the store to actually look at the Asus G60, and I think it's kinda tacky looking... which has me looking at a G72 now. Looks a bit nicer, and the specs are pretty good for the price. On the downside, I can afford the G60, but it'll be another two or three weeks before I could afford the G72.

Peg loves to watch Naruto, but for manga I hear he prefers stuff like Love Hina. He's also been known to cosplay as Wing Zero Gundam.

There you go, eriku. Hasbro made sure Peg has places to stow his swords for when you pose him wielding Pocky.

You know it's not 2004 anymore, right? AMD's been behind on the high-end chips since the Core 2 Duo's started coming out. Granted, AMD enthusiasts have always had an easier time overclocking, but since the debut of the Core i7 AMD's been left in the dust. Don't get me wrong, AMD still has some great chips, and they tend to give you a lot of bang for your buck, but if you want the best in performance, you go Intel. In either case, if it's games you're after, the video card matters more than the CPU. Are you living in a hole? Mass Effect 2, Aliens Vs. Predator, Bioshock 2 and the new STALKER have all come out in the last month. If you count console games (which you should, because a gamer shouldn't limit himself to one system), by the end of March we'll also have Mega Man 10, Dragon Age: Awakening, Final Fantasy XIII, and God of War III. There are more games coming out now that I want than at Christmas.

Yeah, we've just got to take it to some other Transformers boards, maybe edit the wiki, and hope it takes. Long live Peg, the Decepticon turned angsty Autobot who abhors fighting, but does it anyway in the hope that there will one day be peace (basically, the Transformers version of Mega Man X)!

Yeah: story and your companions. I'm cool with that. Turians kick ass. They don't. Look at it another way; Luke Skywalker and his friends blew up two Death Stars and single-handedly brought down the Empire. How do you top that? Despite the iconic nature of the films, a lot of other Star Wars material has been produced. Bioware themselves have crafted some of the better Star Wars fiction (Knights of the Old Republic), and Mass Effect's lead writer (Drew Karpyshyn) has had a bit of acclaim for his Darth Bane novels. So yeah, while the Mass Effect universe is unlikely to have a character as larger-than-life as Shepard, who's every decision seems to have repercussions for the entire galaxy, that hardly means that Shepard's story is the only one worth telling.

Amusingly enough, the concept art for Peg had "do ri fu to" in katakana on the doors (don't remember if he ever turned up in the comic book with it). For whatever reason, they changed it to a kanji on the production model, and although the red on red makes it a little hard to tell, I do believe the kanji they stuck on Peg is "samurai."

I own the X-540's, and I'm generally happy with them. I mean, they could be better... the lows are very good, but I think the highs sounded better on my headphones (headphones which, admittedly, cost almost as much as the entire X-540 set). If you do like Uxi did and go audio out over toslink to a good audio receiver I'm sure you'll get better sound, but when you're married and your computer is confined to a smaller space that's not always an option. For the price and size, I think the sound is quite good, and the tethered remote puts the set's power button and volume controls in easy reach, as well as providing a headphone jack that might be more convenient than the on directly on the computer (my only gripe there being that, if the source audio is 5.1, you'll only get the fronts if you plug in headphones... not bad for listening to music in stereo, problematic on some games if you might be trying to play while you're wife watches the Sex and the City DVD she rented). I dare say the X-540 is good enough that (if we're still talking about computer speakers) you skip the 2.1 speakers and keep saving for the X-540. It's currently going for $82 and free shipping on Newegg, so you'd only be spending about $32 more.

Two words: Action Masters. Oh well, at least we've still got Peg.

Peg's kind of a dick, but it's not really that. He's just sort of bland, and very "weeabo."

We gotta keep spreading this one around until it spreads like JaAm! I for one think Peg is a stupid character, but I agree that he looks like he belongs in Classics. So I know for sure I'm buying Peg, Thrust, and Straxmount. I'm probably going to buy some of the War for Cybertron figures (and likely the game). I can't wait to get my hands on MP Grimlock (I hear that the US version is getting the crown!). I'll have to see what else comes out in the Generations line... if we get more Classics-ish figures (I've heard rumors that Thrust isn't the only Seeker we're getting), I'll probably bite on those, but that's about it. I don't have any interest in Power Core Combiners or any more movie toys. Maybe Alternity will come to the States? I wouldn't mind a less-expensive domestic release of Prime and Megatron, but I'm not interested in any of the rest.

Are we talking speakers, or all of it? I'll second Uxi's Denon if we're talking receivers, but I like Paradigm for speakers. EDIT: Which I should probably point out has nothing to do with computers.

Well... they do sort of have the vent-ears. Sort of. And I think there's something like null rays on the arms. If we count MP Seekers, I see we also have hip kibble. But the wings on them remind me less of the Seeker's wings and more or Prowl/Bluestreak/Smokescreen's door wings. I haven't bought any Transformers locally since Bludgeon, since he fits in with my Classics (Classics and MP are the only TFs I'm displaying; the Animated and movie figures that I had collected are all boxed up). I don't know that I'll buy any more until the War for Cybertron or Generations figures start coming out.

No, you don't. Seriously, you can great-quality 5.1 sound right off most motherboards. Whatever you'd spend on a sound card, just put it in your budget for quality speakers. Can I assume you're talking about Intel's Core i7 family? The first series (code-named Nehelem) were all 9xx models. And yeah, they are pretty much the best processors on the market right now. Much as I respect AMD for competitive price/performance, they really don't have anything that hangs with the i7 (yet). The i7 920 is thought of as "best bang for your buck", if you're going to use more than one video card. Crossfire. Think of it like this... I'm sure you've noticed the trend in computers where single-core processors have been replaced by dual-core and even quad-core processors? There's a similar trend in graphics... if one graphics card can do so much, then two graphics cards working together can do even more. Crossfire is ATI's technology for linking two graphics cards (SLI is Nvidia's). GPU = Graphics Processing Unit. The heart and soul of every graphics card is a chip, just like the heart of your whole computer is a chip. Now, the Radeon HD 5970 is a graphics card that already has two chips. If you buy two of them and link them in Crossfire, you'd have 4 total GPUs. For the record, the Radeon HD 5970 is probably the single fastest graphics card almost-available (Newegg doesn't seem to have any yet, but has a couple listed as "auto-notify"). Should you take VF-19's advice and get two, you can expect to spend around $1400 on the pair. You can also expect to run every computer game released for at least the next five years on the absolute highest settings.

My beef's not with the car, but that they transformed the car into robots that bear little resemblance to the characters they're supposed to be.

Those look terrible. Like Big Lots fake Transformers terrible. Yeah. He was the leader of the Decepticons on Cybertron for awhile in the old Marvel line. He tried to have a space bridge to Earth built, got into a fight with Blaster, and nearly killed when the space bridge blew up. In the UK run, his head continued to lead from a life-support pod. Then he tried to take over Megatron's body, failed, and instead downloaded himself into a clone of Megatron who believed he actually was Megatron. The clone eventually blew off his own head with his fusion cannon rather than let Straxus fully take over. In the IDW line, he has a minor role as one of the first Ark crew. He, along with Galvatron, Cyclonus, Jhiaxus, Grindcore, and Nova Prime became part of the Dead Universe.