mikeszekely

What an odd coincidence. I went to Wal-Mart after dinner, and I didn't see any new Deluxes. All they had was a Galvatron, a ton of Sideswipes, and a few Blue/Silverstreaks. But they did have on the wall across the main aisle from the toy aisles a display with a ton of Voyagers; Shockwave, Starscream, Lugnut, Blitzwing, Bulkhead, and Skywarp from the Animated line, plus a few Treadbolts and Blasters from the Universe line. So if I could have gone to your Wal-Mart, and you could have gone to mine, we'd each have got what we wanted.

You'll be happy to know that Broken Steel is also supposed to up the level cap. I guess they're gonna charge for the PC versions of the DLC? If that's the case, I hope they pack them together into a boxed expansion.

The biggest advantage to the 360 pad is that all games with the "Games for Windows" banner is required to support it, I think.

I was at Toys R' Us two days ago, their TF section was almost entirely Sunstreaker and Galvatrons. I really want Brawn, Beachcomber, Cyclonus, and Hound. I tried Target today, even though they don't do Legends, and found nothing there either. I'll hit Wal-Mart maybe this weekend or next week.

I'm aware of the fact that it's a beta, and I hope Sony takes time to listen to the criticisms and turn Home into decent experience. But, I still think Eugimon's 30 minutes was more than enough time to form an impression of the beta, and I think his opinion was actually quite generous. Personally, in it's current state, I don't think anyone should be playing Home. No matter who you are, you have something better to do. C-Span is currently more entertaining. Is that typical gamer response BS? I'd say it's an accurate observation about a "game" that mostly involves making an avatar with very limited options, buying stuff for your avatar and his apartment with real money, and standing in lines.

How long do you have to be kicked in the bean bag before you know it's a painful experience?

Okay, I just got around to doing Home. It's a little ironic that the facial hair menu's icon is a goatee, but all they had were mustaches. Now my avatar looks a little creepy... But anyway, to call Home weak is an understatement of epic proportions. Very few customization options, an empty apartment, and lengthy (hopefully it's just because Home is new) downloads every time you want to go to a new area... where there's nothing to do except spend real money. Home, in its current incarnation at least, is a pointless waste of hard drive space.

A friend of mine loaned me Resistance (the first one, not the new one), so I figured I'd play it even though it feels kinda mediocre. I quit around 4:00, then looked high and low and saw no sign of Home. Also, I thought the map packs for the first Resistance were supposed to become freebies today? They're still showing up as $7.99 and $4.99 for me.

Logitech has a wireless PS3 controller out that traded tilt for rumble back the in the pre-DualShock 3 days. They were $40, but I've seen a lot of stores selling them for less. I bought one with my PS3 because I had the Logitech controller for the PS2, and I thought the Sixaxis felt too flimsy. Unlike the Sony controllers, the Logitech one isn't Bluetooth. It has a little USB dongle. On a whim, I stuck it into my PC once, and Windows readily identified it and it works like a charm. I'd say that's about the best you'll get if you don't want the 360 controller.

I don't watch too much in the way of foreign anything, because I live in a tiny redneck town where the stuff is hard to come by. I do have a nice collection of Asian Horror films. I haven't had time to watch more than the Ring movies, the Ju-ons, the first two One Missed Call movies, Dark Water, Kairo, Death Water, Noroi, the Eye, the first two Whispering Corridors, Spiral, A Tale of Two Sisters, and maybe a few others that slipped my mind.

I've read in other articles that The Old Republic is bucking a lot of MMO trends because the target audience is more Knights of the Old Republic than Galaxies. Or WoW, or that matter. And I've never played a bad Bioware game. I have faith that Bioware will keep the game balanced enough for people who intend to play the game entirely solo without shelling out a dime over the initial cost of purchasing the game. I can't speak for anyone but myself on this one, but PvP is just another one of those typical MMO traits that I'm hoping that Old Republic avoids.

I played that game three times and experienced nothing of the sort.

The Old Republic might be microtransaction-based. Kinda good news for me, as I definitely want to play OR, but I've never shelled out for a subscription-based game, and I wasn't looking forward to doing it now.

Kingston's fine. I use the regular Kingtson stuff in most of my computers, and I have three sticks of their Hyper-X stuff in my main box. The benchmarks for the Core i7s have been really stunning, no doubt. But while the Core i7s are starting to trickle out for enthusiasts, I'm not sure I'd recommend them just yet. There's a very limited motherboard selection for them, and you have to use DDR3 with it. I'm not even convinced that four cores are necessary... it seems like most developers are just getting used to threading their apps/games for two. Why be an early adopter when the Core 2 line is still very capable and the Core i7s will still need a year or two to really go mass market? You'll save money not just on the processor but on your mobo and RAM if you stick with the Core 2 Duo or Core 2 Quad. Heck, the E8600 is two steps above my processor, is cheaper than the cheapest i7, and the the E8500 (still a step above mine) is under $200, and my main computer is already so fast that I won't use any of the others for more than watching SD avi files or surfing the net. If you must go quad-core, the "Yorkfield" Core 2 Quads run between $200-$300, and most (if not all) of them will post the maximum score in the Windows Experience Index. Definitely. My Antec P182 is a big mamma jamma, and I had to totally remove the upper hard drive bay. IMHO, Raptor/Velociraptor HDDs are one of the worst upgrades in terms of cost versus performance. You can get a terabyte of storage for less than a 150GB Raptor, and the Velociraptor is really only going to cut down on boot time by a tiny bit, and launch programs a tiny bit faster. Windows Vista only takes my current hardware about 30 seconds to boot, and that's not even off a SATA II hard drive. As for programs, once they're in the RAM, you'll hardly notice the difference. I have the BFG 9800GTX+. It ran Crysis at about 30FPS at the maximum settings, until I got to a snow level and the particle effects dragged it down. For a lot of games, like Portal, even with the highest settings I had to enable vsync because the monitor couldn't keep up with the framerate. Currently, I'm playing Fallout 3 at the highest settings. In short, it's a great card that I'd recommend to anyone looking for great performance without breaking the bank. I just can't stress enough how long it is and how pick you have to be about which case you're going to use. And that's just with one card. You get solid gains in performance with a second card in SLI, but yeah, two is enough. The theoretical extra boost from three-way SLI is offset by the fact that virtually no one is programming games or other apps to take advantage of it.

Okay, yeah, I was misunderstanding you. I was thinking that you wanted to scale back on what you get at levels 1-20 and leave them to be redistributed at 21-30. Sticking with tabletop gaming rules, what you actually want is something more like epic levels. In that case, I still don't think it's necessary, but the idea is more palatable.

So Ultra Magnus wrestles the cannon between his thighs until it goes off in his hands (two minutes in). And the singing is really what we're concerned with?

I'll let you answer your own question. Fewer points to spread means characters under level 20 wouldn't be as powerful as they are, so that obsessive types can get at 30 what the designers (likely following the tabletop rules) gave at 20. How is that not nerfing? No, the average player should hit the level cap near the end of the game. The average player isn't someone who does nothing but the main quest, nor is it someone who tries to do everything in one run. They're both outliers. The game allows both outliers to play their way, but it rightfully caters to the a happy median.

I'm all for a new ZOE game, as long as it's not as short as the first two. I remember picking up the second one on Kojima's promises that it was twice as long as the first one (which took me a little over four hours), and I was pissed as hell when I finished it in just under 3.

How does that please everybody? Due to the way Fallout scales enemies, you can already beat the game well below the level cap, but Bethesda chose to make the level cap attainable anyway by an average player who does an average amount of exploration and side quests. Emphasis on average, here. Under your scenario, you have Bethesda nerfing characters at levels 1-20 to create another tier of levels and perks that most players won't attain as a reward to those who play to obsessively discover every nook and cranny in one playthrough. If it was the developers' intention to increase the replay value by designing a world where most players would finish the game without seeing everything (giving them new experiences in subsequent playthroughs), why should they reward that style of play? It's enough that players have the freedom to do it.

Yeah, but do you think most people who played Fallout 3 played it that much? My friend said he was about 16 when he finished the game. I know I spent three weeks avoiding the main quest, but decided to get down to it within the last week. If I don't look for anything else to do, I guess I'll hit 17. The problem inherent to setting an RPG (especially one modeled after a pen-and-paper system, where level caps are usually lower to begin with) in a large, sandbox world is that it's going to go both ways. Some people are going to feel that they explored enough and finish the game without hitting the cap, and others are going to try to see as much of the world as possible and hit the cap long before the end of the game. You can't please everyone.

Although I haven't beat the game yet, I'm starting to think that I'm glad that my perceptions of it aren't colored by the previous Fallout games. For me, I knew about as much about life in the Wasteland as the character I was controlling. Actually, the game does a really good job in that sense... you start off as a naive vault dweller, then over time I became seasoned to the word as my character did. I guess Bethesda was hoping for a wider audience than just the fans of the previous Fallout games. In that sense, the level cap doesn't seem as broken as some of you think. Yeah, if you try to see EVERYTHING in one run, you're going to get bored, and you're going to hit the level cap long before you're done. And it might have been an oversight on the developer's fault that they didn't expect more people would do just that, but I think they were expecting players to do less in one run and replay it a few times. Played like that, perhaps you'd hit the cap closer to the end of the main quest, and you'd still have plenty to see in future playthroughs.

I've been playing FO3 since it came out, and I'm just now getting to the main quest (well, after I find a few bobbleheads). I'm really impressed with how much I love the game, given that I've never played any of the previous Fallout games, and I didn't like Oblivion.

The Pittsburgh stuff is the stuff that interests me the most, since I live about 30-45 minutes east of Pittsburgh (depending on Parkway traffic... you people with more than one major road in and out of your city don't know how good you got it...).

I thought the Tom Jane movie was good enough to buy at Wal-Mart for $10.

I'll second that request. The hinges on one of his wings dissolved, for lack of a better description. Since they toy's now a wash anyway, any DIY info that could lead to me repairing it would be great.