mikeszekely

The agonizing thing about Lunar is that while they keep releasing stuff, they haven't updated website in nearly a year (Macross Frontier isn't even listed on their Projects page). So I'd say the site's abandoned, and even if they did drop Frontier, we wouldn't know until someone from Lunar came here and told us.

My Nemesis Prime arrived today, and I must say that I'm liking him more than I thought I would, considering he's the third toy of that mold I own. The colors just really work well for him. My only complaint, and it's a small one, is that his eyes are painted red, and he still has the clear blue plastic that Optimus and Ultra Magnus have for their light piping, instead of a red piece and red light piping.

Not yet, it seems. I'm waiting for Lunar myself.

Yeah, I was just going to mention scouts. Legends Activators/Scouts/Cyber Slammers Deluxe/Fast Action Battlers Voyager Ultra Leader Supreme

At least you found an Onslaught. All I found was an Animated Snarl and an Animated Jazz, and ultimately passed on both because I'm really waiting for the Classics Ultras.

Having finished Final Fantasy IV DS, I can safely say that your instinct is not off. The 3D character models look great (my favorite being Rydia). And it's nice to have some stuff play out as in-engine cutscenes rather than reams of text. But ultimately, it's not the FFIV you remember. You gain experience faster (and aside from a few spells like Holy, Flare, and Meteor, that means you'll have spells quicker than in the 16-bit versions), but this is countered by the fact that every enemy in the game has more hit points that before. This means that if you knew before that you wanted to grind until Rydia learned Bio before going into the Tower of Babil the first time, and you find that she's got it when she rejoins your party, that you're going to go into the tower and get killed on the first floor. (For the record, I wound up grinding into the 50's before doing the Tower). To make matters more complicated, bosses have new patterns and attacks that negate any strategies that you're familiar with. For example, if you cast Reflect on Bahamut, expecting that you'll bounce his Mega-Flare back at him, you might be disappointed to know that he'll counter with a Reflect on himself, then Mega-Flare off it onto you, meaning that you actually have to kill him before he uses Mega-Flare. You can also expect to max out your levels in the Lunarian Subterrain, and that enemies will challenge you right up until that point (surprisingly, though, not the final bosses). Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles for the DS is on clearance at Target. Wait for FFIV to join it.

I'm not saying that the Jetfire we got was perfect or anything, but there's a lot more characters I want in the Classics/Universe line before I need them to redo ones they already did.

I'm assuming you're only concerned about heat so much as it makes the fan blow. From what I've read, it's supposed to run cooler than the stock 9800GTX, but I'm upgrading from a 8500, so I couldn't say. I can say that after installing it, I booted the computer and a hard drive wasn't showing up, so I shut it down to check the connections and the card was already rather warm to the touch. That said, my whole computer is no louder than it was with the 8500, and the loudest component is easily the DVD drive (a Pioneer), which is one of the quietest I've owned.

Here here. I've seen shoddy and even half-done pencils turned into fantastic art by the inkers. I've also seen great pencils reduced to rubbish with poor inks. Speaking of fantastic pencils, I miss Brett Booth. Sure, he had some troubles drawing women, but man could he draw just about everything else.

While waiting for Newegg to restock the EVGA 9800GTX+ that was the first 9800GTX+ they were carrying, a second one popped up; a BFG, and one of their overclocked editions. Yeah, it was $10 more than the EVGA, but it was in stock, so I ordered it. I arrived today, and I installed it tonight. It was a royal pain to install... the card is so big that I had to move my hard drives. The SATA went into a lower bay (my case, an Antec P182, has a bay for hard drives in the usual place, where mine were, and another in a lower chamber), but I had to put brackets on my IDE and stick in into a 5.25". Absolutely worth it, though. My computer is still whisper quiet, and I ran Crysis at 1024x768, 4x anti-aliasing, textures set to Very High, and everything else set to High. I checked several games at the System Requirements Lab Can You Run It site. My computer now not only exceeds the recommended requirements for every game I checked, in pretty much every case it hit the far right end of the meter. In short, yeah, it might not be up to a GTX 280 or a Radeon 4870, but it didn't cost $500, either. At $200 ($210 for the overclocked one), the card's a bargain for anyone looking to upgrade their video.

You, sir, just saved me $10. While I can't disagree that a Voyager Galvatron would have been nice, if the Universe line keeps cranking out Deluxes as good as they've been, I'd honestly be happy to buy nothing but Deluxes. Cheaper figures means more money for more figures.

I'm not thrilled with the concept of Ultras. Voyagers with irritating electronic lights and sounds and an extra $5 tacked on, if you ask me. I do still want Onslaught, especially since the Autobots are outnumbering the Decepticons. But the cockpit kibble on Powerglide's back is ruining it for me, and Silverbot is either a robot with a jet on his back, or a jet with a robot slung underneath... I can't imagine him having a transformation more complicated than a freaking Micromaster. The new-mold Voyagers (I'm not counting crappy Energon/Cyberton repaints), though, I'm all about. Inferno looks solid (and opens up the possibility of a Grapple repaint), and Cyclonus looks awesome beyond belief.

Nope. I got them all on one side, but two panels refused to line up on the other.

Went out to visit my (sick) dad today. He wasn't really up for company, though, so I decided to check out the Target and Wal-Mart in his area. Still no Ultras, although Target had a space for them on the shelf, as well as some Universe Voyagers that I guess are repaints of some sort. Heavy Load, or something like that. I noticed that Deep Space Starscream is on Clearance, too. What I did find at the Wal-Mart, though was the Star Wars Transformers Death Star Darth Vader. The box was a little beat, and maybe even opened. It was missing the mini Vader, one of the mini Stormies, and one of the mini TIEs. His gun, lightsaber, and cape were still there, though. Oh, and he was marked with a $25 clearance sticker. At that price, I bit. Two TIEs and two Stormies are enough, and I have a mini Vader from the TF TIE fighter Vader. He's a very impressive-looking toy, with a fairly simple transformation, but it's a real pain in the rear to get the panels to line up.

Sorry, not yet. And I'm dying to get my hands on Onslaught. The Decepticons are really starting to get outnumbered, here. Lucky that Galvatron and Acid Storm are in the next wave. I'm going to buy an extra Acid Storm and try my hand at repainting him as Thundercracker.

Sweet, Nemesis Prime is back in stock at the Hasbro Toy shop.

Yeah, I bookmarked the page (as well as Newegg's page for the only 9800GTX+ they have), and will refresh (both) every now and then to see if it (they) show up back in stock.

Damnation. I sat around all day, asking myself, "Do I really want a third repaint of Classics Prime?" And when I finally decided that, yes, I do in fact want a third repaint of Classics Prime (especially since the Classics Autobots are really starting to outnumber the Decepticons), HTS is sold out. In other pointless Classics discussion, reading Classics Nemesis Prime's bio got me thinking about Straxus, and how in the old Marvel comics he wound up in a clone body of Megatron. So I decided that the Deluxe Classics two-pack Megatron will be my Classics Straxus, to help fill out the Decepticon ranks. Deluxe Classics two-pack Optimus just goes on a shelf for random Primes, since I have a tendency to collect Optimus Prime even if I don't want the rest of a particular toy line.

When you right-click "My Computer" and bring up "Properties," how much RAM is showing? Is that the amount that it's supposed to have? You said it's a tablet, so I'm assuming it's got an integrated video chipset and that's going to borrow RAM, so remember to subtract for that. Because if you're computer is free of viruses and you're not running any extra processes, then I'm wondering if the tablet had a minimal ammount of RAM spread out over a pair of sticks, and one of the sticks died.

Hound = win. Now if I could just get a Classics Jazz (that is, a Deluxe Jazz) and Wheeljack, I'm more or less have all the Classics Autobots I want.

In most of the stores around hear, you can find Voyager Megs, Grimlock, and Lugnut. Lugnut is EVERYWHERE. But I'm surprised to hear you can find Bulkhead pretty easy there. In five stores I went to, four didn't have any, and I got the last one at the fifth.

Swap Deluxe Bumblebee for Activators Bumblebee. In some ways, Activators Bumblebee is the better toy, and he's much closer to correct scale. And a mini-con Prowl that unfolds into a Deluxe-sized robot. It sucks that Voyager Bulkhead is so much smaller in bot mode. His alt mode is sized fairly well to Voyager Prime's, and I think he's the more toon accurate figure. With those in mind, and the fact that I just don't like most bots enough to shell out for a Leader toy, I got Voyager Bulkhead, completing my quintet of the main-cast Autobots. In the last two or three days, I've checked my local Wal-Mart, local Target, local Toys R' Us, plus an out of the way Wal-Mart and K-Mart. Lugnut really starting to become a shelfwarmer in my area, and the one Wal-Mart had nothing but Ratchets and Blackarachnias. The first trio of Universe toys are turning up in Wal-Mart and K-Mart now too. But aside from finding a Soundwave at my local Wal-Mart like two weeks ago, I haven't seen hide nor hair of new Animated toys. Which sucks because I really want Jazz, if not Snarl.

If you've lived your whole life in Orange County, you're gonna have that home-town pride. Kinda like how I like Greensburg/Latrobe, even though this area's one big depressed crap hole. So, I wanna hear from people who moved to LA, especially people who grew up away from the West Coast. And I want to know, what's the big deal about LA? (I could ask the same about New York, BTW). It seems like everyone decides they want to move to one of those two cities and make it big, and I just don't get why. They're both expensive, crowded cities where it seems like just about every TV show is set, as if those two cities alone represented the whole of America. To me, that just seems like more competition for jobs where you'll barely make enough money to pay rent on a one-bedroom apartment that costs more than a mortgage payment on a good house in a lot of other areas. I mean, like I just said, the area where I live (western PA) is depressed, and there's not much in the way of jobs outside retail, so my wife and I have been thinking about moving. But LA and NY aren't even on my list. Personally, I've been looking into Columbus, Ohio, and my wife's pretty interested in Charlotte, North Carolina.

I was going to order one myself today, but Newegg sold out.

I don't mean the 9800GTX, I mean the 9800GTX+. They shrunk the chipset, then overclocked it back to the same default temperature, and dropped the price. I don't know what they're going for in Euros, but in the States it's about $140 for the 9600 you were looking at, vs. $200 for the GTX+. Since I don't have the cash for a GTX 280, and SLI isn't an option for me, I'm definitely going with the 9800 GTX+ myself. Oh, and one of the magazines I read (PC Mag, PC World, or CPU) just did a feature on video cards. Their conclusion is that two middling cards is almost always cheaper than one top-of-the-line, and while the single top-of-the-line does usually win in the end, the differences are negligible.