mikeszekely

Ah, paper magazines. Maybe I should start reading some again. Any others confirmed? What's that bring the total list to?

I'd buy a Classics Gears, Cosmos, and Seaspray, but only if they were Scout class.

I agree with eriku, the alt mode doesn't really look like anything. But the figure's a must buy, as bot mode is one of the best and most G1 looking Megatrons since... um... G1.

Wait, when was Prowl confirmed? I only remember Sunstreaker, Sideswipe, and Octane? Not that I'm complaining, I'm up for a Prowl. And Wheeljack, Jazz, Ironhide, Ratchet, Hound, Cylconus, Galvatron, Blitzwing, and Shockwave. And new Seekers based on IDW's (at the very least, give a Thundercracker to those of us who couldn't afford the Botcon set!). And maybe a Nova Prime based on the sketches in Spotlight: Optimus Prime.

On a big screen, the difference between 720p and 1080p can be pretty noticeable. Not so much on a little 32" screen.

Because, from a gamer's perspective, you don't need any of that crap. Until this summer, it's really been a simple $400 vs. $600 for a box that plays video games. Card reader? Haven't used the one that came with the PS3. Wi-fi? Flaky on my PS3, and content to use a wired connection for both. HD-DVD add-on? Not necessary for Gears of War. People who were looking for an solid Blu-ray player might have found $600 to be a bargain, but a lot of gamers would have been happier with a cheaper PS3 and games on DVDs. As for upgrading the PS3's hard drive, I applaud Sony for using standard parts and making it a simple procedure. Too bad I don't really have a reason to upgrade. I installed Linux on my PS3, and I still figure I've got plenty of room. With Xbox games on the XBLM, I can certainly see why more hard drive space would be better for the 360, but I've still got 11.9GB free on my original 20GB hard drive. Finally, I'd be more pissed about having to buy a Microsoft-specific HDMI cable if HDMI was absolutely necessary. But component video is still HD video, and at least Microsoft put a component cable in the box. Which reminds me, don't forget to add the cost of at least a component cable when comparing the value of a 360 vs. a PS3. Anyway, as I mentioned before, with the regular Xbox 360 at $350 and the 40GB PS3 at $400, the PS3 is finally priced competitively with the 360, so price isn't really a big issue anymore. But the game library is. Most of the games out there are for both consoles, and while we've actually been getting some good PS3 exclusives lately, I think the 360's exclusives have been a little bit better.

So KITT's not a Trans-Am... I can deal with that (although with Chevy relaunching the Camaro and Dodge relaunching the Charger, now would be a great time for Pontiac to relaunch the Trans-Am). But KITT a Ford? Someone just raped my childhood.

Oh, I bought my PS3 for games. They just aren't out yet (God of War 3 and Metal Gear Solid 4).

I'm not denying that it was a huge mistake on Microsoft's part to shovel technically defective products out to stores. It was also a mistake to deny there was a problem. But at least they're owning up to it and fixing it now. It's not the exact same thing Sony did... after the lawsuit, Sony only agreed to fix consoles manufactured between certain dates, and to this day Sony maintains that there was nothing wrong with them. Good for you. I still have a launch day 360. I'm on my second PS2, though. Without any numbers, we can only guess whether the RRoD or DRE is the champion. It might seem like RRoD, but that could be because it gets more current press (and because of idiots like my one friend who just got a 360 and tried to cram it into his entertainment center flush vertically with the wood divider between its shelf and the TV flush with one side and his stereo flush with the other... probably the only way to overheat it faster would be to stick it in the oven). Library? If you mean size, sure... the 360's just turning two, and the PS2 is seven. It's got five years of games on the 360. But quality? That's highly subjective, not to mention the fact that a lot of PS2 games have or will have sequels on the 360, including Katamari Damacy, Ace Combat, Devil May Cry, and Grand Theft Auto. What's missing? MGS and God of War, the reasons why I bought a PS3. Oh, and JRPGs (most of which, including Final Fantasy, I can't stand, and it's not like we're seeing a glut of those on the PS3).

Yeah, their policy of extending the 360's warranty against RRoD to three years and fixing all those 360s at a cost of, what'd they say, $3 billion? Yeah, that really gets my goat. Why can't they just do what Sony did and deny that there was any problem until a class action lawsuit over "Disc Read Error" forces them to fix or replace a certain group of consoles, even while still denying there was a problem? In all honesty, yeah, I've heard a few complaints about the MS's service on the net. But everyone I know that's sent one back go their replacement in about two, two and a half weeks without incident.

There are audio receivers that are little more than a stereo component, or audio receivers that are really just DVD players with a few extra audio inputs. When you go up one more step, they're audio/video receivers. So, in your scenario, if you have just an audio receiver, you'd run HDMI to the TV, and Toslink to the receiver. If you have an A/V receiver, though, you'd just run HDMI to the receiver, then HDMI from the receiver to the TV. If you only have one HDMI port on the TV, but you have more than one on the receiver, you could hook up your PS3 and, say, an HD-DVD player to the receiver, then receiver to the TV. The TV would be set to HDMI, but you could go between HDMI 1 and 2 on the receiver.

Ah. No, you're right about that. Throw a pair of high-end video cards into a compatible mobo with a good processor and plenty of RAM (I still can't believe the PS3 is stuck with 256MB), and you can consistently output better visuals than any next-gen console probably before that console even gets around to launching.

Five. Hairy Gundam seems to have it's own model number and counts as a separate unit from Virtue. The problem with 00 isn't that it does or doesn't have the uber Gundams always winning out. The problem with 00 is that, IMHO, people are gushing over its "originality" just because instead of Earth vs. Colonies, it's real-world countries glommed into generic factions vs. other real countries glommed into generic factions. Nevermind the fact that 00 has pretty much take every other Gundam cliche and run with it, and dare I say it, the mechanical designs range from vaguely SEED-ish to crap. A winner? 00 is WORSE so far than SEED or Wing, and while it's kind of early to say so, I don't see the writers doing anything to change that any time soon.

We don't go source>TV>sound system. We go source>A/V receiver>TV. Sorry, David, but if you've just got a stereo and you connected your sources to your TV, and your TV to a free audio input (like my dad did) on that stereo, your audio setup is... dated, to put it politely. You don't split your sources' video and audio components among the TV and the receiver, you connect all your sources to the receiver first, then the receiver send video to the TV and audio to the surround speakers and, in some cases, the TV's speakers, depending on how the source is set up. And I honestly have no clue why they have a digital output on a television.

That may be true, but a lot of us would rather buy a game that looks dated by PC standards without having to spend another $300 on a graphics card to run it, secure in the knowledge that we can play it without installing and configuring it to work with our hardware, on the big TV from our comfy couch/chair rather than hunched in front of the computer monitor in a crappy desk chair.

Sony's been bleeding money and the "Computer Home Entertainment" division is the band-aid on the wound. They simply couldn't afford to lose money on the PS3 the way Microsoft can for the 360. By the same token, they needed Blu-ray to be a win. While DVD was starting to catch on in the US, the PS2 was responsible for finally getting DVD to surpass VCD in Asia. Sony banked on the popularity of the PlayStation brand to push Blu-ray onto the masses, and unfortunately, they did it at the cost of competitive pricing. They're only now getting some solid 1st and 2nd party software, and they've only recently managed to get a competitively priced PS3 on the shelves (and even then, it's still more expensive than the standard 360). I think Sony's marketing is improving, as I think they realize they have to focus on the games with Blu-ray and HD-DVD at a stalemate, but they've essentially given Microsoft a two-year head start. I think their efforts now are just too little, too late. Like yourself, I'm glad to have a Blu-ray player to go with the rest of my home theater, but the gamer in me is having a hard time justifying the purchase. As for GT5, the only difference between the GT games are prettier visuals and more cars no one wants to drive. There's only so many times I can drive around Autumn Ring to win a POS Mazda Demio that isn't just worse than the car I used to win it, but is worse than the car I used to win it BEFORE I modded it. I'll take Forza over GT.

Sad, but true. Home theater electronics are like heroin. You think you'll just have a little taste, then you spend the rest of your life chasing the dragon.

Five terrorist Gundams piloted by kids with mental problems, and now Gundams with hair. Anyone still think 00 is really going to turn out better than Wing or SEED?

Ooh, sexy. Dammit, David, you're making me want to buy a new receiver, and I haven't even had mine for a year yet! Well... I'm actually OK for a little while. I've got my 360 hooked up with component/Toslink, and I've got the 360's HD-DVD player for that. I've got my PS3 on HDMI/Toslink for Blu-ray. I've got an upconverting DVD player with HDMI/coax for DVDs and DivX. My bases are really covered. Of course, now I can use the PS3 for upconverting DVDs, and the 360 for DivX, so the DVD player is actually redundant. So what I want to do now is build a Home Theater PC. My friend already gave me a HTPC case with a power supply. Newegg's got a Gigabit mobo that's HDCP-compliant with a HDMI out. If I match that with an LGA 775 Intel processor and some RAM, plus a DVD-ROM I pulled from my main computer, I'll have all the basics except the hard drive for under $200. I can grab a big hard drive when they're on sale cheap, maybe add a low-profile TV tuner card, and I'll be set on that, and since it's HDMI, it'll be as easy as pulling the DVD player and using it's hookups. Plus, after I save a bit more, I can replace the borrowed DVD-ROM with an LG DVD/CD burner Blu-ray/HD-DVD reader.

Spoken like someone who's surprised the PS3 isn't winning just because the PS2 dominated the previous round. Of course, if the one who was on top at one point was always on top, we'd still be playing Ataris. With the possible exception of 1st and 2nd party developers, no one is going to take the time to really tease all the power out of the PS3 that they could (power that, I might add, was was certainly exaggerated by Sony in the first place, and was never likely to "leave the 360 in the dust"). Exclusives are becoming a thing of the past. Hell, even half the Wii games out are dumbed-down ports of the 360/PS3 version with tacked on waggle controls (and of course, without waggle controls, you have a PS2 game, and since the PS2 is still selling, developers keep supporting it). Since the North American market has become the largest market for video games, and the 360 has outsold the PS3 here, it seems like the 360 is their target platform, with the PS3 getting a port. The result? Best case scenario, you have PS3 games that look and play exactly like their Xbox 360 counterpart. Worst case, the PS3 version is plagued with technical issues. Games don't sell a system the way they used to in a market where maybe 1 out of 20 games is an exclusive, so it boils down to price and features. $600 might have been a bargain for a Blu-ray player, but that was a feature that the average gamer didn't really care about, and $600 was too much for a game console when there was already one for $400 with 95% of the same games. By the time they released the $400 40GB PS3, they've already suffered through two years of people buying 360's instead. This is coming from someone who's owned all four of Sony's consoles. I'm disappointed that I don't get more use out of my PS3. But let's face it, Microsoft tried to built the console they thought gamers wanted to play, and gamers bought it. Nintendo wanted to build a console that non-gamers would play, and everyone buys it (although I hear Wii software isn't selling as well). Sony built what they hoped would be a trump card in the Blu-ray/HD-DVD format war, and Sony abused their fan base when they slapped the "PlayStation" brand on a Blu-ray player and expected us to buy it just because it had that "PlayStation" brand.

Prime's and Galvatron's are both really good too, and Kup's was certainly different. The art in Ramjet's was gorgeous; I really like how Robby Musso's art manages to be really detailed while retaining an animated feel. IDW's putting out a second TPB with the Soundwave, Kup, Galvatron, Prime, and Ramjet's Spotlights in February.

Is the PS3 your only system? It's actually worse when you have a 360, too. 9 times out of 10 the PS3 version of a game has technical issues not present in the 360 version, and even when they're equal, I wind up buying the 360 version anyway because Xbox Live and Achievements become the deciding factor. That just leaves the PS3 exclusives, which for the most part have been kind of mediocre. Here's hoping that Ratchet & Clank and Uncharted are a sign that the PS3's exclusives are going to continue to improve.

Y'know, I really had my doubts about IDW. While Furman did write some interesting stories for both Marvel UK and Dreamwave, Marvel still had its share of cheesy stories and Dreamwave was a little disorganized the way it picked up some of the Marvel background while disregarding even more. And Infiltration was a little dull, while Hearts of Steel was a little dumb. But the Spotlights have been fantastic, and Stormbringer and Escalation erased any doubts Infiltration created in Furman's TF relaunch. I'd pretty much given up on comic books, but I'm buying the IDW trades as they come out.

I know I'm a little behind, but I just got Spotlight: Ramjet today. While some characters are true to their G1 looks, I've noticed some characters in the IDW series with Classics designs, and some all-new modernized designs (like Jazz and Prowl as a current model Porsche and 350Z, and the Seekers as F-22s). I would LOVE to see new Classics/Universe figures with those updated models. Speaking of IDW, I noticed they reprinted Dreamwave's War Within series as a new TPB. Does anyone know, did they actually finish it this time?

I thought Giren's Greed saw an actual PSP release?