mikeszekely

Sony HTiB. This one's a little different than the one I got, but pretty close. My audiophile buddy really liked it. It's definitely not as good as a nice set of Paradigms and a high-end receiver, but it's probably already over the limit for what I'd want for my apartment. I'm surprised the neighbors haven't complained yet.

I've had bad texture pop-in occasionally. One time I got on an elevator, and all three characters were people (well, one Turian) shaped blobs, and as the elevator ran, one by one each texture loaded. But texture issues and the occasional pauses to load were minor nuisances. The only bug that really pissed me off was one where I'd get knocked around Oh, BTW, for those of you who finished the game, did you make it to 50 and get the Achievement that goes along with it? I'm wondering how hard it is to make it to 50. I'm at 45 right now, I've done the first three main missions after leaving the Citadel, and probably every side assignment there is, including the mining one (excluding, of course, any new side missions gained between Virmire and the end of the game). Five levels in the time left is doable, right?

Wait, what? Am I missing something? You started a ME character, leveled him/her up enough to get Singularity, and then quit that character? And later, you're going to start a Vanguard, and even though Vanguards don't get Singularity, yours will because of the previous character? How does that work?

Not a complaint for me! I didn't care much for the song lists in Guitar Hero II or III (and while I did like Rocks the 80's, I wish there was less Limozeen and more Journey or something). Rock Band has the most variety and all around goodness since the original Guitar Hero. Even bands I don't normally like, like Garbage and Hole, I kinda liked the songs they picked for the game. The only song I flat out do not like is Sabotage... seriously, I'd like to find the guy who thought that the Beastie Boys off-key yelling was music and kick him in the nads a few times. As for downloadable content, I'm a little disappointed that so much of it is covers, but there's still some stuff I definitely want to grab, especially the Metallica Pack, "My Sharona," and "Jukebox Hero." Still holding out for downloadable Def Leppard...

KOTOR was good, but I actually liked Jade Empire better. Go buy that, too. (The advantage there is, like KOTOR, it's backwards compatible, and every store around has really cheap copies). Oh, and if you like PC games, Neverwinter Nights, which is still better than NWN 2. You can buy the Diamond Edition with all the expansions for $20. It's starting to show its age a little, but I still like it.

Hot diggity damn! I was thinking from the first posted pic, "Meh, they look like cruddy animation models." But that up close pic has me wondering when I can preorder them.

Well, I'm not sure what to think about the guitar. I didn't have any trouble until I was playing stuff like Highway Star on medium. I'd swear I'm hitting all the notes, but the game begs to differ. I go back and play and easy song, and I can still get 100%. Hmm... Actually, my Xplorer is flaky. On both GHII and Rock Band, it'll occasionally shut off. Even though it's plugged in, the light's off, and the game's telling me to reconnect the controller. I'm going to wait awhile, and try got get GHIII with Les Paul or maybe just the Les Paul. In any case, you don't have to send your guitar back. You can fix it yourself. Directions here.

Yeah, at times I really wish I would have waited a little longer for the Pro, but on the other hand, I don't game much (I bought but never got around to Neverwinter Nights 2), and I think the white MacBook looks better than the bigger aluminum Pro. Considering that I could have bought two MacBooks for the price of one Pro, it was too hard to justify the extra price. If you're looking for a desktop replacement, the MacBook Pro is definitely a good choice (and $2500 is a fair price for a desktop replacement). But if you just need a multimedia and web browsing notebook, the regular MacBook is still a great choice.

Good sound is great for Mass Effect. When you've got your pistol zoomed, trying to take out a Geth Destroyer on the other end of a large room, and you hear a Husk shriek from one of your rears, you realize that directional sound has become an important part of gaming.

I know you keep saying you don't care about audio, but trust me, after you have video where you want it, you'll start to realize that HD visuals are squat without good sound. When you buy a A/V receiver (and while I'm sure expensive, high-end speakers really are worth the money, I bought a Sony 1000w system with speakers on clearance for $350, down from $500), you'll find you can connect a lot more stuff to that. My PS3, Wii, DVD player, and 360 all go through the receiver first (which was convenient, as my TV has just one HDMI input), which leaves one component and several S-Video inputs on the TV itself free. For stuff like my PS2 that connects directly to one of the TV's S-Video inputs, I ran some RCA extension cables to one of the audio only inputs on the receiver.

Honestly, even with a BIOS update, the voltages on Pentium 4/M/D chips are slightly different from the Core Duo/Core 2 Duo lines, so at best your processor is going to be a faster version of what you've already got, but still a significant step down from a Core 2 Duo (and Intel's still got some pretty sweet processors debuting in 2008). And while HDDs are pretty standardized, opticals aren't. My honest advice? Think carefully about what you want your laptop to do. If what you got works, add some RAM and maybe a new processor for some extra speed. But if you think you need the upgrades to get the laptop to where you want to be, you're really better off buying a new laptop. Oh, something I forgot to mention before... The price probably isn't. If you're looking for serious gaming on your laptop, I think the MacBook Pros hold up favorably to anything Dell or HP is offering, but for the basics, you can buy a Windows unit for $500-$700 on any given day, and I've seen sales as low as $230. Apple's pricing is pretty much set in stone, and the cheapest laptop they sell is the $1100 MacBook. IMHO, though, the MacBook is totally worth it. After using mine for about almost a year and a half now, pretty much all other laptops look chunky to me. OS X (yes, I did upgrade to Leopard) is cleaner, neater, more polished, and easier to use than Windows without being too restrictive or dumbed down. If it wasn't for the fact that Mac gaming is very sparse (although Boot Camp in Leopard fixes that issue) and the fact that Apples are designed to work with specific parts and pretty much need to be serviced by Apple Geniuses when something needs fixed, I would have totally abandoned Windows by now. As it is, since laptop parts are fairly proprietary anyway, I'll never buy another Windows laptop. But I like poking around inside my desktops, and the Mac Pro is really out of my price range, so I'm stuck building Windows desktops. Yeah, yeah, I know there's Linux, and I've tried a few distros, but it seems like each distro has its own set of standards that make installing new software a pain in the ass. And as much as I adore open source software, I'm not big on open-source formats like Vorbis. That wouldn't be such a big deal if getting new codecs was simple (there are a few good tricks for Ubuntu), but installing new codecs can be as painful as installing new software.

Is that your first time through? I thought they it was recommended that you play through on Normal, and go Hardcore on your second play through with your leveled-up party. Also, are you very far in? I died in a lot of my early encounters on Normal, but after doing some side quests, I'm on level 32 and I'm breazing through most encounters.

Hard to say. One of the primary reasons I still use Windows on my desktops is because they're easy to pick apart, but laptops are a huge pain. I'll do hard drive and RAM upgrades, but if it needs more than that, I'm off to the Apple Store for a new Mac notebook.

Give it time, and consider investing points in Assault Rifle. I'm about 20 hours in, and my assault rifle heats the slowest of all my weapons. Yeah, the accuracy at range isn't great with them, but up close the high rate of fire will chew through enemies much faster.

Are you talking laptop or desktop? I don't see any reason to go with a 5400 RPM hard drive in a desktop, but the speed gain in a laptop is, IMHO, trivial, and the slower hard drive will give a laptop better battery life. As for RAM, the OS has a lot to do with it, as well as what you want to do with your computer. If you're running Linux, Windows XP, or Mac OS X Tiger, and you're doing mostly web browsing and what not, you can get by with a gig, but that's become the new comfortable minimum. If you're running Windows Vista or Mac OS X Leopard, or you do a lot of gaming or multitasking, you're going to want 2. Honestly, if you can afford to pay a little more, RAM is a low-cost way of getting solid all-around performance gains. If you're looking at laptops, it's worth noting that it's often cheaper to buy a laptop in the default configuration and buy RAM later. I think it would have cost over $200 more to go from 512MB to 2GB in my MacBook if I would have ordered it that way from Apple, but I replaced the RAM myself for around $70. As far as software for copying DVDs to iPods, are you using Windows? If you are, try Videora iPod Converter. You can even download model-specific versions. You'll need another program, DVD Decrypter, to convert a DVD, but links and instructions come with the software. I couldn't find minimum requirements, but it's worth trying, since it's free. If you're a Mac user, try Handbrake.

You guys are having trouble with the assault rifles? I'd used them almost exclusively until I got the achievement and switched to my pistol. I don't think it's that they're too "random," it just lends itself to a different style of play. The pistol and sniper rifle are great for picking off enemies from cover, the assault rifle and shotgun are better for in your face, run-and-gun gaming.

I saw that Gamestop was charging $25 bucks, but I was under the impression that it was always supposed to be $20. That's why I held off, I figure I'll look next time I'm at Target or Wal-Mart.

I agree that it'd be cool to create your own paints, as I've yet to see any reason to hand over extra money for new paint jobs on a game that's already $10-$20 more than the previous seven games in the series but had the smallest selection of planes and the fewest missions (except maybe Air Combat... I'll be honest, I played one mission in Air Combat then pretty much threw the game away). You're a little late on the Idolmaster paint, though. 11th post on this page.

Ooh, tough choice. I really enjoyed the set list in Rock Band. Even songs I by bands I usually don't like, like Garbage, I enjoyed in Rock Band. The only songs I didn't enjoy to play were "Highway Star," because as nice as the Rock Band Strat is, it seems to have a hard time picking up a lot of successive notes, and I really felt like I was hitting a lot of notes it said I was missing, "Sabotage," because the Beastie Boys suck even in the most awesome of games, and "Train Kept A-Rollin'" because it's kind of repetitive. Mind you, that's just with the guitar. I just started the drum solo career, and so far I liked playing all the songs (the first two venues). I haven't done any vocals yet.

Hey, a good game is one you can play twice and the second time feels fresh.

I'm playing renegade, and I got that thing you mentioned. As for the side quest, I'd actually gone to Eletania first to look for a lost probe, and stumbled on the other quest just by driving around a bit instead of going straight for the probe. I can tell you what you missed, if you'd like.

And it would have been a losing bet.

Not really a spoiler, but I suppose there are people who never played the game but might yet, so I'll stick it in a spoiler thingy anyway, but I need help with a side quest.

Are we talking about the difference between photo and photo quality? Most of the dedicated photo printers I've seen print paper that's the same size as you'd get if you had Konica develop your film at Giant Eagle. As much as I do know about computers, printers aren't really an area of expertise for me. I'd been without a printer for a long time, since I didn't feel like replacing the ink the the Epson, and I bought the printer I have now because I wanted a color laser, and Staples had a good Black Friday deal. But it's a low-end printer, and it does a pretty lousy job printing photos, but it made me a nice cover for my copy of Wii Sports.

I had a Stylus a few years back. Granted, it was CX3200, but I absolutely do NOT recommend them. The ink cartridges were some of the more expensive at the time, and it went through said ink like green beer through a lightweight on St. Patty's. It wound up being an expensive stand to elevate my newer Samsung. EDIT: And LPT ports? The 90's called, David, and they want their tech back. Next you'll be telling me you back your data on ZIP drives...