mikeszekely

That's not entirely true. There was a Minicon paired with Optimus in Armada, Sparkplug, who was more or less Bumblebee.

No, Guitar Hero is REALLY good. Part of what makes it so good is that Harmonix and Red Octane have done a remarkable job making you feel like you're playing a guitar. Because, let's face it, the twitchy flailing you do while playing DDR isn't exactly dancing. They've also done a great job of making the game accessible to everyone. A tutorial teaches you the basics, and the Easy level eases you in with just three frets. Master it, though, and you can try some of the harder difficulty levels. And A7? Van Halen's confirmed for Guitar Hero 2. The rumor on the street is that, in addition to rock classics and indie rock hits, Harmonix may be including some guitar mixes of classic videogame tunes, included the theme from Megaman.

I've never claimed any such thing. Roddenberry's vision was often more idealistic than realistic. I like Star Trek because they're good stories. Mostly.

You guys act like Enterprise was the first place we saw stuff from TOS updated. Did you guys miss the DS9 episode where the Defiant-class Defiant was sent back in time by the Orb of Time, Trials and Tribble-ations? A little light-hearted, it was still a highly entertaining episode. And since it was after they switched from studio models to CGI, you get to see a gorgeous CGI NCC-1701 Constitution class pre-refit Enterprise.

I'll second what Mog said. A lot... and I do mean a lot... of what TNG so good was the crew. And at first, even though you know that DS9 is set near the end of TNG, it feels so foreign. But the crew kinda grows together, and as they do, you find yourself liking them more and more. Also, since DS9 is a fixed point instead of a starship out exploring and encounter new villians of the week, you get a set of regular villians that really get a chance to shine (Weyoun for the win!). In fact, character development is one of DS9's greatest strengths, and the writers' ability to connect the viewers with even bit characters make for some excellent stories with real emotion (check out "Honor Among Thieves"). I'm not going to lie to you... there are some bland, boring episodes, especially in the earlier seasons. But some of Star Trek's best stories are to be found in DS9.

I reccomend ABC, mostly for its ease of use. After you've installed it, right-click the torrent file you downloaded, then choose the "Open With..." command. If ABC isn't on the list, browse for it. Then, assuming that there are people seeding the file, ABC will download the avi that goes with your torrent file. In the future, instead of downloading a torrent to your computer and opening it with ABC later, you'll be able to instruct your browser to open torrent files with ABC to begin with (the one real advantage to Windows and ABC over Mac OS and Transmission).

What OS and what bittorrent software are you using?

He was the groundskeeper. And you guys are forgetting where some of the best looks into the Acadamy come from... Deep Space Nine. Remember, Nog (the nephew of Quark, the Ferengi bartender) joined Starfleet. And from Deep Space Nine, you can kind of get the impression that it's one part military-style classroom studies, and one part field training.

Okay, I'm home with mine, charged it up for three hours, and played New Super Mario Bros on it for a little bit. Now, while it's true that it's not SP or Micro-sized, the DS Lite is noticably smaller and lighter than the original. The brightest setting is almost too bright, and the second to dimmest setting is about new SP level. Dimmest is about as bright, maybe slightly brighter than the original DS. Let Apple and Nintendo sort out who designed what first, but the overall design is VERY similar to the new MacBooks. They're identical in color, and both have that glossy on the outside, matte on the inside design. I'm suprised more people haven't made a fuss about the stylus. Yes, compared to the one that goes with my Axim, it feels like cheap plastic... but at least it's about the same size as the one that goes with my Axim. For a lot of games like Brain Age, it makes all the difference. If you have a DS already, it's going to be a personal preference. Some people are going to gladly shell out the cash for the Lite and be happy about it, other people aren't going to be able to justify it. But if you don't have a DS yet, the Lite is definately the model to get. Oh, David, I didn't have any dead pixels in my Lite, and I'm not sure how many reports of them there are. It might be safe to import, although I still don't get your fixation with the Navy one. I've owned a lot of electronics, including some white ones (no, I'm not a huge Apple fan... I do want to get a MacBook, but it'll be the first Mac I've ever owned). But never a blue one.

Highly reccomended. It's not just the GBC games... GBA games are more comfortable to play on the SP than the DS (at least the original), because B and A (in GBA mode) are still mapped to B and A on the DS, not Y and B. Passable for RPGs where you're mostly hitting the A button, but for action games like Castlevania or Megaman Zero, you're forced to bend your thumb at an angle that makes you wind up grabbing your GBA anyway. And I can't state enough how much of an improvement the new screens are. The passable front-lit screens that washed everything out were replaced with stunning backlit screens that are brighter and more clear than on the original DS (will find out how the Lite stacks up today).

Hey, Guitar Hero 2, God of War 2, Final Fantasy XII... the PS2's not dead yet. Oh, and I'm not personally interested, but GTA came out yesterday. Porting PS2 games to PSP was irritating, but for some reason, I'd like to see more PSP games on PS2. Wipeout, Maverick Hunter X, Megaman Powered Up, and the new Gradius collection would all kick ass on the PS2.

Seriously? I think that you're probably the opposite of me! I've been using PCs since my old 486 DX2 Packard Bell with Windows 95, and I've been using Windows XP pretty much since it came out, on a total of four different machines. And it's not that I dislike Windows now, just that I'm kinda bored with using it everyday, so I decided to branch out. I've messed around with a few Linux distros (Knoppix, SUSE, and Mepis mostly), and while they seem interesting, the computer I've dedicated to being a Linus box is a tad underpowered, and combined with my lack of familiarity with KDE, I haven't done much with it. On the other hand, I installed a patched version of Mac OS X Tiger on a spare hard drive and put it in my main system. It doesn't run perfectly, because the hardware isn't real Apple hardware, but I've still found myself to be very impressed. It looks more modern than Windows XP, perhaps even Vista. In fact, a lot of the newer features to be incorporated in Vista are already in Tiger. I think it's also very user-friendly, as well. Overall, I think I'm finding that there are some things that Mac OS does better (mostly the little day-to-day things), and some things Windows does better (gaming, and I still like Windows Explorer). And it's not so much that I want to switch to being a Mac-user as it is that, in the future, I intend to keep at least one Mac and one Windows PC up and running. Me! I've decided to get rid of my Windows laptop and get a MacBook. And FYI, my friend was checking out how Mac OS ran on my PC. He has a Mac Mini with the Power PC chip and a gig of RAM. Mac OS sees my computer has having a Core Duo (although it's actually a P4 with hyper-threading) and 1.5GB of RAM, and he was floored by how much faster my system was running. So we poked around a bit, and it seems that the Intel Macs perform much better than the Power PC Macs... so long as the apps are supported. Rossetta, the software that emulates Power PC for PPC-only apps, is apparently a bit sluggish. Oh, and have you guys noticed that the Power Mac G5 is the only Mac line without Intel chips yet? Rumor has it that the G6 won't come out until next year... because they're going to be quad-core...

Moore has been pretty much against backwards compatibility from the get-go. Backwards compatibility through emulation was added later, because Xbox fans caused a ruckus when they heard that the 360 wasn't going to be backwards compatible. And now Moore's telling us again that we don't want backwards compatibility, and again the Xbox fans are causing a ruckus. And again the emulation team is telling us that they're working on it. Bottom line? Moore's been telling us no backwards compatibility, and the emulation team has been telling us their goal is 100% Realistically, it's somewhere in between. The emulation team is never going to reach 100%, but updates for popular software are going to continue well after the next few times Moore tells us we don't need it.

I've never really seen mouse gestures as useful. I'm too keyboard-centric. Alt-left=back, alt-right=forward, etc. </irrelevance> 405353[/snapback] Keyboards rule.

You know what's funny? I grew up on 80's hairbands. Def Leppard and Queensryche were my absolute favorites, but I also enjoyed Blue Murder, Whitesnake, Skid Row, Iron Maiden, Megadeth, Winger, Motley Crue, Steve Vai, Joe Satriani, etc. But now? It's not that I don't like them... throw on something from Def Leppard's Hysteria album and see if I don't sing along. It's more like I lost interest. So even when they come out with new albums, I can't bring myself to be interested. Oddly enough, what I do listen to these days might be considered trendy today, but the genre was more or less underground indie stuff back when I was in high school. Anyway, look in my car and you'll find Anything and everything by the Juliana Theory Futures by Jimmy Eat World Bleed American by Jimmy Eat World From Under the Cork Tree by Fall Out Boy A Fever You Can't Sweat Out by Panic! At the Disco Mmhmm by Relient K Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge by My Chemical Romance Based On a True Story by The Starting Line Alive III by Kiss Loud by Timo Maas

Why? Again, why? I tried Opera once, on a reccomendation. I couldn't discover anything special about it, per se, which I wouldn't hold against it if there weren't a ton of other browsers available that do the same stuff and look better doing it.

Mods, if thy deem this too off-topic, may your divine wrath strike this thread down. But I've participated in plenty of "where do you live?" "how old are you?" "what car do you like?" etc threads. Well, we all get to Macross World (among our many other favored websites) somehow. I'm curious to know how. Myself, I'd say I've mainly been a Windows man, having owned computers that have run 95, 98, ME, and three XPs. During the days of dial-up, I used Internet Explorer, but after switching to cable, I got frustrated with the ammount of malware that ended up on my system daily, and quickly discovered Firefox, which is now my browser of choice... at least on Windows. Recently, I've begun to branch out a little. I built another computer out of spare parts, and with no system disc, I figured I'd give Linux a whirl. After some trial and error, I like the KDE desktop over GNOME, and although I'd really like to run SUSE, that computer just can't handle it, so I settled on SimplyMepis. Again, Firefox is the browser of choice... open-source loves open-source. More recently still, I've developed an infatuation with the new MacBooks. Mind you, I haven't touched a Mac since I was in high school (Mac OS 6 and 7 look kinda familiar), so I decided to try installing Mac OS X on a spare hard drive in my regular PC (no, it's not exactly simply, but since Tiger supports Intel x86 processors, it can be done with a little tweaking). I have to say, I'm impressed, perhaps impressed enough to use a Mac for everything sans PC gaming (I'm in Mac OS now, in fact). The interface is simple, intuitive, and makes XP look positively archaic. With Mac OS, you can still use Firefox, but Apple's Safari browser has a more simple look and feel that meshes better with the rest of the Mac OS environment. Another good choice is Camino.

They have the gimped version for people like you. They arguably should have gimped it even more. They should have the price on the gimped version at least to $399 but that may not have been possible. If you don't want need Blu-Ray, etc then don't bother bringing up $599 as $499 is for you. If $599 bothers, you most likely don't give a lick about HDMI, etc and 20GB is more than enough. You don't need to worry about memory cards or any such, either. Even so, I'll be very surprised if the $599 price point remains for very long. Certainly for the initial run, which is about guaranteed to sell out (I'm very interested in anyone thinks it WON'T). I'll bet by Christmas 2007, PS3 is at $499/$399. Prices that people are willing to pay HAVE come up. I never thought the PSP would have been successful due to it's price point and feature set versus something like the DS... but it has been. The XBOX did not make a significant imprint in Asia and the 360 has been lackluster. This shows with development and PS3 is going to have more wow titles sooner. I enjoy my 360 premium but there are still no MUST HAVE titles and except for Oblivion and GRAW I haven't been playing it so much recently... 402786[/snapback] Actually, my TV does have HDMI, and HDMI isn't just some fancy input for Blu-Ray players, it's a digital step up from component video. Not to mention that the $500 PS2 is also missing slots for memory cards, doesn't support wireless networks, has a smaller hard drive, and still costs more than I'm willing to pay for a console? The gimped version isn't for "people like me." No one in their right mind should be considering the gimped one. Remember that the $500 PS3 doesn't have wi-fi either. And that the actual technical superiority of the PS3 is still debatable, or that developers aren't planning on making PS3 games look any better than 360 games. $500 is no bargain. I think this is actually the crux of the issue. Sony isn't all that interested in next-generation console gaming. They're more interested in using the PlayStation brand and the naivity of the masses as a trojan horse to get Blu-Ray into more household. If I was in Sony's shoes, I'd probably be doing the same thing... their consumer electronics division has been hurting bad. Sony is gambling the future of the company on the success of Blu-Ray, and the PS3 is their ace in the hole. But if Sony's not interested in gamers beyond using us as a means to establish Blu-Ray in the marketplace, why should be we interested in their product?

I think JB0 hit on a lot of the points that I was going to make. Yeah, if you look at the PS3 as primarily a Blu-Ray player, then compared to the other players that will be on the market, $600 is a bargain, and it even plays games! But if I wanted a Blu-Ray player, which I honestly don't at this point, I'd wait for the tech to come down, and maybe wait for one of the players LG is working on that can read Blu-Ray AND HD-DVD. And that's just it. While some technophiles and early adopters are thinking "Blu-Ray," I think most people are looking at the game console, decended from the PS2 game console, decended from the original PlayStation game console. And $600 is just too much for a game console, even one with features that many of us don't care for or need.

You, like Sony, are ignoring what pushed them to the front in the FIRST place. The PS1 was 300$. The Saturn was 400. This was a BIG deal, as 400 was the upper limit of what people were willing to pay at the time. It still is, as far as I can tell. The PS1 stayed profitable during the ensuing price wars down to 200, while Sega lost money on every Saturn they sold during the war(a redesign eventually made the Saturn profitable at 200, but it was too late to do a lot of good). The PS1 launched with a good software collection and a continuous flow of new titles, while the US Saturn launch was COMPLETELY messed up. The N64 was late to the party. Massively. By the time it got there, many of Nintendo's long-time developers had jumped ship for Sega and Sony. And when the Saturn folded, they moved to Sony because the PS had a larger user base and cheaper media(That, not size, was the deciding factor behind the move to CD. You can MAKE a huge ROM cart, it's just expensive. And ANY size ROM cart costs more to make than a CD/DVD). At the time, Sony was also the least abusive of the 3 companies. Developers were greeted with no exclusivity contracts, no minimum game requirements, and no painfully high licensing fees. In short, they took the #1 slot by being first to market(with a strong launch, too), cheaper than the competition, and very developer-friendly. The PS2 wasn't absurdly overpriced, but it had a bad launch and wasn't profitable for the first year or 2. It beat the Dreamcast due mainly to marketing, though Sega's reputation from the 32x and Saturn certainly didn't help. Marketing only gets you so far, though. They lost signifigant ground to the XBox, and would've lost more if it had launched close to the PS2. Sony's also become a much more abusive licensor since they became the primary market force, doing things like requiring developers make PSP games to get PS2 games licensed(you might have noticed the PSP has a lot of ports in the pipeline. That's why) and blocking releases on a whim(rumors that they deny licenses merely for being graphically unimpressive have been confirmed multiple times). Nintendo's done a lot this generation to shake the damage the N64 did to their image, and has some features on their next system that have people very interested. If they can sustain momenteum this time, they'll be a force to be reckoned with next generation. The "virtual console" gives them a very strong footing in the nostalgia market, as well. The systems emulated on the Wii all have a fair bit of appeal(PCEngine/TG16 was a big deal in Japan). The 360 has pulled out of it's launch slump. It's going to take a very strong PS3 launch AND a price cut for it to be immediatly competitive. A price cut which MS will likely match to stay ahead. Both MS and Nintendo are making active efforts to court developers while Sony is telling them to bend over and take it up the ass. Sony's making the same mistakes that Nintendo, Sega, and Atari made back when THEY were the big fish. And only one of those stories came close to a happy ending. The PS3 as it exists now is an almost unparalleled screwup. If the PS3 stays at currently announced pricing, the 360 and Wii WILL take a large portion of Sony's market share, regardless of launch library. And when Sony is not the overwhelmingly dominant force, developers WILL leave Sony for a friendlier company. They have no reason to stay if Sony doesn't have a LARGE lead on the competition. And when Sony loses sofware support they'll lose more marketshare, because game machines are ultimately sold on the strength of their library, not technical specifications, cool logos, or manufacturer names. Depending on how fast Sony reacts, they could lose #1 entirely. 402293[/snapback] While you've raised several valid points, I think you missed one major point when it comes to software. It's not just about how Sony treats developers/publishers vs Microsoft or Nintendo, or about how the high price-point will have developers thinking twice before developing for the PS3. Rising development costs means that, in order to make a profit, they have to reach the widest possible audience, which will more often than not mean releasing a game on multiple platforms. There will be far fewer 3rd party exclusives. Suddenly, it's less about buying the system that has the games you like, and more about which system with the games you like do you want to buy? The $400 one or the $600 one? Microsoft already has a lot more Japanese support this time around, too. First and second-party franchises could define the difference between Microsoft and Sony, and while Microsoft has fewer, I think games like Halo and Fable stand out a bit more than Jak and Daxter or even Killzone. God of War could have helped Sony, but the next one is coming for PS2, leaving time for a healthy price drop on the 3 before a third God of War, and Gran Turismo has always been big for Sony, but then again, Microsoft's Forza Motorsport was no slouch. Nintendo obviously has the most first party franchises up their sleeves, and nobody makes games quite like Nintendo. Plus, the Wii is different, and being different paid off big-time for the DS. I think a lot of people are going to be very curious about the Wii, and it will likely do much better than the N64 and Gamecube. That said, though, I think outside of Nintendo's loyalist fanbase, many people looking at the Wii are looking at it in addition to another console. Say, a 360 for their tradition hardcore gaming, and a Wii to try something different. In the end, though, the fanboy factor can't be dismissed. Sony knows it (see SCEE CEO's earlier remarks about being able to sell 5,000,000 units without any launch software), and we know it too. Ken Kutaragi could crap in a bag and slap the PlayStation logo on it, and fanboys would rush out to buy it. That fanboy factor is going to keep Sony in the game.

Let's not forget that the Xbox 1 used an off-the-shelf Pentium III, and ran on Microsoft's on Direct X software. And what's the ratio of backwards compatible to not backwards compatible there? Bottom line, I wouldn't count on backwards compatibility as a selling point for the PS3.

From Star Wars, any of those ridiculously large, wedge-shaped designs. Acclamator, Victory, Imperial, Executor, etc. The bigger they get, the more over-the-top they get, the meaner they get... exactly what you'd expect from an evil Empire. Gotta be honest, thought, I couldn't care less for just about every other ship larger than a starfighter in the entire franchise. Most of my favorites come from Trek. The best of the best would be, in no order: Excelsior-class Ambassador-class Akira-class Prometheus-class Sovereign-class Nova-class Constitution-class (refit) Defiant-class Galaxy-class D'deridex-class Romulan Warbird Valdore-class Romulan Warbird Scimitar-class Romulan Warbird Klingon Bird-of-Prey

I hope it is backwards compatible with all American and Japanese tittles. I hope Bandai releases a Macros game for the PS3, so we can finally play Macross without having spend extra cash. 401310[/snapback] Don't count on it. Whereas the PS2 had a PSX processor and the GBA had a GBC processor, last I heard, the PS3 is going to use emulation, like the 360. And apparently, SCEI thought that emulation was going to be easier to set up than it's turning out to be.

Sony Computer Entertainment Europe CEO David Reeves in an interview with Computer and Video Games, via Gamespot. Now Sony is publicly stating their belief that fanboys will buy it just because it says PlayStation. Kinda makes you wonder why there are so many Sony loyalists...

Hmm, I think I missed the Space Channel 5 level in A Link To the Past. Japanese Zelda's kinda hot...