mikeszekely

Keanu's not great, but he's tolerable, and a decent story or supporting cast could make up for it. I'd definately rather watch Keanu than Nicholas Cage.

There is absolutely no way I'd ever consider buying anything to eat or drink at the theater. Again, it's a perfect example of businesses ignoring the law of supply and demand... they assume that, just because they forbid you to bring outside food or drinks into the theater, that they're forced the demand up to the point where they can charge as much as they want, instead of finding that nice point on the graph where profits are actually maximized. I mean, inisde the movie theater, a large drink is over $4. Outside, I could go to McDonald's and get value meal large-sized for $4. Inside the theater, bottled water is $3.25. Outside, I could get a case of bottled water for that price.

I'm probably going to check it out. I mean, I'm sure it's not going to be the best movie I'll see this year. Hell, it might be the worst movie I see this year. But, it's not like there's anything else playing. I mean, I hadn't seen a movie in the theater since 'The Grudge', so I finally broke down and went to see 'Hitch.' And let's not even mention crap like 'The Boogeyman.'

I find your lack of faith disturbing... Hey, I'm with Gui... I'd rather watch, at the least, Gundam TV, Z Gundam, and Gundam ZZ to Star Wars any day.

Another white RX-78 comes from the Mobile Suits Variations, the RX-78-3. Supposedly, it was built from the remains of the two RX-78-2s the Zeons blew up at the very beginning of Gundam, and it was used to test the magnetic coating that the RX-78-2 would get much later in the series. RX-78-2

Yeah, but what's the Force compared to transforming space battleships armed with mega particle cannons and pop divas?

It makes you wonder if anyone out there running any of these corporations took any basic economics classes. I mean, doesn't anyone remember supply and demand? It used to be that if you wanted to maximize profits, you'd figure out how much it cost to produce, then how many you could sell at each price. You didn't sell the prodcuct for outrageously high prices (CDs, if I recall, only started to go down recently. They debuted around $15, then peaked at almost $20). You also didn't oversaturate the market, either (if I see another underage pop starlet/actress come out with another album, I swear I'm gonna puke). Nowadays, instead of finding that point where profits are maximized, it's almost like they want to cram subpar crap down our throats, charge us a premium for it, and sue us if we even contemplate trying to get it from an alternative source. They've already encrpytped movies on DVD, and started suing software manufactures who make software that can decrypt the DVD. They're suing file distributors on the internet. What's next? They sue Blockbuster for allowing people to borrow the few copies of a movie they paid for (and worse, for profiting from it)? Sue HBO for broadcasting the movies on TV? Start suing people who own TVs, and who have ever watched a movie on TV? I don't think this is really that file sharers are cheap. I'm not saying that downloading movies is right, but I think that it's about the value of a dollar. People have a limited ammount of money to spend on things like movies, and the sad fact is that too many of the big corporate movie makers want too much for too little. People just aren't willing to pay it. File sharing could totally come to an end, movies could be released on a new uncopyable format, and retal stores could go out of business, and I still don't think that the MPAA members are going to find that they're getting all that much more money.

John Woo optioned Metroid, if it helps. In any case, there's a petition going around. The undersigned are united in their desire to keep Uwe Boll from making any more movies again, ever, videogame related or not. As for Halo, Microsoft is aware of how poorly videogame movies are doing (and Boll can't take all the credit, since he didn't direct the collossal flop that was Tomb Raider and the Cradle of Life). Apparently, the're getting advice from some guy who used to work for Columbia to write their own script. Ah, found it. Halo movie news.

Thing I don't get is, everyone wants to be in movies, be they writers, directors, actors, whatever. And while sometimes a stinker of a movie gets made, most of the people involved have some talent. I mean, I've seen some bad acting in bad movies, but not on the level of, say, bad voice acting in a videogame or bad dubbing in an anime. But, it's pretty obvious that Uwe Boll has ZERO TALENT whatsoever. How the hell did he get a job in such a competetive industry?

I totally agree, between all the coke and hookers in my life I often forget to recharge my electronics. I recharge my digital camera about once a month, so I'm quite thankful for it's longevity. It's easy to say that 4-6 hours is "enough" but people forget, you get stuck on long plane trips or in traffic or whatever. It's nice to have the extra time. I'm not saying that it wouldn't be great if the battery would last longer... but I don't forget to charge my cell or my SP, I doubt I'd forget to charge my PSP. For car trips, I'm sure they'll sell a cigarette lighter adaptor. And for a 12 hour flight (and seriously, how often do any of us go on 12 hour flgihts?), like Dangard Ace said, you're probably going to sleep for some of that. There's seriously no way you'd want to play a videogame for 12 hours straight. (And, if you're watching MPEG-4 or listening to tunes off the memory stick, the battery life is much longer.) Sorry, but for a few unusual cases, yes, longer battery life would be great, but 4-6 hours is workable. There's got to be a much bigger issue than the battery life to turn me off of the PSP. As for the dead pixels, yeah, Nintendo was taking them back, and yeah, Sony wasn't. But, SCEA's policy might be different than SCEI's, for starters. But in any case, who returns things to the manufacturer anyway? If you have a dead pixel, it's going to take you less than a week to figure it out. Take it back to the store where you bought it.

The only people I've seen jerking controllers were non-gamers. And even then, I've never seen anyone jerking around a handheld. Makes it kind of hard to see.

4-6 hours long enough? Not really. Get on a long flight and you'll appreciate good battery life. 4-6 hours is a bit low, IMHO. 4-6 hours is long enough to fly from just about anywhere in the US to anywhere in the US, and I still doubt I'd spend the entire flight playing videogames. Longer flights usually mean layovers, and I'm sure you could find a place to plug it in at the airport.

Are you kidding? Drivers are poor enough when they're just talking on the thing. Last thing we need is them flailing around first. Drivers need to wait until they park their damn cars before getting on the phone. Yeah, it's actually possible to drive without talking on the cell phone. Rumor has it, before the things were invented, people did it all the time.

the sad part is that it will be sold out on its first shipment What's sad about it? Sony's made a handheld unit that people are going to want to play, and they're marketing it to people who can afford the price tag. The sad part is for 250 bucks I want a highly quality device. not one with QC issues like the japanese version (square button/dead pixels/air bubbles, drive popping out, region encoded, low batterly life (so they can make tons off consumer on the batteries as well), etc... remember Ken said this is "as designed" As I've said before, I've played a PSP, and had no issues with the square button. As for the air bubbles and dead pixels, a lot of people seem to be conveniently forgetting that the DS had the same issues, and in both cases, they were the extreme minority. The battery life is plenty long enough to play games on before it needs charged again, and as for the drive popping out, what the hell are you doing twisting it like that for in the first place?

the sad part is that it will be sold out on its first shipment What's sad about it? Sony's made a handheld unit that people are going to want to play, and they're marketing it to people who can afford the price tag.

Hell, yesterday at Gamestop, I got another reserve on one.

I think the movies on the PSP are sort of their answer to the personal movie players from Creative and other companies. I don't know how popular those movies players are especially since you have to download them and they can be really choppy. The PSP screen, don't forget, is ridiculously large when compared with the GBA or DS. In fact, I'd say it's fine for watching movies. Second, while compression issues may be a deal when you're trying to cram MPEG-4 video onto a Memory Stick, movies on UMD should be fine. The issue, though, is indeed the fact that I don't see a lot of people willing to buy the same movies twice. Now, if Sony sold rewritable UMDs and USB UMD recorders, and allowed you to transfer DVD video to UMD, I'd be down with that. And I know some people, like my buddy who spends a good bit of time commuting from Virginia into DC for work and then back again, who would actually rather have movies on UMD than DVD. He feels like he doesn't have enough time to sit down and watch a movie at home, but he'd love to watch them on the train. And the PSP is certainly smaller and mostly cheaper than the majority of portable DVD players on the market. As for the remote, yes, it's a headphones remote. It's basically a little disc that has things like volume control, and your basic play/pause/skip forward or backward, etc, that you plug your headphones into, then plug the remote into the headphone jack. The idea is that you lock the PSP's face buttons, then keep it in your pocket or wherever while you listen to mp3s. Then if you need to adjust the volume or skip a track or whatever, you use the little disc dangling from your headphones. But let's not forget that, first and foremost, the PSP is a videogame handheld. It's cool that it can play movies or mp3s or let other people check out my digital vacation photos... but if that's all it did, I doubt I'd pay even $100 for it. I want a PSP because there are six launch games I want, and probably more later. I want a PSP because the games look as fun, deep, and graphically detailed as modern console games. Meanwhile, I don't think there's six games I want for the DS, even if I count GBA games, for the rest of 2005, and the DS games I do want are stuff like Wario Ware, which is certainly fun but not nearly as deep as something like Untold Legends is going to be.

Thank god. Lord knows pushing buttons is a chore, right up there with getting off the couch to get a beer or taking your clothes off before getting in the shower. On the other hand, if they combine it with a powerful microphone so that you don't have to talk directly into it, and program it to activate the microphone to accept voice commands whenever you flick the phone open, we could all pretend we've got communicators from classic Star Trek...

Article at IGN says the US will only be getting a value pack http://psp.ign.com/articles/584/584983p1.html Gamespot confirms that we're only getting the value pack. Gamespot's PSP news I'd complain more, but realistically, we were going to have to buy the Memory Stick for it anyway (for games saves), so I don't see it as too much more than I expected. And this way, since I preordered mine the day after Christmas, I figure I'll be in that group that gets Spider-Man 2 on UMD. I can always re-sell that later. All told, I've got $175 down on the system already, and $15 each on Dynasty Warriors, WipeOut, Tiger Woods, and NFSU. Sony said the games are going to be $39.99. So, I've got Valnetine's Day, my employee discount, and my regular game budget for March yet. I should be alright.

Which is why I try not to hang out with artists.

http://www.gamespot.com/news/2005/01/31/news_6117510.html Apparently, Eureka 7 is a 50 episode commercial for a PS2 game.

Most of those booths are protected b/c they are on triad turf. Raids are commonplace and the stores, booth operators and people in the area get tipped off. Even if and when places get busted the merchandise is still out there b/c the production is a)fast and b)easy to recirculate mainly due to demand. All the cracking down doesn't matter in HK or China until they can change the average customers mentality that is ok to support unlicensed copies. Personally IMO companies releasing the licensed region specific versions need to get more compititive (sp) and reconsider the MSRP. Consumers want deals and that is what they are going to go for. Afterall the average person buying counterfeit dvds regardless of type: anime, porn, US movies etc, wants a bargain. If they can get the entire set of Kenshin or Fist of the North Star for about $40 why would they ever pay over 40 for just a part of the series? IMO until this changes, people will keep on buying the counterfeit versions which really do not support the anime industry at all, but hey that is consumerism, people have the right to vote with their wallets. Not just in Hong Kong... here too. Think about it... I've bought each season of South Park for around $30. Each season has about 13 episodes. Family Guy goes for about $40 for each set, with 28 and 21 episodes for volume one and volume two, respectively. That's somewhere between $1.43-$2.30 per episode. Anime, on the other hand, seems to average around three or four episodes on one $25 DVD. Going with 4, that's $6.25 per episode. Even if I allow that the DVD was only $20, you're still talking $5 an episode... double the cost that most American TV shows on DVD are going for. Looking at it another way, most Hollywood movies come out in "Special Edition" 2-disc DVDs, brand new at around $15, maybe $20 if it's not on sale or if you happened to pick a more expensive store like Suncoast. A lot of movies in single-disc packages can easily be had for $10 a pop. Fact is, most 25-35 episode animes could be sold in a single $50 box set and still make plenty of money. A 50+ episode series could be sold in one big $75 box or two 25 episode $50 box. In either case, the number of discs could be cut down by putting six or so episodes on a dual layer DVD (I haven't bought much domestically released anime, but I know for certain that the Animeigo Macross DVDs and Bandai's MS Gundam DVDs are on single-layer DVDs, and in the case of Macross, not even copy-protected). But domestic distributers have been gouging fans since the VHS days, and anyways a lot of the anime fans I've seen act like the stuff is crack, and would likely pay $50 a DVD. Unfortunately, I'm not one of them. I never watched that much anime, and most of what I did watch was fansubbed.

Corrrection. Video games are currently the single largest and most profitable entertainment industry in the US. Games generate MORE revenue than Hollywood. Which only serves to emphasize the point. Interactivity is a two-edged sword, though. While it draws players into the story more, people who lack the aptitude to play the game, or tolerance for certain genres (in my case, I really can't get into any kind of RTS or tactics games) keeps people from experiencing what is otherwise a solid game/story, while, providing the movie really doesn't suck, a movie is instantly accessible to anyone, and even if the viewer didn't care for the movie, they can usually identify with it on some kind of level.

That's a positively brilliant assertation, and I think I agree. It started with RPGs, but now, games in almost all genres, including fighting games and FPS, are starting to have bigger and bigger stories. Plus, more and more games are getting star power, be they voice actors like the countless celebs in the GTA games, or actual digital representations like Brooke Burke in NFSU2 or Jean Reno in Onimusha 3. The videogame industry has grown to ridiculous proportions and bring in revenues that are close to the revenues that Hollywood has been bringing in. And as revenue goes up, more money is spent on development. In some ways, videogames have surpassed Hollywood films as a means of cinematic story-telling, as videogames are often longer, and can spend more time developing the plot and characters Also, while movies are purely passive, videogames are interactive, which creates a deeper emotional involvement. When you watch a film like Dawn of the Dead, there's some intense scenes that leave you wondering how the characters are going to keep from being zombie chow, but at the end of the film, you walk away, reguardless of the outcome. Play a game like Resident Evil, and that's you figuring out how you're going to run through that room full of zombies with only two bullets left. If you die, well, you just restart from your last save, but if you succede, that feeling of satisfaction is personal.

Hey, it's not like dead pixels weren't a problem on the DS. Two of my friends who bought the DS at launch had dead pixels.