Alpha OTS

You know, I probably should have picked it up anyway. Been playing KoF XI some more, and I was intially waaaaaay too hard on it. It's actually very very good. There's almost a full roster of unique characters(13 in all) you can unlock to add to the default cast for 47 total(that's not a misprint). Mai, who I initially thought wasn't in this one, is one of the unlockables, in all her bouncing glory.

Please be Galvatron, please be Galvatron, please be Galvatron, please be Galvatron, please be Galvatron, please be Galvatron, please be Galvatron, please be Galvatron..........

Finally got around to watching the Animated premiere. Really enjoying the voices. REALLY enjoying that the Carlos "Holy Frijoles!" voice is nowhere to be found! The personalities are coming through pretty decently. I don't hate any of these characters out of the gate. The Starscream voice is surprisingly close to Chris Latta, and while most likely a bone to us G1-ers, it also fits. I'm getting a Kup vibe from Ratchet, and the lines he has really adds some weight to what's happening around them. I hope they keep that up. The animation's better than what I expected given the stills we had seen. It looks much better in motion, and I'm liking the face plates. Yeah, it's more on the cutesy side and geared towards kids, but, more importantly, it's consistent and far more fluid than the A/E/C series ever was. The humans aren't stealing all the transformer's screen time. It's probably more Teen Titans than it is Justice League, and it'll probably stay that way, but one thing it isn't is a poorly written, poorly dubbed, poorly animated, BORING embarrassment like the last three series were.

Shamrock's not completley useless. If you tell him to target a plane that's targeting you, more often than not, that'll keep that plane occupied and out of your way. Sometimes Shamrock will even manage to hit and destroy it.

You know, I thought these were both old titles for some reason, but looking at the gamefaqs boards now it looks like these are new releases. Weird that they'd discount them so quickly. Maybe they're preparing to clear out the ps2 stuff altogether? I also saw the PS2 version of Fire Pro Wrestling in the $9.99 bin too. Although that game's not my cup of tea(I didn't have the patience for the learning curve), people have raved about it ever since the Saturn version. Seems the ps2 got a lot of 2d SNK goodies recently.

Don't know if there are any SNK fighting game fans around here, but I found the PS2 King Of Fighters XI and NeoGeo Battle Colloseum for 9.99 a piece in the bargain clearance bin at Best Buy while Christmas shopping. Colloseum is like the Marvel Vs. Capcom of the SNK universe, and has a good sampling of fighters from just about every SNK fighter(including Sam.Shodown and World Heroes). I'm kind of old school with the KoF cast, so I noticed more of what it didn't have(Where's Billy!?) than what it had, and ended up preferring the 2002/2003 combo set that came out a couple years back. Both are some old school 2d fighting fun, but I was more wow'd by Colloseum.

When Pasternak starts calling in more drones, he'll flash red on your radar. At that time, he's easier to hit because his plane obeys the laws of physics. (We're well past the spoiler point on this, aren't we?) You have to beat the game on Hard to get the CFA-44.

Godzilla Unleashed would be nice, but I'm a big Godzilla fan, and also really liked Save The Earth, so I'm in the minority there. Plus that's the type of game that could be retooled for a standard controller anyway. There's really nothing else on the Wii I'd like to play, the gimmick does nothing for me. Maybe I'm old school, but I'd really just like to press a button or push a stick.

Remember the movie sequence towards the beginning of the game where Melissa was walking out of town during the evacuation? She walked by a crashed jet fighter that was her husband's.

Something about the white plastic in particular on both of these figures strikes me as cheap looking. I'm not as wow'd as I was hoping to be. The link ups are weak, and in the case of the bot mode Legioss in front of the jet mode Tread, nonexistent. I still think the Toynami looks better in bot mode, but since the hands crumble, the arms fall under their own weight, the legs don't allow for anything dynamic, and other various multiple QC monkey hijinks, that doesn't mean much. Still interested, but I'm definitely not going to be a first adopter on this. I need to see pictures of this in people's collections along side other figures and read some reviews first.

I think they did pretty good considering. It's pretty obvious they worked in Galvatron colors to do it too, which I think is pretty clever. It could have been much worse. I'll definitely buy the Japanese Classics Megs because it's closer to a G1 color scheme than the U.S. release was, but I'm still dissappointed that they used chrome instead of silver paint. It looks like they're working chrome into all of the figures. Prime's front grill looks like chrome, and Grimlock has a large splash of it too.

And after that all you need to see is AvP 1 to see all the cool things they ruined.

I really hope you're right, and I really hope that if they do, they also purge all this retconning gestation period and cold loving predator crap they've done.

Chrome flakes and it tends to look KO-ish. I'd prefer they use the default gray for the chest or a silver paint like Titanium WW Megatron uses.

A new mold for Classics Ultra Magnus was confirmed? First I heard of that, and surprising since there's an Ultra Magnus in Animated(cartoon at least). Japanese Classics Megatron revealed: http://www.tfw2005.com/boards/showthread.php?t=160965 Not digging the chrome at all.

My brother surprised the hell out of me by getting this for me for Christmas. I had no idea he'd know to get me this type of movie and on HD no less. "You did good, brother. You did real good.", I said after taking off the wrapping paper. Opening it today, I had a small scare. Two of the discs were loose, but fortunately not scratched. Just finished watching the Final Cut before heading off for Christmas dinner. It's been a year or so since I last saw Blade Runner, so I haven't noticed anything new from the Director's Cut I had seen before. It does look fantastic in HD though. Just seeing the flying car moving towards Tyrell Corp put a huge smile on my face. Ridley almost directed Dune? I would have liked to have seen that version!

Another one of Jin Saotome's awesome customs: Classics Warpath. I have a question for any of you customizer's. I do a little painting on figures every now and then. I'm very much a novice. I always avoid painting any area of a figure that moves, pegs or has any friction against it. Looking at this Warpath custom, how do you paint it so that when you peg the legs together during transformation the paint on the peg doesn't flake or chip off?

That's what I suspected and feared. The last DVD set to come out was pretty complete and had a really nice set of extras. The one extra on how they did some of the perspective visual effects shots was really neat. Watching it on my HD tv now, it's a pretty nice transfer, but there's dirt specks here too which I imagine probably are less offensive on a standard dvd than they would be in HD.

How is Dune? Does it have the Smithee version like the last set to come out? I just found out that it's on HD, but I'm hesitant to pick it up because of releases like the Last Starfighter that aren't that much better than the standard dvd release.

Another one of those custom Cyclonus figures just went up for auction. This one says it's all metallic. That's the first I heard they did one like that. http://cgi.ebay.com/TRANSFORMERS-Movie-Han...1QQcmdZViewItem First bid is an inexpensive $185.

Japanese classics aren't cheap. The BBTS preorders have the voyagers for 42.99 and the deluxes for 24.99.

I completely agree. I'm about to make a rash generalization. Transformer fans are relentlessly nitpicky to the point that they suck *all* of the fun out of any TF conversation. Don't be foolish like me and say that you're happy because these colors are more toon accurate and that bodes well for a G1 colored Megatron because you'll receive a snarky correction that there was never a Classics cartoon.

Japanese Classics Optimus, Bumble Bee and Grimlock's paint schemes: http://tformers.com/transformers-1st-look-.../8781/news.html The allspark seems to be bemoaning these as too boring. Personally I like them because they're doing what I wanted/expected, applying more G1ish paint apps to the molds. This bodes *very* well for the Megatron and Astrotrain repaints.

I thought the rotoscoping effect was terrible. It did have some neat shots though. The "big foot" hobbit shot was something PJ used in Fellowship which was a direct homage.

I wish I hadn't read this.