Alpha OTS

I know Joel needs to markup things like this in order to make it worth his while, but $94? That's taking it quite a bit too far, imo.

That's.......pretty damn ugly.

I downloaded the demo for this and thought it was just ok. Hearing you guys talk about it, you definitely don't make it sound like it's what you expected. In fact, I'm reading more negatives than positive. I take it this is a discount bin title for an Air Combat novice like me then?

I can't find the source now, but I remember hearing that Paxton ad-libbed that famous line. All this Aliens talk has me jonesing to rewatch the movie. I might just do that now.

I wanted the toy in realistic colors but with those colors as close to homage as possible. It could have been done, there's jet colors out there that they could have chosen as the base color that aren't that far off from Screamer's base. Unfortunately MP Screamer was waaaaaaaay off the mark with the seaweed, and was imo, ugly to boot. As has been noted Wally Screamer isn't perfect either, but it's far closer to what I wanted than MP was. MP Skywarp achieved that happy medium and is dead sexy to boot.

Just got your friend request. Keep me in mind when you play Marvel. The only other game I play regularly at the moment is Gears.

I'm really hoping they offer this online through Walmart's store. They have for every exclusive I had wanted before. My Walmart hunts are always a bust.

Are they showing any pics of any plain Aliens or is the Pred-Alien the only one we're getting?

I'd much rather be able to pick 3 from anything *from the store* right when I purchased the player. I'm *still* waiting for my free 5 HDs from the August promotion.

For some reason, I'm getting a Gobot Puzzler vibe from that custom Menasor. That's not a bad thing.

I've been collecting some of the Forces of Valor 1:72 scale tanks pretty much to intersperse inbetween my giant robots. They're really pretty nicely detailed for the scale. Even the 1:72 soldier packs are pretty nice. I knew that this line did planes, but all the ones I had ever seen on the shelf were of the propeller engine type, so I never bothered. Today I went through the product catalog that came with the Abrams I picked up and found out that they did do a few jets. Forces of Valor Plane Listings Two Tomcats(one with a deco from the Black Knights) and a U.K. Panavia Tornado GR.1 all 1:72 scale, and they look pretty nice. Just passing along the info as this was completely new to me.

Megatron's been conscious despite being frozen. There's been humans teeming over him long enough for him to learn our language, which has been 70+ years. The reason he spoke our language when he awoke was to openly refute with disdain the "He's not Megatron, he's N.B.1" line. Weaving's inflection was way off here, and the line didn't come across as it was supposed to. Definitle agree about the S1 G1 intro trilogy. It's held up pretty well, especially for its age and it being a kid's cartoon. Without it, we wouldn't have all the Transformers mythos/product we have today, imo.

You know, as much as I want to hate Michael Bay, he's made quite a bit of sense when it comes to how to tackle a Transformers movie. I agreed with him and his cohorts more often than not while going through the extras DVD, and I wasn't expecting that. This bodes well, imo. Then again, Bay already knows he's getting huge explosions regardless(and as if it wasn't already blatantly obvious, the extras dvd really drives this home). Although that "heart and magic" better be in far larger transformer proportion than human this time.

Reminds me of something in the extras where they discuss movie Bonecrusher's design. He's the Buffalo minesweeper with that long retracting arm with the big claws/rake on the end, but in real life that rake's about the size of a pizza box.

I ordered mine online, and I wouldn't do it again pretty much for those exact reasons.

I was thinking of getting a PS3 not so much for the games, but for the blu-ray(every movie I want seems to be there) and to replace my PS2. Statements like the above only serve to encourage my wreckless spending habit.

Oh we knew that was a given from day one. However, Hasbro was probably the one that suggested it first.

HD DVD Players For Under $200? Internet rumors fly after a Wal-Mart employee posts evidence of $199 player for the holidays. By Swanni Washington, D.C. (October 18, 2007) -- An HD DVD player could be available for the new low price of $199 this holiday season. Internet message boards are buzzing with the possibility after a Wal-Mart employee posted an upcoming store notice about a $199 Toshiba HD DVD player. The price has not been confirmed by Wal-Mart or Toshiba, but the drop would not be surprising. Toshiba's entry-level player is now $299, but industry analysts have forecast that a sub-$200 player is likely for the holidays. Additionally, Blu-ray manufacturers are expected to lower the price on its players. Sony's Blu-ray player is now the lowest with a suggested retail price of $499. However, Sony announced today that it will launch a new Play Station 3 for $399 on November 2. The PS3 has a Blu-ray player inside. Lower prices for both Blu-ray and HD DVD are expected as supporters of the two high-def disc formats battle it out during the holiday season.

Went through all the extras on the extra disc in the HD set last night. Pretty decent stuff, although the Transformers history they bring up is pretty basic, but probably sufficient for the general public. The thing that surprised me was that given some of the quotes and stories I've read prior, I was expecting to hate Michael Bay, but ended up nodding in agreement with him quite a bit as he logically explained why he chose the designs and voices that he did. I'm a *little* less reticent of him doing the sequel now. One of the neat bits is where he explained why he chose Hugo Weaving over Frank Welker by showing a clip of movie Megatron using Welker's voice. Although to be fair, they did use a voice clip from the G1 cartoon(I think). I remember when Welker did a voice clip for the Transformers fandom not that long ago, and his Megatron voicing had aged(purposefully?), and sounded much better I thought. The only deleted scenes I saw were in the behind the scenes features, and none of which were anything I'd want to see again or have re-integrated into the movie. They're all human scenes anyway, obviously. One of the neatest unexpected extras is the Iron Man trailer on the first disc though. Awesome!

Cool, I hadn't considered that. With that in mind, my wish list is that for Bee they do that *and* change the paint on the bottom and insides of the feet from light gray to black as well as putting some silver/chrome behind the headlight. Hey, might not all happen, but it would make me happy. The one I'm really holding out hope for is Megs though. Gray, red, and black will always be *the* Megatron to me. I love classics Megatron, but I feel that his paint deco is more of an amalgamation of Galvatron and Megatron into one, than it is just Megatron. Although the paint scheme they did choose is actually a very clever way of bypassing the U.S. gun laws while doing fan service. Astrotrain needs an anime deco, and someone needs to do it and make it affordable before botcon does it.

I had thought it was just my vga cable gone bad, but now I'm not so sure. Over the last two weeks, the video would cut out for a second or two while playing a game. I'd still hear the audio, and the game would still be progressing, but I just wouldn't see any video for a second. Then it'd all pop back and be fine. At a random and quite long interval later, it'd happen again. It wasn't enough to be hinder my 360 use, but it was enough to be worrisome. When I was watching the Transformers HD last night, it happened again, quite frustratingly when Blackout showed up. And at random intervals after it'd happen again, and again. It got so bad and frequent that I had to replace the vga cable with the default component set. I tinkered with the vga cable after, hooked it up to my pc monitor, but it didn't work at all after that. I had thought that had fixed it, and it was just the cable, but today I go to play Crackdown with the component cable and two things happen. The same video blackout and when it flashed back there was a weird video signal, like the full strength wasn't getting through to the tv. I turned it off and on, and the problem resolved, but I'm still freaked out that the blackout happened again followed by this other weirdness. Anyone ever hear of anything like this before? I saw a post on gamefaqs saying it's a GPU failure without the RROD, and that others are having similar problems. Is this covered under the factory extended warranty?

Ideas or stories? Because story wise, Japan has a pretty craptacular record with the TF franchise. Armada was insulting, Energon was boring, and Cybertron barely managed to be mediocre. Car Robots was plain old silly, and for the first time ever, an American dub improved a Japanese show from silly stupid to silly fun. I liked Headmasters, but it was definitely a downward slope from season 3. I've never seen Victory or Masterforce. Idea wise, you may be right. Although the movie designs were a refreshing new change from the norm. Not sure who deserves all the credit for that though.

This was mentioned in the HD thread, and maybe here already, but man, this dvd is really lacking in good chapter stops. I have the HD version, but I'm assuming the dvd has the same stops. There should be twice as many as there are, and at the very least, there should have been *direct* jumps to the key action scenes/introductions. I frustratingly found out that my 360 only goes up to 16x when forwarding, which is a pain the ass when the scene I want to get to is at the very end of the chapter stop I selected.

That makes sense and jives with the recent talk of some HD movies being taken from masters for a DVD release. Is upscaling more hype than delivery? I know the OPPO players market themselves on being fantastic upscalers. My very limited experience with my xbox360 through vga, and with only the dvds I have, is that I can't really see any improvement. That's the only thing I don't like about my HDTV experience so far is how it's educated me on what a crappy transfer is. I was blissfully ignorant before.