JB0

If you hit the wrong ones, he does seem to use a few too many 10-cent words. But there are also short entries. . . and some that are quite breezy. Don't give up on it too quickly. Here's one of my favorite (humorous) entries: HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Okay, I'm gonna have to look through this one.

Note to self: avoid firmware updates. *slaps on an eyepatch* Arr, matey! Ye be boardin' the HMS Rawmz this fine day? We be sailin' the seas o' the internet fer m4d l00t. I'd say it's a good day fer it, but EVERY day's a good day fer our kinda booty. ARR!

"IGNcube: Coming back to power. We apologize, but if we don't get some answers our readers are going to go insane. What are the tech specs for Revolution? Or, to put it another way, is Revolution as powerful as Xbox 360? Shigeru Miyamoto: You know, in regard to the power of the Nintendo Revolution versus, say, the Xbox 360, we're looking at making a small, quiet, affordable console. If you look at trying to incorporate all that, of course we might not have the horsepower that some other companies have, but if you look at the numbers that they're throwing out, are those numbers going to be used in-game? I mean, those are just numbers that somebody just crunched up on a calculator. We could throw out a bunch of numbers, too, but what we're going to do is wait until our chips are done and we're going to find out how everything in the game is running, what its peak performance is, and those are the numbers that we're going to release because those are the numbers that really count. I do think it's very irresponsible for people to say, "This is what we're running on. This is the power of our machine," when they're not even running on final boards. I think the professional's job is to not believe those numbers. " A nice dose of realism there. While there is an implication in the first sentence of the reply that the Revolution will be less powerful than the other 2 decks, he quickyly shifts into "But the competition's full of crap anyways. They can't know how well the system will perform until they finish the system and start running code on it."

Not necessarily newest and best. Admittedly, I'm not big on quick snapshots. It might could give a GBA a run for it's money. Not sure what the high-end phones are capable of AV-wise. But I get easily annoyed by sub-optimal controls. I just won't play a shooter if I don't have a joystick available anymore. I've tried before, and I just get frustrated by the gamepad interfering with my game(which it does, I consistently perform signifigantly better with a stick than a pad in that sort of game) Admittedly, most of my annoyance with cellphone gaming is that the cellphones have some exclusive titles that I want(Dang it Namco! Port that Tales game to something else!). Fair enough.

It could've also just been covering his failure. Millia comes in and harrasses him for getting his butt handed to him repeatedly. He automatically goes "Nuh-uh, it's not my fault. They got some crazy pilot over there that just ain't human... zentran... whatever he is, it ain't normal." Then added the bit about maybe being a threat to Millia just to annoy her.

And you get fried by their barriers. Yay! I don't think it WAS non-explosive at the end. There were just so many other explosions going off at the time that it didn't matter. If I recall, the issue was ultimately that the omnidirectional barrier absorbed energy when hit, and didn't have a safe way to shed it during combat. And when it overloaded, the barrier shed everything all at once. ... Hmm, if you could control the discharge, you'd have a barrier-powered cannon...

Although, you have to hope the splash damage from those other missiles don't do much damage. It's like wearing protective gear. Let's say you wear the knee pads, elbow pads, helmet, and gloves (ah heck, let's throw in the crotch guard) and those would be like your PPB system. Let's say a missile storm is like a Homer Simpson-style injury. Obviously you can't protect it all and something is going to affect another and we have a cascading injury effect. Yah. I was thinking the only way it'd REALLY be useful is if the disks "cupped" upwards around the missile. Which there's no evidence they can do. It's not good for anybody in the blast radius. Imagine you and your wingmen pinned down in an area like...<insert financial district/busy area of your city here>. That part of the city plus anybody left there, is going to be gone if a ODB system overloads. Yes. I was understating the issue somewhat, as well as assuming space battle.

I'd bet no, though it's just a guess. Not supprting the 8bit GBs means they can scrap a processor(the z80-ish thing isn't available in GBA mode), as well as ditching the hardware needed to sense 8bit games and supply 5v to the cart slot instead of 3.3(if I recall the voltages right).

Sad part is... the hype machine not only buried the Dreamcast, it desecrated the corpse. I've talked to several people recently that SWEAR the Dreamcast had "no good games." After some prodding they'll amend it to "Well, okay, but Soul Caliber was the ONLY good game for the system." It's disgusting.

Yes there was a regular edition of Lunar but it came out years after the edition that you have... I have it cause I didn't have a Playstation ever(until PS2) so I never got the old release of Lunar. I'm the opposite. I got my Silver Star Story on launch week, THEN got a PS1 to play it. But I was a Lunar fanboy before most of the english-speaking world heard of it. Cousin had a SegaCD and the Lunar games when I was a kid. Actually bought his Genesis setup off him for the sole reason of playing Lunar(I was a Nintendo fanboy at the time, and was pretty sure Silver Star and Eternal Blue were the only 2 games worth owning on the Genesis).

Ahhhhh! Must....get.....in......to...E3!!! I'm considering trying to go and just walk in (hey, always works for me in restricted pits at races...), but I'm afraid I'm gonna end my day smashed and on a plane with a one-way ticket to Tokyo. Yes, but then you'll make friends with a ninja, buy a Cool Thing, and go insane. And everything looks more interesting when you're insane.

But I do portables too. I just like hardware that was DESIGNED to play games. Tends to perform the task a bit better, and have a better input configuration on top of it. Jack of all trades, master of none doesn't do it for me. Similar argument for cellphone cameras. Sure they're convenient. They're also low-res, and have crappy lenses(even if they buy them from a good manufacturer, there's not room for the multiple elements of a half-decent full camera lens). I'd rather have a standalone camera that takes decent photos.

Whoa... Starcraft: Ghost!

That's what Dyson did when guld went psycho and had his flashback. Not as good as max's "fly right into the swarm (rather than away from) with a slower vf1 and dodge milia's missiles swarm in SDF: macross", but good enough. This is why I think if the vf22 had that BCS yf21 system, average pilots might stand a better chance because they could dodge easier. Too bad it was taken out. And can you IMAGINE what a pilot like Max would get out of it? Be like a god of death walking into the battlefield. Problem is omnidirectional barriers have a nasty tendancy to go nuclear when they fail. This isn't good for your wingmates. Thought Basara put PPB disks on his shield. Either way...

If you face the infamous missile storm, and your VF only can generate.. maybe 15-20 barrier discs (lets say each can only cover an area with a 3..3.5 ft diameter) at maximum power, I don't know if doing it manual or computer-control with a flood of missiles coming would be a good idea. Heck, I would just launch decoys and run if that was coming at me. Forget the PPB, must go faster. Yah. I have my doubts about PPB usability against missiles. With luck, your disk is wide enough to block the blast from the impact missile, and the missiles coming in behind the lead one(which the computer blocked) are blasted by the first one exploding. I was assuming a 3-disk system, really. 15-20, just set disks resting on several key strategic areas and to heck with it.

Yeah. The companies are talking about trying that out. I think it'll bomb. Remember the N64? Something else to consider, and I think it was mentioned in the same article, that developers have been using the higher-priced "collector's edition" version of games as an experiment to see if consumers are willing to pay more for games. And I'll say that, from a retailer's point of view, the $54.99 collector's edition games (like Halo 2) have sold pretty well, but the $60 games (like Mortal Kombat Deception) sold much better in the regular editions. If the publishers learned anything from that, they'll keep the games at no more than $54.99. Collector's editions are neat. When they come with something worth having. I love my Lunar soundtracks, Eternal Blue pendant, Lords of Lunar game, and yes, the sexy boxes, but why would I want a red aluminum box with a Gamestop logo wrapped around my standard RE4 package? ... To be fair, neither PS Lunar game was ever offered in a "standard" edition anyways, though(if it was, it flew by too fast for me to notice).

I'm betting the cheaper competition will drive it down fast, regardless of what it starts at. Much like the famous Saturn/PS1 wars, with Sony pulling the Saturn price down untill both settled at 200. Or more recently, the PS2/XBox/GameCube, with Nintendo filling Sony's old role and pulling prices down. Oh, no! The PS3 has announced support for a hard drive, but Sony hasn't said if it will ship with one or not. I didn't mean to imply that the PS3 definatively has a hard drive... my point to MGREXX was that having slots for a variety of flash cards doesn't make the PS3 superior to the Xbox 360 as long as the Xbox 360 does have the hard drive. Okay. I'm back to celebrating the presence of standard media slots. Particularly SD, as they're more standard than MemorySticks. If it keeps me from paying 20$ for 8 MB of flash, I'm good.

Yah. IMO it's better to be a little under than massively over. Sadly, massively over builds better hype, even when the people making the claims get caught red-handed.

"Feel my walking stick you will, yes..."

Yeah. The companies are talking about trying that out. I think it'll bomb. Remember the N64?

This is also what Nintendo did for the Cube. Do you remember the claims Sony made about the PS2 before it launched? Do you remember when they showed the realtime rendered ball scene from FFVIII and claimed it was running on the PS2, when it was really running on several SGI machines? Sony hype should never be taken at face value. I'd go so far as to say their hype for the PS2 was outright lies. And Sega got hammered with those claims, because htey were releasing what they believed were real-world specs for the Dreamcast. In point of fact, developers got more than spec'ed out of the DC rather regularly. But it's damn near impossible to get the "spec'ed" performance from a PS2.

Not if you have force powers or magick which Sara and Mao started to have. Remember they may be the descendants of PC, an advanced lemurian/atlantean civilisation that may have awakened dormant powers of the mind and passed this knowledge to the select few in a sacred bloodline who would use it wisely and not abuse it. You can just use the force to read where the shots will hit, and instead of using your hand to move the controls, just push it with your mind. Now ppl, don't forget that shin managed to do this of his own power when he levitated the vf0 of his own power so I'm not making this one up. Oooohhh... Jedi in a VF...

JB0, I'm not arguing in favor of proprietary memory cards. If you have to use a memory card, I'd say go with CF on account of its sheer cheapness. But, why waste money on either if you can stream media wirelessly and store it on the supplied 20GB hard drive? PS3 lets you save games to a hard drive? ... I have GOT to pay more attention to gaming news. Everything I've seen's just been "OMG TEH CELL AM PWNZ" over and over. If the XBox did nothing else, it got me internal game saves back. And for that Microsoft has my gratitude.

That's a weird market strategy. Do we have any actual tech demos of what the Revolution is able to do? Reports seem to indicate that the new system is "only" about 2 or 3 times as fast as the Cube. Nintendo's own numbers. And what's wierd about attempting to give real-world performance #s instead of grotesquely bloated ones? Average user can get 4x the Wavebird's max range, too. The 3.2 GHz PowerPC in the XBox is pr'ly about 2-3x better than the 733MHz P3. We'll say 3. Dual procs is usually roughly 1.6x single proc performance. 3 procs gets you roughly 2x. Resource conflicts typically prevent the gains from being as great as expected. A problem compunded by the fact that all 3 of the XBox cores are on one chip, and thus one CPU bus. That's 4-6x, hardly the 15x being promised. Sony's 35x is just comedic. They have ONE 3.2 GHz processor with 7 extra floating-point units. Admittedly, FPUs are good for 3D gaming, but not THAT good. Aside from which, SCE's never released an accurate spec in their entire history. These aren't even benchmarks, as far as I know. Just marketing estimates of increased "power." And power isn't even really defined. We can assume, with the context, that it's the CPU(s). But beyond that, what is it? More MIPS? Less cache misses? Watts comsumed? ... actually, I'd believe it if it was watts consumed. It's just the modern version of "bittage". It's a meaningless term without a definition.

PRE-RENDERED custscenes blow. I have no problem with game-engine cutscenes, in moderation. But pre-rendered ones break the visual continuity and make me feel funny. ... Especially when your character's carrying a rifle, and suddenly shows up with a pistol in the FMV.