Radd

By my understanding, in the Japan they started releasing black, evil looking repaints of Convoy toys. The only one I can think of that has made it to a show was in RiD.

I believe it was the first episode. Possibly the second. I remember my friends and I making fun of the animation where Hound performs CPR on Spike

Well, at a glance I'd say it's a cheap and gaudy looking knockoff of a humvee, that transforms into a cheap and gaudy looking knockoff of a Transformer.

Yes they do, at night on Adult Swim. Venture Brothers, Sealab 2021, Harvey Birdman Attourney at Law, Aquateen Hunger Force, Robot Chicken...

Actually, Robot Chicken is out on DVD now. At least the first volume. Is it still showing on Cartoon Network?

My fiancee just had to pick up a DS Lite today when we were wandering through Walmart. I have to admit I was taken aback seeing it in person. It really does look so much smaller and sleeker, more than I expected. Also, the Lite feels like it's much better made, I mean the buttons, the casing, the d-pad all feels like they're made out of higher quality materials, and put together much better. When I first got a DS, my major complaint was how cheap it felt compared to the SP. Not so here, the Lite is like a mini high-end laptop or something.

Just enough to make him look silly. The Bullwinkle antlers didn't help, either.

Oh man, I have Armada Megatron. I was desperate for a decent Megatron toy and hoped that this might be one. Was I ever wrong. About as poseable as a G1 brick, and while his base colour is dark green, he has so much bright and neon colours on him that my first thought was "Oh no! They made Megatron into a raver!" I'm still desperate for a decent Megatron. I really hope that tank version from a few pages back is the real deal. THAT looked fantastic, hopefully the toy itself would look as good.

Just so we're clear, let's not confuse the artists with the media being used. If an artist really wants to, they can do some great things with digital colouring. It's just that digital colouring, much like digital animation, also allows for a lot of shortcuts not available with traditional media. If an artist is willing to forego those shortcuts, digital colouring can be every bit as "dark and gritty" as inks and watercolours. Another problem is that lots of people gravitate towards eyegougingly saturated codlours and bright, blurry effects. These look awful, and tend to ignore even the most basic of colour theory ideals. Maybe someday people will get over this strange infatuation with awful looking effects, kinda like how the lense flare fad eventually diminished. Or better yet, maybe someday in the far future it will dissapear completely, at least from professional work.

An interview with Katsuragi. http://www.news4gamers.com/ps3/News-1079.aspx

As for Evil Prime, Hasbro should have just released him as that, and skipped Optimus altogether. Robot mode even reminds me of Scourge/Laser Prime.

Nice! Can't wait to see the actual toy.

I really shouldn't have to tell you that there were no PS2 games available at the time Sony was showing off those demos. The average gamer did expect the games to look that good. Web forums, dorm rooms, bus stops were all virtually caked in the praise of what Sony had shown at E3 in 1999, and anticipation of games equally as good looking. Many chuckled at how Sega had dropped the ball again, that the PS2 would blow the Dreamcast out the water with its graphics. Of course, it's even worse when the "tech demos" are not even being run on the machine they're supposed to be showing off, or when those "demos" turn out to be pre-rendered FMV. Again, I'm not saying that Sony is the only company that does this. The sting of Microsoft's "bullshots" from last E3 (*edit: E3 2006, not this just passed E3), and how the games actually looked when the real in-game screenshots finally appeared is still fresh. And who can forget Nintendo's ex-President Hiroshi Yamauchi? He said things that kept little gamers awake at night...in fear. Is it getting old to call companies on this sort of thing? I don't believe so, not so long as they keep doing it (Killzone 2 anyone? How about some Madden'06?), and the general public eats it up like so much delicious, delicious candy.

So, you're saying that because the PS2 could never come close to FF:TSW graphics (and by this time we're all well aware that it can't), that Sony could not make boastful claims about their system using FF:TSW test shots in with their game "demos" to hype the power of their console? The same people that said "Yes yes, this demo is running on an actual PS2!" about the FF8 demo, when it turned out that it was running on a beefed up PS2 chipset connected an SGI machine? The same people that said the Killzone 2 trailer was actual in-game footage, when the people who made the trailer were saying it was FMV? I'd like to introduce you to a man named Ken Katsuragi. Sony executive and part time stand up comic.

http://media.psx.ign.com/articles/067/067139/vids_1.html IGN still has the video. First one. The old man head, it was a test shot from the early developement of FF:TSW. It was circulated a lot around the computer animation labs at my art school before it even showed up in the PS2 videos.

How does that show anything? The fact that there are other FF:TSW related videos and tech demos negates the faintest possibility of the one I've seen? I've seen the video again within the past year or two. It still had the FF:TSW test shots in it. I'm not thinking of the nVidia tech demo.

Right. I don't understand why you're showing this, though.

Starscream is mistransformed, too. Look at his tail in fighter mode.

Whoa, whoa, whoa there. Read my post again. I mentioned the ballroom scene as a seperate demo on the same video. That video also included a lot of Ridge Racer fmv, and various other demos. I am well aware of the difference in quality between FF8 and the movie, which is why I obviously would not confuse the two. Nope. They decided to stick with the Dual Shock design because of the vocal fanboy outcry when the 'boomarang' was first revealed. Gamers are, oddly enough, very technophobic when it comes to anything besides graphics, sound, and including a hard drive in their consoles. Controller design is one of those especially touchy subjects. Anything that strays too far from the security blanket gamers are so used to, and there's a panic. Lots of people don't even know how to correctly hold an N64 controller(or simply refuse to). It's really that bad.

The Dual Shock isn't terrible. It's a decent, and very useable controller. Better than a lot that have come down the pipe. However, it's not particularly ergonomic, and better designs have since come and gone. The most likely reason they decided to try a new controller design for the PS3 in the first place was probably to improve the ergonomics of the design, make it more comfortable to hold. Whether or not the 'boomarang' controller achieved that, we'll never know due to gamer technophobia.

It's difficult to find news articles and whatnot from back then. If you look hard enough you can still find Sony's PS2 demo video which includes test shots from Final Fantasy:TSW. I think that same video includes the Final Fantasy 8 ballroom demo that was running on basically an SGI machine, though at the time Sony claimed it was running on the PS2 hardware.

I really hope that Megatron as a tank shows up as an Alternator (or related line of a different name). I mean, we've never had a truly excellent Megatron toy. Classics Megatron isn't too shabby, it's just too bad they had to give him a gaudy colour scheme to meet the legal requirements for toy guns nowadays.

Oh, I agree. When I say "It's only a matter of time" I'm not speaking in days or even months, but it's the nature of the beast. No console will really be "the console" that lasts forever. I've known people who, every time a new generation of consoles is announced, complain that console developers should make one console and stick with it forever.

It's just a matter of time before PS2 releases dry up. Most of the major attention is going to be on the new systems. That doesn't mean that the old consoles will be dead the day the new ones launch (except for the Xbox/360 it would seem). Given the price of the PS3 many people will probably hold off for price drops. That means two probablilities, either developers will continue to stick with the PS2 for a while yet, waiting for the PS3 to pick up steam, or that people will pick up a cheaper console in the meantime, such as the Wii, in which case developer attention might wander in that direction. Of course, if the PS3 does become an instant success, and the market decides it's willing to uspport $600 systems, then developers will continue to concentrate on the PS3.

Of course, I don't doubt the difference in quality between HD and SD. However, it seems to me that most people still have SD television sets. I picked up an HD set recently (or rather, the fiancee did), but no one else I know has one. No one else I know is planning to get one. Of course, with the cheaper PS3's lack of HDMI support... Still, if you hooked up a Wii, a 360, and the PS3 to SD sets...will the Wii really look a generation behind? Or will the gap be more similar to how the PS2 falls behind the Gamecube and 360?