JsARCLIGHT

Bike locks are kind of hard to get through. You'd need a bolt cutter or some other form of industrial cutting tool to get the item loose... I'd think someone would notice some pasty fatass fanboy clawing at a bike lock with his 20" Boba Fett Bolt Cutter. In the end it was not so much the lack of locks, cages, exploding Padme dye packets and secure lock boxes but the lack of attention. Having some guy just stand behind the thing and watch it probably would have dissuaded your average cowardly toy thief. The second you think "no one will steal anything" is when you let your guard down and someone steals something. However I for one thing everything that can be said about the actual theft has already been said. It got swiped, analyzing the "fanboy crime of the century" into History Channel levels of hype is not exactly proactive.

I'm not sure anyone is "debating" anything here... some folks are just saying things along the lines of "gee, you'd think they would have kept eyes on it a bit better" and to a degree you have to respond "yes, they should have kept their eyes on their stuff better". I can understand the whole "criminalizing the victim" side of what is being said but at the same time to many of us it's kind of common sense these days to keep your stuff close to your chest. I mean, even at a local police department meet and greet here in my town to which only officers and those involved in the department were invited, their display table of seized weapons STILL had metal cable locks on all the pieces. Everyone there where cops or other upstanding, law enforcing citizens... yet the goods were still kept under lock. If you can't trust cops around things who can you trust? Nobody... not even cops. I guess what I'm saying is definately double dog bad on the perp who swiped the item but at the same time I personally have to raise an eyebrow that they left something so "valuable" just sitting there... I mean the thing had a lanyard loop on it, the least they could have done is put a chain on it like they do cheap plastic pens at the bank.

I have always believed that people feel "their group" (toy fans, anime fans, etc) is always immune to the bad sides of mankind and they unintentionally leave themselves open. It's been my personal experience that "fandom" in general has a very, very high ripoff precentage. From all the con artists that prowl and pounce on fanboys to the wastes of space that shoplift at stores to the punks who rip off prototype toys from manufacturers' shows... it would not shock me if the "crime rate" perpetrated in the fields of adult hobby is the same or greater than that of society on the whole. Everywhere I turn these days someone is getting ripped off or something is getting stolen... Sad really.

This is actually the first I've heard about the "X-Clamp" (albeit I don't go cruising gaming boards) and after doing some poking around it sounds more than plausible that this is the cause of the 360 Meltdown plague. I'm not the sharpest tack in the drawer when it comes to computer stuff nor am I a doctorate in thermodynamics but I know enough to know how this problem is a problem... and just looking at the photos of the insides of an Xbox 360 leads me to believe this was a poor design. The whole "heat channel ducting" thing does not look all that effective... and having been the owner of several Dell computers that used that same kind of design (metal fin heatsink into a plastic duct leading to a rear mounted fan) I can attest to it's inability to wick heat away efficiently. I had no clue the insides of this thing where laid out this way... kind of disconcerting. This whole thing is just lending more credence to my practices of playing in short bursts, constantly trying to monitor the console's heat and making triple sure the console has lots of room to breathe with proper ventilation. Based on this new info I ran out and bought one of those wall plug-in fan stands from Beast Buy for mine and moved it closer to the corner of my entertainment center near the floor AC duct.

Question for fellow Crackdown players who have installed the "Gettin' Busy" add on as well as the other addons... do you notice a distinct "slowdown" in the loading of the game now? It could just be me but it seems the game is slower to load up and transitions to the "rotating logo" loading screen more often than it used to. I'm just wondering if that is common. Also I wish they'd add some more guys you could play... I don't like the current set. Too... goofy. Especially the new guys they added. Captain helmet and the amazing neoprene mask guy are almost too goofy for words. Oh and I plan to DL the Halo Beta thing this weekend just to look at it... don't know if I'll play it that much or not. I'm not that big a fan of Halo.

Folks should view the flood control as a 120 second "cooling off period". After all, if a person could just walk into as many threads as they wanted and walk out with a high capacity assault post that same day the flame rate would increase ten fold... imagine the virtual internet bloodbath we'd have on our hands with posts being so easy to acquire same second. Flood control saves lives. Brought to you by the Macross World Post Prevention Center.

I just cheat the time into the right time. I'm in the central time zone but I simply select a time zone 2 hours ahead of me to get the correct local time. It's a cheat that doesn't fix anything but it works.

I was running it on XP SP2. The Vista related bugs are more to the "it just won't work" side whereas the "bugs" I have encountered in the game are shoddy programming issues. On the technical side you need quite a beefy rig to run it but on a purely gameplay angle some missions screw up, items vanish, etc. etc. A good solid patch should fix those issues IMHO... but the technical "why is my framerate minus one?" issues are purely hardware, you have to have quite a beef system to run it with the HDR lighting.

Well it finally happened this past weekend... I finally saw my first "red ring of death" doomed Xbox 360. luckily it wasn't mine! Saw it in a demo unit at the local Best Buy. Three red blinking rings, blank screen on the TV... dead as far as I could tell. I tried resetting it with the remote but it would just restart then come up blinking. Now that I've seen it, I know what to look for. So far this is the only "blown" 360 I have ever encountered in person so to me this is unusual.

You know, from the sound of things it might turn out to be like S.T.A.L.K.E.R... I mean, S.T.A.L.K.E.R., if you take away the "dripping with eastern bloc slavic" feel of the game was pretty much "Poor man's Oblivion with guns in a post-apocalyptic future wasteland with mutants".

Well, seems to me the episode got "serialized" for TV broadcast. As much as it sucks here in the states people feel the need to have intro/outro credits and titles on shows. When a show doesn't have intros/outros or it has strange timings it fouls up the whole "commercial break" timings... which, let's face it is the thrust of broadcast TV. As an outsider looking in this whole debacle seems to be nothing more than a screw up in domesticating a non-conformist (in media timings) foreign show to the domestic broadcast market. I saw Adult Swim's "apology" last night while watching Futurama and from their explanation it seems someone used the "wrong log", which to me indicates they possibly decided to master their own cut of the episode from several tapes rather than from the one single broadcast master... once again most likely due to inconsistent break timings and irregular run length. Take the intro/outro out of a show and the tape queue positions and run timings get messed up.

Well, that begs the question then of did that episode run more commercial time than normal? If the final episode is the same length as the others with those scenes in then it stands to reason that there would be a noticeable increase in commercial time with them removed. On the flip side of the coin if that episode runs long then more than likely it was pre-edited to fit the broadcast time slot. Not much a network can do about that... they have to hit hard breaks and pay the bills. It's TV after all... not like they are pulling the show right off the DVD into your living room. Then again I guess I'm just used to having TV programs cut up, cut down, not run and just plain canceled. I would see this "broadcast short" as a reason to seek out and watch the uncut DVDs... who knows what else they've cut. I don't know because I stopped watching the show after like episode four.

Was it time issues? Does that episode run long?

Question by someone who knows little to nothing about what's inside my Xbox360: What exactly is causing these failures? Cheap parts? Bad design? I constantly hear people say "heat is the killer" but it seems to me that excessive heat should have been expected when they are doing what they are doing with these consoles... that leads me to believe they are having a rash of bad parts or perhaps they didn't properly test their design under different conditions and there might be a flaw in which when certain events occur the system can't handle the heat and fails. Of everyone I personally know here in town (three people) who own 360's no one has had a red ring of death or anything remotely close to a breakage. Then again we all don't play these consoles that often (once a week tops for only an hour or two at a time), which leads me to believe it might be an excessive heat in combination with a design flaw or parts failure causing all of this. With the rush to bang out all this hardware, plus with all this new hardware having so much put upon it and it's system being taxed so heavily to produce today's "next gen" HD graphics it seems to me that it's no wonder a lot of these consoles are blowing up under the stress. I'd think all it would take is to put one under a good load and then have it not be able to dump heat fast enough, or perhaps a power voltage fluctuation combined with the heat... then a solder blows or a transistor melts a little and poof, no more Xbox.

I was a big fan of KoTOR 1, but KoTOR 2 did a LOT to ruin my enjoyment of the games. While I am not a player of MMO games I might give it a look in if it turns out to recapture that "feel" of the first which I personally felt the second game lacked immensely. The one area that I really enjoyed about the KoTOR games was the "choose your response" conversation method... I wonder how that whole dynamic translates into a MMO environment. I mean, I don't know about you guys but it was the story and those great "choose the total a-hole thing to say OOPS Darkside!" spots that got me to slug through the game. I found the actual game play itself rather... standard, but the story twists and the diverse ability to guide your path through non-combat action really sold me on the game.

Yeah, call me old fashioned but I think those designs look like pure ass. I in no way like the "new" trends of making everything all swoopy, thin and jaggie.

Unless I miss my guess the color pics ARE the Aoshima MPC's and not the CMs toys. And again unless I miss my guess is that ride armor the Beagle?

Mospeada has a dream sequence episode in which the characters and mecha are shown as D&D style warriors with swords, armor and stuff.

I wonder why they left the Legioss' tailfins up with the Tread connected? Regardless these toys are looking better and better.

I'm on it. This ass got off 17 hits. Seven frakking teen. Any word on that board upgrade Hurin? Shawn? Edit: I think I've managed to track down and nix all 17 of that spambot's posts. It was not only posting new threads of it's own but was shot-gunning posts into existing threads all over the board. If anyone sees a post by the spambot "Vash" that I may have missed please PM me with it's location.

STALKER is supposed to be Vista compatible with a patch but when searching the forums looking to solutions to my problems with the game I discovered that it's Vista compatibility is sketchy at best. STALKER has been patched already but it is in dire need of another patch to clean up the game's problems, which appear to be a combination of poor code and wonky mission structure. The current patch fixes a handful of bugs but not many, plus it makes your old savegames not work... plus it kind of imbalances the game by adding a lot of items to the shops early on. From what I have seen STALKER is a massive resource pig. I'm running a fairly new rig complete with a Radeon X1950 graphics card, X-Fi sound card, 4 gig of ram (yes I know, I got it through work so it's all that much of a "waste"), etc. etc. and even I am having problems running the game with all the bells and whistles turned on... which is sad because visually the game is not all that impressive, even when maxed out. When set to max on everything it's about on par with HL2 that came out years ago but not Oblivion which even is still a few years old.

I just wish STALKER was not so buggy. I'm trying to play the game and trying to enjoy it but it's just so damn buggy for me. Missions that lead nowhere, items magically disappearing, characters not where they are supposed to be and the random crashes just to keep the game interesting. The game is also a complete resource pig. My PC eats HL2 Ep1, Oblivion and FEAR for breakfast maxed out but STALKER is a jumbled mess at about 2 FPS when set to max... I could also go on and on about the myriad of technical inaccuracies the game has but I figure it's just a game, a game designed by people who have never shot a real weapon in their lives.

I'd just be happy with something approaching "quality control" on the old toy. Decent plastics, decent paint and different stickers would make this toy "decent" all around rather than the floppy, breaky, oversprayed pile that they are.

I've seen tons of anime... been watching since the '80s and have seen hundreds of titles, quadruple digits perhaps. All I own on DVD is Macross TV and DYRL now, my "collection" was sold off years and years ago. So, in numerical terms, I currently own something like 0.02% of all the anime I have ever watched. At my height of collecting around 93 or so I would say I owned something like 40% of all the anime I had ever seen, and that was 200+ tapes.

Does anyone else see the potential for Toynami to get a real slap in the face on this whole deal? I mean, what I see is Aoshima saying "We really like your design and want to sell your toys... but your produced toy was terrible... we are going to make some changes and produce our own and show you how a REAL toy company makes this design." If this pans out the way I think it sounds then I feel stupid for buying the original Toynami version. I may just have to buy one of the Aoshima versions to see how this toy was actually supposed to be made.