JsARCLIGHT

They are. All you have to have in business is one good idea... then take that idea and market it and keep repackaging it. What are sports cars but just one idea repackaged? What are beers but one idea repackaged? Why do people who own a 1999 Mustang want the new one? Because it's repackaged and it looks better to them so they get rid of their old one and buy the new one. Attracting new customers is only one side of introducing a "new" product that is effectively the exact same thing you sold before. It's all about the sizzle and not the steak. You want everyone to buy the new one, not just the newcomers. In this disposable world we live in companies are counting on you, and the "new guy", to buy the new thing they offer for sale reguardless if you own the old one or not. It's just that usually most companies entice you with new features, more power and such... i.e. "upgrade" from the PS1 to the PS2. But the gameboy line has been all about making the thing smaller and altering the screen slightly... the actual mechanics and level of games have not changed in years. You can say that that is why they made the DS, to offer something more for the people who want something more... but in the same breath why introduce the Micro when the SP just got upgraded itself? Simple... to get the whole "Ipod effect" going on. Yes it will draw new customers but what it really does is make people look at the one they have, feel bad, and want the new one. And seeing as the gameboy is marketed at children, who are the most fickle things on earth, Nintendo knows exactly what it is doing. Kids will yell at mommy and daddums to get the new gameboy even if they have a perfectly good one and nine times out of ten the parents will just up and buy the new one for them. I remember one of the parents in my office was sooooo pissed when they found out the new Gameboy micro they bought for their kid was the exact same thing as the gameboy SP just smaller. They thought it was going to be something "new" like the DS or the PSP.

Heck no, all video game companies are opportunistic bastards. Sony repackaged the PSX as the PS One. Sega repackaged almost all their consoles at least once that I can remember. And Atari... did anyone else remember back in the '80s when the NES was so hot and Atari came back with the 2600 trying to compete? That to me was the ultimate milkfest.

The entire electronics industry IS milking. Milking is THE modus operandi of successful global business. Leave it to someone else to innovate, the goal is profit. When you can profit from simply repackaging the same old thing over and over again with little effort and people still gobble it up then you have a profitable business. Did I say milking was a bad thing? Hell no. If I was Nintendo I'd milk it to the bone as well. But I'm a technophile... I want the new, the different. More of the same bores me.

You guys have not talked to many parents lately have you? The gameboy platform is all about "buy the new, hot, cool unit!" I have several parents in my office who are now complaining about the Gameboy Micro because their kids, who just got SP's, now want Micros. I also know several Nintendo fanboys who are re-buying their Gameboys for the umpteenth time thanks to the micro. I personally see it as milking. They just released the SP with a new screen and the DS... there was no need for the micro other than to ballyhoo more people into consuming another new system. They are using "Ipod logic", in that they can just keep farting out new product just like the one before it with minimal innovation, if any at all, and people will upgrade.

It got SUV makers this far...

They really go out of their way to tell people that. Then again in another four weeks we'll have the Gameboy Nano followed by the Gameboy GX followed by the Gameboy Extra Color followed by a re-release of the Gameboy Micro Plus P. I swear Nintendo milks it to the bone.

Well... I may not know for sure but the Gameboy Advance SP is the folding color screen Gameboy unit. This thing: I have not seen Nintento ever actually say what the SP stands for... usually SP stands for "Special Purpose". Perhaps SP stands for "Somemore Profit" knowing Nintendo...

DestroidsRage got banned. He went a tad verbal one day... Edit: I think he was one of the first guys to get a custom "I'm banned" member title... if I'm not mistaken it was "Don't cry for me I'm already dead".

Hey Gaijin, which Pano do you have? Mine is a TH-50PHD7 Plasma. I love the hell out of the thing.

I originally had my plasma hooked up with component cables from a normal progressive scan DVD player. With the component signal my TV would not auto orient it's aspect setting... it would just stay on whatever setting it was at and you had to do it for it and you could override any setting it was in by pushing the aspect button. I got sick of this and bought a Toshiba upconvert player. Now running HDMI meant somehow the TV "talked" with the DVD player and the aspect setting was locked out from the remote with the TV auto setting itself, you cannot change the aspect at all. And for what it's worth I noticed a massive image quality jump from component to HDMI on my plasma. I used to get nasty color grain on my component signal... and that was with good component cables and a power conditioner. Switching to HDMI did away with that entirely. I also notice a very healthy cleanup in the image of a DVD when switching from 480p on my player to the upconverted 720p through the player. The 480 image just looks "jagged" compared to the 720. It's still not true HD resolution (like the HD channels) but it's so close now I almost can't tell. Except for the jaggies. Subtitle jaggies still annoy me.

You can eliminate that problem on most HD widescreen sets by running a digital line from your DVD player. I have one of those Toshiba upconvert players running optical to my surround system and HDMI to my plasma. The plasma automatically pics it's display setting based on the DVD playing back and is unchangeable. Which means if I hammer the aspect button on the remote it will not change at all and is locked out. I've noticed on a lot of new widescreen DVDs released in the states (such as the Tommy Boy Holy Shnikies Edition) the menu is in 4:3 but the movie is in widescreen. With a digitial line most widescreen TV's will autoset themselves to the right resolution. When I put in that DVD it comes up as 4:3 with the bars on the sides but when you play the movie it automatically snaps to widescreen 16x9. Might just be my unit and the one at work but it seems that most mid to high end HDTV units will do that with a digital line connected (HDMI or DVI).

Well if you follow the Inbit's way of thinking they where "returning the earth to it's natural state" and in effect all the animals of earth where also expected to return to their origins. Their ambivalence and seeming constant pursuit/ignoring of the military remnants speaks to their desire to see earth "balanced". They hunted down the active military because of obvious reasons, they attacked the Inbits, but for other unseen reasons... such as the military being the "stinger" of the polluted, mechanized world the Inbits where working to rebuild as their new home. The soldiers who left their weapons behind and tried to hide where ignored as they where "changing" from bad to good in the Inbit's eyes. I always felt the aboriginal society the freedom fighters bump into the forest (Mint's wedding) was the Inbit's ultimate evolution/de-evolution of man, fitting back into the natural world from where he came. In that natural state man still had society and order just none of the pollution and mechanical trappings of the hostile world the Inbit where working to undo. Thinking about the feel of that episode that whole forrest had a strange alien Inbit canopy over it which even lends more spin to the angle that the aboriginal society of people dwelling in it where products of the Inbit's planetary rejuvination.

But that is the difference between a soldier on a mission and a selfish antihero out for themselves... the selfish antihero kills as it suits him whereas Stick, Yellow and Jim are soldiers. Soldiers protect and only kill a non combatant when needed. Sure Stick may have wanted to air out that guy's brains that lead them into a trap on the island... sure Yellow wanted to show that bastard selling the fake maps what his lungs looked like... but they didn't because they are soldiers on a mission and part of their mission is to protect the people of earth from the Inbits... including the bastards. They cannot just go around killing people they feel wronged them. One of the main sub points to the way Stick acts is to keep things totally miliary... to run his operation as he would run it if still under Mars base command. He wanted to show people what true soldiers where... not just the washed up rejects that prowled the earth who used to be soldiers. He expected himself and his men to maintain propper ROE at all times even though they where fighting a guerilla war. But then that comes down to "who was really the bastard"? Col. Johnson was sacrificing troops to the Inbits (bad) but that sacrifice was keeping the town full of people from being wiped out by the Inbits (good)... the kid who lead Stick, Ray and Mint into that trap (bad) was doing so to protect his fellow city people (good)... the guy selling the fake mountain pass maps was doing so line his own pockets (bad) but when his girlfriend was in danger he sent out his prized fighters to try and save her and buy time for her to escape (good). Like I said earlier, all the "bad" humans in Mospeada do things like any real world "bad" person would... there is always a reason behind their badness. Very few of the villains in Mospeada where simple one-dimensional angry tough brutes intent on killing and pillaging. As for Mint or Hoquet not getting beat down, it happened a lot in the show. When Hoquet was in that bike gang she got lead into a trap with a rival gang and was beaten... perhaps she was raped we don't know because they didn't show it but you could assume it if you wanted to. As for Mint she apparently also had a tough time of it bouncing from one town to the next trying to find a home... you never really know what happened to her out there. And in the third episode some toughs try to beat down Yellow while he/she is performing... only to have Hoquet step in... but if Stick had not been there who knows what would have happened.

I liked the atmosphere of Mospeada a lot... the whole concept of the "beaten" Earth and how everyone was so depressed, sad and pathetic except for a few handfuls of resistence. Yellow's music was slow and bluesy, something you'd expect from a planet crying into it's booze waiting for someone or something to end it all. I thought the show did a very good job of showing the "dark" side of man without throwing in rape gangs, religious nuts and other far extreme sociopathic groups while at the same time showing the positives of man... but just like the real world the heroes are not always the virtuous white knights and the villains are not always the black clad wicked men. Almost all the heroes in Mospeada are tragic and all the villains you can identify with on some level. The signs of a well written story are that you can see the ups and downs of all sides.

Patlabor the Movie number 1 and also number 3 are in the same boat as P2. I love 1 and 2 but 3 just went off the deep end on my goofy-crap-o-meter for me to fully enjoy it. I always call the Patlabor movies "thinking man's action". Like the original Law & Order TV show that I love so much the Pat movies are all drama... it's the "trill of the hunt" and not the kill that makes those guys so enjoyable. But you have to have more than two brain cells to rub together and an attention span longer than most people to enjoy those movies. They have a long lead up but their payoffs are pure gold.

You need the tiny pony bottles that he used. Those aren't full size beer bottles but the much smaller "half size" bottles. I know they made them back then but I have not seen them in decades... ... or you could just be fehy and use wine cooler bottles. Waarrriorrrssss! Come out to gaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyy!

The Warriors "Ultimate Edition" Director's Cut DVD is already out in America. It IS "remastered" and altered from it's original form ala George Lucas. SPOILER: The new cut of the movie adds no new scenes or anything as cool as that, but what it does is add new transitions between scenes. Rather than the old school wipes and disolves you now have this crazy "comic book" transition. What they did was take frames from the film and turn them into living comic book frames, complete with text bars. The whole effect actually ruins a lot of the drama and suspense in the movie in key parts, such as the confrontation with the baseball furies. The new comic book transitions are also very saturated and "comic booky" and totally clash with the original movie. I read a write up of the Ultimate Edition DVD in a magazine and the reviewer strongly believes that the new cut and release of the Warriors with all this comic book bullshit in it is pandering to the new Rockstar game that is coming out. The reviewer thinks with some certainty that the game will have similair transitions and flow and thus they repackaged the movie to capitalize / reinforce that.

Yeah the subtitle tracks on anime DVDs are handled just like multilingual sub tracks on regular R1 discs in that they run through your DVD player's hardware. Hence why subs sometimes behave differently and look differently on different DVD players.

If your subs are hard cut into the footage (like in bootleg VHS to DVD transfers and the like) then your subs WILL get partially cut off when you adjust your 16x9 set's aspect ratio to make the anime fill the screen. On my plasma at home when watching anime on TV that is broadcast in 16X9 ratio but on a 4by signal (such as Ghost in the Shell on Adult Swim) I hit my aspect button until the image fills my screen... anything that would be in those black bars (like the AS tags) get cut off). Edit: Nied hit it before I could add this.

Most of the R1 anime DVDs I still have in my collection route the subtitles through the DVD player's hardware subs and they appear in roughly the same place/aspect ratio as they would in a 4 by set. If the anime is running a 16x9 ratio then the subs will appear on the images rather than in the black bars... if it is running an animorphic widescreen 2.something to 1 ratio then they will be half in the black, half on the image. Don't worry about them getting "cut off" or anything... when in doubt they just take up more of the image.

Well, when I was in college in the early '90s we did not have an "official" anime club per se as much as we had a group of people (myself included) who where just interested in anime in general. This was during the dawn of "fanime" in the states when anything anime was greedily consumed and thought of as the best thing ever. We gobbled up any fan tapes we could find at conventions and watched them until the tapes wore out. In those days we would watch the crappiest crap that ever crapped and love every minute of it... sometimes for the simple reason that it was not Bugs Bunny or Mickey Mouse. I think to a good degree you have to "forgive" a lot of new anime fans for loving "what they can get ahold of" rather than loving the hardcore, long past "deep cuts" classics sort of thing. Only with age comes true wisdom and only by experiencing the bad can they know what is good. I mean, I watched everything back in "the day" and it taught me what I liked and what I didn't like. I actually liked some things that today I laugh at people that like the same. Hypocritical yes but plus ten points for taste in today's world. If they are still watching Gundam Wing and Naruto five years from now then you can call them out.

... and Carnies... small hands.

The same DOES apply to porn... Federal judges on several occasions have thrown out porn laws at both a state and federal level for violations of the first amendment. Child porn is a special category in that it takes advantage of minors (and invokes molestation laws) but adult porn, much like movies in the US, is self-regulated under an outdated ruling from the supreme court from the eary '70s reguarding "public obscenity" (anyone here watch the movie "The People Vs. Larry Flint"?). There are very few laws on the books reguarding porn (that is not kiddie porn) and most deal with it as "public obscenity" because once again it is a matter of the first amendment. If you give a kid porn you are not breaking any porn laws, you are breaking a the law of contributing to the delinquency of a minor... an outdated law that has had trouble getting "updated" due to the first amendment. Heck, the lion's share of this country's prohibitory laws stem from decades ago and are almost all based on "morality" and "public obscenity" laws from the 1920's and earlier. These laws skirt the first amendment in the same way that you can't yell FIRE in a crowded theater... you can have all the hardcore shizer barnyard porn you want as long as you do not publicly display it and in turn infringe on the rights of OTHERS.

Out of curiosity I did some reading and have found that out of the handful of states that have tried to draft legislation banning sale and rental of video games to minors, 3 out of 5 of them have been deemed unconstitutional and have been taken down with the remainging 2 currently in court pending the same fate. The similair laws in Washington state, the city of Indianapolis and my own place of residence Saint Louis, Missouri have all been overturned in Federal Appeals Courts due to violations of the 1st amendment. They may have had some court support in the beginning but that support vanished fast with higher courts. Similair laws in Illinois and Michigan are currently in court and facing the same or similair verdicts. The gaming industry is already planning to file suit (if they have not already) in California under the same grounds. There is already legal precidence set in this instance in three states and by several different courts at the Federal level. Like it or not these laws will most likely eventually be overturned because they are unconstitutional. Just a few of the Sources (that aren't from Gamestop): MSNBC Article C|NET Article CBLDF Article

A vote is being cast to decide if trade sanctions should be applied to Gargamel as we speak... it is the concensus that that should be enough to keep him from bombing any more Smurfs. Just in case Johan and the King have crafted a very stern letter to Gargamel outlining several bullet points of UN code he as violated and delivers a one-two punch of threatening to possibly at some point in the future perhaps maybee think about starting a committee to investigate the ongoing investigation into allegations of Gargamel's intent to possess weapons of smurf destruction (WSD's). Gargamel's ambasador to the UN, a Mr. Azreal, is quoted as saying "Meeeooooow".