JsARCLIGHT

Give me a Benelli M1, M3 or Remington 870 anyday over a SPAS 12. Too many damn knobs, dials, levers and buttons to operate on the SPAS 12. Not to mention it is a boat anchor. The SPAS 12, while complicated, used to be the only animal of it's kind when it came to specialized police breaching weapons. Nowadays items like the Beneli M series have replaced it. Have to remember the SPAS design is over 25 years old... and as reddsun1 pointed out they are mean-ass looking things and are a hollywood favorite because they are just so "evil" looking compared to normal shotties. The fuse on a 40mm grenade is armed by the spin of the round and most of the time they are set to arm after about 50 yards or so, so a M79/M203 would suck for close range fighting. The accuracy against a moving target at range is average, even for a marksman. Most of the time 40mil grenades are pumped through doorways or windows or over sandbag walls. Only possessing a kill radius of about 10 meters they sure as heck would harm the bajeebus out of a dinosaur but once again I think they'd lack the brute force to knock one down in one hit. Basically the things are frag grenades launched from a tube, very good at anti-personell... then again humans are quite frail targets, get a little shrapnel in one and we go down but a big dino like a T-rex or a brontosaurus I'd imagine could shrug off a shrapnel wound until it bled to death. As for the flamethrower, while an impressive weapon to see in operation they are actually quite limited in capacity and killing power. They are more or less a "shock and awe" weapon. The dino might be scared sh!tless of the flames but even if you got a good full tank of burn on a T-Rex (and a full tank on the last generation of flamethrowers used by the US was a measly 20 seconds or so grand total) all that would happen is the T-Rex would light on fire, scream a lot, and probably stomp around for a good 30 seconds or more and set everything around it on fire as well as possibly continue to assault you. Fire and flame weapons are a usually a bad choice for offense. They pack a mean punch when used for what they were intended, clearing trenches and bunkers, but they are all but useless on open ground against moving targets.

For the most part the guns in Jurassic Park could have been blowguns because they where just there as setpieces to the story. Sam Neill's shotgun jams and he drops it otherwise were is the terror if he just guns down the raptors right off the bat? Same thing with Muldoon only loading in one shotshell... it was to illustrate that he saw himself as a fair hunter and that he wanted to "outsmart" the lead raptor rather than just kill it. I am in full agreement that shotguns, while nasty inventions, would be rather useless against the larger dinos. Even a Barrett .50 cal anti-vehicle rifle would take a good solid shot to kill one quickly. After all, we are talking about large animals with (from what I have heard) simple nervous systems. You could pump ammo into a T-Rex for minutes and without a solid CNS hit to the brain or spine I bet it would keep coming at you. Heck, even all the reports of Elephants killed with rifles it took several shots and several minutes to bring the animal down. My bet would be if one got loose they'd track it from the air with a chopper and hit the thing with anit-vehicle munitions like a minigun or zuni rockets, something that would drop the beastie instantly rather than poke holes in it and wait for pain and bloodloss to bring it down.

The "Shotgun" Muldoon was carrying was a Franchi SPAS 12 autoloader (I myself own one, see pic in thread). SPAS 12's are nasty little creations of the Italians. They chamber 2 3/4" shotshells and operate on a pump or semiauto gas fed design. Because these guys are semiauto shotguns they require a quite powerful shotshell to function properly, usually above 3 dram shells 12 gauge. The SPAS 12 on semiauto is capable of emptying it's magazine of 6 to 8 shells in less than 15 seconds if you can hold onto the thing long enough. I have done a mag dump on mine once and only once, my shoulder almost dislocated and my last shot was almost over the berm at the shotgun patterning range. In other words, a SPAS 12 loaded with 3+ dram "OO" buck shells or magnum slugs will literally tear a man in half. These rounds where made to stop large elk, deer, moose, bear... you get the idea. The shotguns in Jurassic Park where intended to stop really just the Velociraptors, which from what I could tell where roughly human size. The trick was that the raptors moved like cheetahs... a normal rifle would be a pain in the ass to hit them with, hence the shotgun. The only downside of a shotgun is range, they are only effective to about 50 meters. Past that and they just piss things off. If Muldoon had connected with his shot on that raptor that got him he would have punched a rather lethal mess into that thing... but alas, poor Muldoon was an idiot and handloaded one shell into his SPAS. Another thing to point out is the mysterious "stovepipe" jam on the SPAS Sam Neill's character drops... this kind of jam never happens on a SPAS 12 shotgun. In pump mode there is no such thing as a "jam" on it and in semi mode it will only jam like that if you are using squib shells like beanbag rounds that have very little charge in them... and even then it still fully ejects the spent shell but fails to load the next round requiring you to hand pump it. The SPAS got a nasty rep for being a finicky shotgun but they are tanks if you know how to use them.

My new favorite radio station is K-JsARCLIGHT that plays actual hits heard on the actual radio in 1992 like Pearl Jam, the Cure, INXS, Chilli Peppers and more! ... well... only half of Radio X is crap, Playback is good and K-DST at least has one good Bowie song, one decent Boston song and one not so good Who song. Sorry but I can't stand most of what's on the radio stations in San Andreas... especially that country station, it's like a fork on a chalkboard.

After some digging I found the fix for the nasty buzzing noise. No patch needed just some tweaking of the settings, now it runs just fine. I played it again tonight and got a tad further in the game, so far no real changes seen. I like the game much more on PC than on PS2... two words: head shots. On the PS2 you had to have hitman level on your weapons and be fairly close to your victim in order to possibly pull off a head shot, but now just like VC's PC version you can simply aim and shoot and get a head shot. I found my weapon of choice (the AK) and have just sat back, kneeled down and headshot most of the punks with ease. The only real improvement this game needs is smarter AI... they still just run straight for you.

Do you mean the saber he used in ANH/ESB/ROTJ? Is there another saber?

This thead should most likely get back to Vader and his emotional baggage. This is a great debate, I'd hate to see it end mired in geopolitical hot topics.

Rise from the dead! GTA:SA is out for XBox and PC. I picked up my copy for PC last night and here is my mini review of it for those who are interested (I only had a few hours of playtime last night so these are mostly first impressions and don't speak to the "whole" game yet): PACKAGE The package design for the PC release is stellar. It is few and far between that a game package impresses me as most of them tend to be simple plastic clamshell DVD cases or the tired small cardboard box with cardboard tray affair. GTA:SA did something with a twist... the pacakge on the outside looks like a run of the mill DVD case with a cardboard slipcover on it but once you open it you discover what you thought was a run of the mill plastic DVD case is in fact a nice hardcover book! Said hardcover book, done up in a fancy black glossy cover, contains both the pull out map (which is pretty much the same thing as the PS2 release) and in the back houses the single DVD-Rom game disc. This sweet hardcover book is easilly four times as long as the old PS2 manual and goes into much greater depth about the three cities in San Andreas as well as going so far as to list other things in the game of interest as well as giving you "nutritional information" about the fast food joints. Being in package design myself I found this twist of packaging to be a very welcome change... it adds to the sense of value when you buy the game and the hardcover book gives you something to read that you actually want to read (unlike most simple staple together game "booklets" that read more like brochures). I rate the packaging a 10 plus, some of the best video game packaging I've seen to date. Now on to the meat of what you pay for... THE GAME ITSELF Contextually the game has not been changed... or so they say. The actual game, what happens, what appears, etc. is supposed to be exactly the same as the PS2 release with no alterations, new missions or anything that would set it apart from the original. After playing for a few hours last night I could swear that I am noticing subtle game differences... I'm seeing more "high end" cars around, noticing more variation in the people, finding items where I don't remember them being in places, etc. Then again all that could just be my own poor memory from playing the PS2 version months ago. Also playing on PC has other bonuses that come with much greater system memory and hard drive. Load times are almost nonexsistent. Once you start the game you have an initial load screen that lasts about 5 seconds (similar to the PS2 initial load screen but ten times faster). The only times the game "loads" during play are the transitions between building interor and exteriors, and on the PC it is instant. The game has, to a good degree, achieved a seamless playback on PC without compromising anything. Outside of the upgrades the game has received (see further down), the game is the same. No story elements changed, no missions altered, no weapons added and no vehicle changes. Suffice it to say, Carl is still Carl, the Grove street boys are still the Grove street boys, OG Loc is still a retard and the state of San Andreas is still one violent place. I'm going to cover the game in three separate categories to make it easier to get my impressons down: graphics, sound and play control. Graphics Obviously the PC version has superior graphics to the PS2 version. The inclusion of the original high res texture maps plus higher polycount in the characters and vehicles give the game a much, much cleaner appearance. Just like the transition of Vice City from PS2 to PC now you can actually read street signs (gasp! ), see character's faces, notice rust and damage on vehicles better and on and on. I never knew how easy it would be to navigate when I could actually see the street signs from further back rather than right in front of them. Add to this the much further draw distance with no pop in makes it so much easier to "See stuff coming". Just like my experience on the PS2 I'm running GTA:SA on the PC in widescreen and the game looks better wide than in normal 4:3 (but that is personal preference, people who have only played the game in 4:3 will never miss widescreen but those who played it in widescreen will never go back... if that makes any sense). Another very minute but very noticeable addition to the PC graphics punch are shadows... all the shadows in the game are now soft and very natural. Also now everything casts shadows onto everything... you can see the shadows of the overhead power lines cast onto CJ as he runs under, you can see the ominous shadow of that darn police chopper overhead creep up on you and you can see the shadows under bridges and behind buildings. The tiny addition of these background shadows seems to add a touch more life to the world and makes it feel more natural on some levels. In the end, graphicly the game has much more punch and pizzazz on PC. Cleaner textures, higher res and soft shadows galore. Audio First and foremost I should note that all the radio stations from the PS2 are the same. Same content, same songs, same DJ's, same everything. The one and only addition is the "do it yourself" MP3 radio station. However, unlike Vice City where the MP3 station was a simply a playback of your songs from one to the next the San Andreas MP3 radio goes further. It not only plays back your songs but adds in commercials, radio imaging and the like. I was shocked and very entertained to hear "More Music! Less Talk!" mixed in with my songs last night... and then hear a commercial! So in effect it lets you make the radio station from the early '90s you actually heard on the air with songs you really want to hear rather than the stereotype radio that the game runs. Next under audio are the sound effects and foley. They also, for the most part, are totally unchanged from the PS2. The citizens of SA still banter, you still hear that guy on the street blurt out "I smoke cause it gives me knowledge!" and every shunt, bump and chirp of the tires sounds the same. The weapon sound effects sound a bit more thumpy and less firecracker this time around though. Now for a bug that it seems I have found reguarding the audio. When you start the game it plays fine, but when you save your game or escape to the menu and go back into the game the audio freaks out for a minute or so. What it does is it stops playing half the sound effects and instead creates this annoying buzzing noise that plays for about a minute. Once the buzzing stops the game returns to normal. This is very, very annoying and I assume there is a bug fix coming soon for it. It is not a hardware feedback buzz as it is actually the sound effect of bicycle tires rolling from the game, just played back really, really loud. It's an obvious glitch in the game as the sound is even "dimmensional", meaning as you run around with the sound playing it is actually exsisting in the game world somehow. By this I mean as you turn CJ the sound dopplers around your speakers as if it was being made by some object in the world in dimensional placement to CJ. All in all it is very strange and very annoying, but as I said a patch is most likely in the works and it only happens when exiting to the menu and re-entering the game and then it only lasts for 30 seconds to a minute before magically going away and returning the game to it's normal audio operation. Play Control The meat and potatoes of GTA:SA. Gone is the auto aim (thank god). Returned has the mouse aim! (once again, thank god). This time around it is not as simple as pointing and shooting like in Vice City though. Now that GTA:SA supports shooting on the move you now must hold down the right mouse button to call up your "aim" reticle at which point you press the left mouse button to shoot. This is actually quite nice once you get used to it as now it gives you very precise aim ability, plus small arrows appear over hostile targets letting you know their health (in the PS2 version the autoaim reticle changed color to let you know if the target was hurt or not, now in the PC version a small arrow appears over the target's head and it changes color to let you know the status). What this right click aim gives you is the ability to move while shooting, which I found indispensable in the PS2 version but a tad herky jerky and more "Spray and pray"... on the PC the shoot while moving function is more fluid and I can actually manuver and fire much like I would in a FPS. So now I can run and strafe while gunning down my targets. Some other crossovers from the PS2 to PC are the "button tapping" controls. Such as peddling your bike or dancing in the game required sequential button presses or rapid button taps to perform... they still do on PC. This can be a tad frustrating at times but no more frustrating than it was on the PS2. Just about everything else is the same as it was on the PS2, just with comparable PC keyboard buttons rather than controller buttons. The game retains the ability for you to buy one of those PS2 PC controllers and use it just as the PS2 version of the game would function... but when you have mouseaim why bother? I guess the long and the short of the PC play control in my mind is the mouseaim... if you are captain butterfingers when it comes to console controllers like I am and more comfortable with a mouse and keyboard then you will dominate this game. Final Thoughts This is GTA:SA as I wanted it. High res, mouseaim, widescreen bliss. If you are anything like me you will wonder why you bought it for the PS2 in such a "rough" form. I only hope they get the audio glitch sorted out soon as it becomes quite annoying quite fast and it is really the only blemish on an otherwise stellar PC port.

My only quam is with everyone calling him a genocidal, planet killing monster. He did not throw the switch nor display any genocidal traits in the movies. Albeit he was in the same room as said switch and was there to see the results and did not lift a finger to stop it but being the right sword hand of the Emperor and being some sort of twisted maniacal monster are two different things. I always saw Vader not as the murderer but the enforcer of the Empire. His image was more of fear of death than him actually killing you. His actions where all quite deliberate but very few of them I feel where done out of bloodlust or want for carnage or to wipe people out. The prequels paint him as a person seeking order, total order. All his actions are more or less done to control rather than destroy. His killing of subordinates is more or less him eliminating malfunctioning parts of his perfect machine. Yes, killing is wrong but there are several levels in which Vader choses not to kill. I guess I just see him more of a calculating control freak than a homicidal maniac. The prequels frame Vader more as a victim of circomstance than someone who willingly chooses to murder and destroy and conquer. His fall to the dark side is under the auspice that he will gain the power to control, not the power to destroy. Then again this is all just my interpretation of the character from all the movies. Everyone seemingly has differing views on Vader now that the series is complete. Heck Lucas himself most likely has a totally different view than all of us combined and in several interviews he claims to have patterned the character of Vader on Henry Kissinger.

OK, this is a weird question I have to pose here: why is everyone crediting Vader with killing millions of people on a planet? I'm pretty sure it was Moff Tarkin that ordered Alderaan be blasted... Vader just stood by and watched. To my knowledge the only direct creditable kills to vader (not Anakin) are a fair number of jedi, the seperatist leaders, a handful of rebel pilots above the Death Star and Obiwan (sort of). Giving Vader credit for all the evil of the Empire is like giving Field Marshall Rommel credit for all the atrocities of the Nazis in WW2. Or is there something else I'm missing here?

me The it appears we are bookends because I think Prince is as straight as an arrow. He may dress like Lucy from I love Lucy at times but the man has bedded more girls than most stars I know. Then again this is the same issue I hear all the time Prince fans and Jacko fans don't mix well. We each hate the other artist and love the one we do. In the end we both love a tiny black man for the music he makes.

OK how many people here think Prince is gay?

I think a point that Agent One is making is that in Anakin's mind he is not evil, he is the "good guy". He is believing in the republic and fighting to maintain it he thinks. On no level does that dismiss the bad things he does but it makes a good point as to his true mindset and polarity. Think of it in modern day terms that we can identify with: let's say you are a soldier for your country and the president tells you the army you belong to is a subversive element inside the government that is planning a coup. You are faithful to your country above your army and will follow the orders of your leader believing they are "right". In your mind, wiping out your own army to prevent the coup is "good"... but that is once again playing to the whole "who decides what is good and what is evil" angle of human nature. Good is usually defined by the majority or in the case of war, the victor. If the Nazis had won WW2 their warped values would have been considered "good" and those of their defeated enemies (us) would have been "evil". I will not argue that the killing of children is a very not nice thing, but in the context of the situation Anakin was placed in the children where an extention of the organization he was tasked with eliminating. Using another analogy, what do you do if you are confronted with children who are training to be terrorists? Or the Hitler Youth, children training to be Nazis? They will fight you just as their older members do, and if that one kid who is fighting the clones on the landing gantry when Bail shows up is any indication of the skill level of child Jedis they would have posed a threat to the empire/republic. I guess what I am trying to say is that I think Anakin thought he was in the right and seen from his side he sort of was. He was stopping a war in one action by killing the separatist leaders, he was stopping a coup by killing the Jedi and he was ensuring the safety of the republic by doing so. In the same breath I will also say that the SS thought they were right and Stalin thought he was right... it is only in the presence of good can evil be called evil. Without a proper measuring stick evil can be seen as good in some lights.

Booyeah... ... and Prince is still better than Jacko. At least Prince played an instrument in his act.

But at least you know which way his bread is buttered if you know what I mean... Prince gives Agent One a run for his money in "prokin'" of women. (and with that, I now place this thread in the lowest levels of debauchery)

Wow, this thread went down a very weird road a few miles back.

In the '80s you listened to one of the two short black men, Michael Jackson or Prince. I listened to Prince and still do today.

I found that scene to be a tad strange on many levels. I can understand the feelings Obiwan had reguarding Anakin as his "brother" and such but it seemed so terrible and needlessly cruel to just watch him catch fire and start to burn. It also seemed so strange that he would just walk away leaving him to burn. After all, his task was to ensure that Anakin was destroyed... not mortally wounded and left for dead. Obi has an almost Bond Villain moment there in which he leaves assuming Anakin will die. As I said I can understand the whole "I didn't want to kill you" and I don't want to watch you die angle but damn, you have to admit it was rather cold of Obi to lop the guy's last real limbs off and just leave him there to burn. Then again that whole fight was tremendous and then just sort of ends with a whimper rather than a roar. On the other hand it is just a simple (and quite weak) plot device. Sure Obi should have walked up, choked back his tears, and lopped the whiny brat's head off but that would have pretty much ended Star Wars right there. While I enjoyed the movie, that scene (along with many others) I felt was handled terribly and suffers from poor scripting and dialogue. A true scriptwriting master could have woven that yarn in a way that didn't seem so stilted and off-balance but we have what we have in the end.

The Bowie CD is not really "new" per se, he is just re-releasing all his previous albums remastered with better packaging and such. David Live is an old, old album that recently got a facelift. I have it on vinyl and decided to buy it again for the improved audio editing. As for music reviews they are like movie reviews, take with a grain of salt. After all, it is just someone else's opinion on something. If I let my personal listening habits be affected by music critcs then I'd be listening to dead air right now. And New Order and the Gorillaz are sort of aquired tastes... if you did not grow up with Joy Divison/New Order in the '80s they may be quite a reach for you to get into. Their new album is classic New Order, very New Wavish with heavy synth riffs, loops and tons of big hooks. I myself am loving this New Wave revival that is going on right now... it's great to see old school bands like New Order putting out new material but it is even cooler to see modern New Wave bands cropping up like Elkland, The Bravery and others. Heavy Synth and big loops are back!

I think the practice that these folks are requesting be halted is not the "make me an offer" sort of selling but the "I'm not telling you a price, you have to guess at it and the seller picks and chooses the one he wants". I know I've sold things on here with the request for people to just "shoot me a price" but that was usually the case when I had something that I just wanted to get rid of and did not care what price it sold at. Generally in those instances I would jump on the first offer and sell. I personally think the people who post something for sale and then pick through a series of offers looking for the best one are a tad devious... they are doing nothing "Wrong" mind you as it is pure capitalism in effect, but it easily angers people trying to buy. Imagine that someone posts something for sale you really want and just says PM me with your offer. You are "First" to post in the thread and first to send a PM with a valid offer... only to find out someone else gets it for an undesclosed amount. It sort of chaps your hide. Then again asking the mods to police a private sale section is asking them to increase their authority and possibly take personal responsability for private sales. Claiming "go to ebay" could be said for everything offered for sale on this site. I guess the final answer is the one I use when I see business dealings or prices I don't like at stores: walk away. No one is forcing you to buy. If someone appears to have shady business practices or performs certain sales tricks that you don't like, just ignore them and move on. If and when someone gets ripped off THAT becomes a public issue that would require action by the hive mind.

Cheap Trick's "Ohm Sweet Ohm" is out there and available. I last saw it on one of their compilation CD's, Sex America I think. Debbie Harry also released her "Angel's Song" on an album at some point with slightly altered lyrics. The thing that chaps me to this day is that they never released a soundtrack for Rock & Rule... Unearthed had plans to include a soundtrack CD with the collector's set DVD release or eventually release a soundtrack CD but I think their plans fell through. It's too bad really as R&R has a ton of original songs in it that are not available anywhere like EW&F's "Dance Dance Dance" and of course "Angel's Song" in it's unaltered form as well as the ending balad "Send Love Through". Classic '80s rock lost to the ages...

Rise from the dead! DVDs for Rock & Rule come out on 6/7. Single disc standard release and two disc collector's set. I've had my collector's set pre-ordered for months. I'm jazzed, is anyone else?

DA is right, I'm already branded. And having sort of big hands has other fun qualities, like being able to do the '80s wrestling move the "iron claw".

I've always had sort of big hands and have found the original A1 AR15 grip to be quite comfortable when shooting. The reason they added that stupid finger rest on the A2 grips was because of mine and everyone else's complaint about the A1 grip: being made of solid plastic with little traction when you really sweat that grip gets very slippery and your hold position starts to slide upwards into the trigger guard. Not only is that uncomfortable but there is this tiny gap in the trigger guard so the guard can rotate down for use with winter gloves and when your hand is forced up into that gap it creates a nice blister causing condition that only gets worse with rapid fire. The two kinds of aftermarket grips for AR's that I prefer are the age old trusty Hogue rubberized grip and the fairly new First Samco/Fobus Tactical grip. When it comes to AR grips there are so many on the market now and they all have different feels to them that it makes it hard for you to find one you like without shopping around. After all, grips are a very personal thing and one person's likes do not always translate to another person. I'm just glad the AR family has become sort of the IBM of rifles in that everyone makes accessories for them and the options for almost every part of the weapon seem limitless... on the other hand the grip pannels on my Uzi are uncomfortable as hell and I really wish Hogue made rubberized grips for them.

Then again rap is also the furthest from the center for most kids looking to rebel against everything in high school and grade school. Rap had been around since the Sugarhill gang broke out in the late '70s early '80s but it was not really until the later '80s when rap started to go mainstream big time. That big explosion in the early '90s, and thanks to the constant news coverage of gang activity, rap was further pushed into the spotlight as the "rebel music of choice" for today's teens. Just like how when I was a kid it was electro and new wave/punk was the "rebel" music that I listened to that pissed off my parents today's kids are listening to rap and pissing off their parents. Hair Bands to a good degree where the same sort of shtick: loud raucus music that your parents didn't approve of. Mom and Dad saying "turn off that crap" is a surefire way for kids to like it even more. Edit: makes me afraid of what kids will be listening too later on down the line... will there be a revival of classical music because it will so much different than everything else? I mean, what do kids rebel with when mom and dad listen to snoop dogg and gangster rap?