JsARCLIGHT

I started laughing at that last night when I watched the opening ceremony... those kooky olympian designers. ... and if anyone cares the Olympics in HD are just as boring as they are in NTSC.

I'm no fan of ALF but Sledgehammer F'ing rocks. A person who does not enjoy a good Sledgehammer episode has too much culture and sophistication to be a true child of the '80s. OK, so they are releasing everything that ever came out... I'm sure the small wonder DVD criterion collection will be on the horizon just after the Manimal and Automan boxed sets. Yes the '80s spawned a ton of really, really terrible programming... but when it comes down to it near everything the '80s spouted is terrible compared to other things that have come along later. Sledgehammer to me is a classic, when I watch it I like it. Different strokes for different folks... (Dif'rent Strokes coming out on DVD soon). Edit to add: And I can't speak for the ALF set but I got my Sledgehammer set for $20... $20! For the price of one suck-ass movie I got over 500 minutes of a show I loved as a teen.

Well, I'm the boss so I take as long a lunch as I want. Anyway for those asking I and my co-owner make the rules and our rules are: Work hard, play hard. Monday through Thursday it is 10-15 hour work days with the ass to the pavement from sunup to sundown but Fridays are "phone it in" days for us. Technically the teams and production staff only have to work from 7 to noon then they can go home but most choose to stay till about 5 and take a really long "special lunch". Usually I take the gang (my pet design team) to the theater for a movie every other Friday. Two weeks ago it was The Village and I went but this week they all wanted to see AVP and I didnt't so I phoned in the tickets and they went and left me at the office with the tech geeks playing some LAN Doom 3. We are always looking for top level professional graphic designers and video production people but we just hired our "winter staff" so we are set for a while. This industry turns around so much that the people you are seeing a movie with today will be gone next month to go work at ILM or some other such low rent house . I think everyone everywhere would work harder and enjoy their job more if they had "slapstick Fridays" like we have.

Some of my team went to see it at lunch today. Their words to me are: If you really, really like Aliens and Predator (the first one) you will really, really hate this movie. None of them liked it. Not a one. Out of four guys and one girl who went, all of whom have different tastes in movies, not a single one of them liked it. That tells me that I will hate it with a passion so no AVP for this chipmunk... no siree. The one guy that I consider to be my movie barometer (meaning any movie he likes I usually love and any movie he dislikes I usually loathe) even said it is not worth the money to see. He even went as far as to recount the entire movie for me in my office just now... about every ten seconds all I could say was "what? really? that sounds dumb" and his answer was "yep, pretty much". Glad I stayed here and played Doom 3 against the tech geeks rather than go see this turd. JsARCLIGHT +$7 and happier to boot.

I make this same joke every time someone mentions the Galaxy defender... Look at his shoulders and feet! ? He's a GS-11! It's a government paper pushing robot! His accessories include a stapler, paperwork, ten lunchbreaks a day and a fat packcheck from Uncle Sucker.

(reads first post of thread) THIS THREAD IS GOING TO SUCK! It's all opinion in the end. Every post on this board is basically an op/ed piece by opinionated people... take them for what they are, add to them or ignore them. I feel confident that in my opinion for my viewing choices this movie is going to suck. PG13 means no gore, no aliens tearing apart people, no predators ripping spines out and sure as hell no nudity or "rough language" that would upset the children in the audience. I'll just pop my Scarface DVD in and enjoy the bloodspray and F bombs and imagine they are shooting aliens and predators.

When I was a kid there were two big toy giants, Toy Chest and Children's Palace... both of which were sort of the pre-TRU FAO stores of the late '70s early '80s. Toy chest went tits up from competition with Children's Palace... Children's Palace went tits up in the late eighties from competition with TRU... now TRU is getting killed by Walmart of all things. I remember those halcyon days of yore, riding my BMX bike a mile or more into town to the Children's Palace and spending my weekly allowance on wiffle ball bats, frizbees, those damn nerf boomerangs and other such swag. When CP went cold in the late eighties I had a friend I knew from high school go there and buy all the Sega Genesis carts he could for me and mail them to me in Germany. I scored big that day. I was the hit of the base for about ten minutes.

Four letters have caused this movie to become a "maybee a rental" for me: P - G - 1 - 3. Alien? R Aliens? R Alien 3? R Alien Resurrection? R Preditor? R Preditor 2? R Why on earth did they limit this movie? Oh yeah, that's right... they are marketing it to pre-teens and teens. Extreme to the max! Radical! IMHO the score as it stands is Bad director, seemingly bad plot and reduced gore level to get the PG13 equal not worth my time. I think I'll go see Anacondas: The hunt for the blood orchid instead... oh wait... that's PG13 too... what's next? Ninja playboy sex kittens chainsaw killer party 4? Oh it's PG13 too...

The only backlash I know Lucas most likely feels is from film critics, they panned Eps 1 and 2 like catfish. I even read a review in a local paper in which the critic pleaded with Lucas (in the review not in person) to never direct a movie again. Outside of most movie critics groaning and squirming in their seats to leave the screenings of his movies Lucas can't hear any naysayers way up there on top of that giant pile of money he sits on. After all, you can make the worst trash in the world and if people keep buying and buying and buying then even if all the people in the world call your product crap you won't hear them over the sounds of the cash registers ringing. The only way to shut Lucas up is to stop buying his stuff... but he is so ingrained in the hollywood market with ILM and all his other business ventures that spawned from Star Wars that even if SW tanked he would still be a millionare and still pissing off fanboys. Lucas is the Bill Gates of the movie world, he went from nothing to everything with one product and keeps riding that product like a pony which causes everyone to either idolize him or villify him. In the end he is just another uber rich societally detatched old white guy spounting what he feels like saying when he feels like saying it.

I bought vol 2 on Tuesday to go with my volume 1... since my old system bit the dust in a lightning strike last month and I'm on my new system now the old sub issues that I was having are long gone. Guess it must have just been that Sony player I had. My new Toshiba PSDVD player even subs the different actors in different colors... Kiddo's speaking in green while Hanzo speaks in yellow, things like that. Rewatched part one last night before bed and will watch part 2 tonight... when my wife is out (she still hates part one, too much blood). KB 1 and 2 in progressive scan with a DTS system backing them up is better than in the theaters... I may never go to a movie house again.

I bet if the old Stooges director crawled out of the grave and in a deep, rotting zombie voice said "Coooooooooloooooooooooor" that Lucas would be sitting next to his decayed ass helping him with a pantone book to discover the true vibrant color of Shemp's pants that he originally intended with his works because his true awesome creative vision could not be accomplished with the feeble tools of the time. After all, in King George's eyes if the original artist wants to keep painting over the canvas they can do it till the cows come home... especially to retcon said artist's crapass writing of new projects.

I don't know about that... most of the baddies I shoot tend to either explode into an anatomy/phys class or go flying backwards from the hits. I noticed that if you peg a zombie in the head they recoil from the hit but pretty much shrug it off and still come after you. But if you hit them enough they recoil and then go flying. They sort of "ragdoll" on you if you get enough lift on the hit. The bigger enemies however seem to have more of a prescripted "slump over dead" animations.

I got rid of about 75% of my Macross collection last month due to a reduction in shelf space. I myself am just getting tired of macross. The new series does not hold my interest, the upcomming toys seem to be nothing I want and I am just finding better things to spend my spare money on. It was a fun ride while it lasted but the lack of new things that interest me and my dislike of most of the franchise except for the original TV show and movie does not give me much room to manuver in Macross collecting. And for the record I'm 34 and technically a Gen-Xer if you can call me that... I always have refered to myself as a MTV generation kid as I was in high school when MTV first burst upon the scene. I think the big generation for macross stuff is the generation after me who were born between 75 and 80.

I don't think the game has location based damage... I always try for headshots on slow targets like the simple unarmed zombies and it still takes three solid hits from the pistol to drop them... head shot or no head shot. The only damage scalar system that seems to be in place is the same distance vs. type one they had in the original doom. Far away the shotgun pisses your target off but up close it splatterizes them.

In real life that can happen like that. Firearms create directional noise, in most cases the noise of the shot travels forward with the bullet and the shooter only gets part of "hit" of the noise. Hence why weapons with short barrels sound really f'ing loud... because the noise is hitting you sooner and in more force than it is with a longer barrelled weapon. Plus I have been told that troops and cops can have something called "combat conditioning" where they can almost tone out the sound of their own weapon and allies weapons and hear that lone AK chattering away in the middle of a furball. I honestly can say I was not in enough combat to tell the difference between ours and theirs but I know a guy who can sit in his car at the rifle range and just by the sounds rifles make he can give you the make and caliber. I myself can't really notice that much of a difference in the sounds between the player weapons and the enemy weapons, other than the spacial distortions that the EAX causes. My main complaint so far in the sound editing for the game is that droning hum noise the facility makes combined with just waaaaay too much ambient noises and sounds. It was interesting at first but now it is just becomming so much extra crap you have to filter out to hear that imp or zombie thing creeping up on you.

Did someone call for a naysayer? I'm going to see this movie this coming weekend. I'm a huge Michael Mann fan and I hope that the story and action outweigh the Cruise factor as I am also one of the leading Tom Cruise haters of this board. For the life of me I also can't stand Jamie Foxx... but from what I have been hearing Foxx is not mugging and cavorting like he usually is. It might just be a benefit to me that Cruise's character is shallow... and a bad guy... then I might actually enjoy him in a movie for a change.

Um... the sound is all in your speakers dude. I don't know dork about computers but I know a buttload about audio/video junk (being an audiophile myself... yes an audiophile is a close clone of a computer geek but we speak in watts and resolutions not bits and bytes). I have a 5.1 DTS system for my computer with almost a grand in power output with a woofer the size of my cat under the desk. With the music set medium and the sound effects set high when I shoot around in Doom 3 you feel it in your chest thanks to that woofer. To be truthful the sounds of the weapons are muted a bit but that is so the player does not get a headache in the first ten minutes of play. Games are designed to be fun, not realistic. If the gunshots would be close to real in volume then they would blow out all the other sounds... plus keep in mind the whole game takes place in what is in effect a large metal room. A true gunshot indoors with all those hard surfaces would damage your hearing in seconds... plus for all we know your player character has earplugs in. I can only think of one game that approximated weapons noise correctly and that was a stinker multiplayer counterstrike clone called Global Operations. The game recreated gun report so accurately that it even included the audible "ringing in your ears" if you fired off too many rounds in tight spaces... let's just say that got really, really annoying really fast. You want to enjoy the game and not spend time covering your ears. Shooting real firearms is more about the jolt of the recoil and not the sound in the end. That is what bothers me the most about FPS games... the disconneciton with the gun, you can't "Feel" the shot.

It's not that non geeks can't figure it out, it's that we simply don't feel we need to know it. I know I could learn it all if I wanted but I don't want to, it does not interest me. That is the main reason many people like me do not learn computers super hard core like a lot of people today. I don't want to learn about them, they are boring in my mind. I like what I can do on computers but I don't care to know how they work or how to work on them. The opposite is true for most people I know and cars. I grew up building engines, not motherboards and if people want to learn about cars and how they work they are just as easy as computers... some say even easier. But most computer geeks I know are stumped when it comes to cars and most can't even change their own oil. Or more to the point most don't want to. It all comes down to what you like and how much you want to know about something. I like cars and go out of my way to tinker on them... computers on the other hand I could care less about. As long as they fire up when I turn the key there could be a hamster on a wheel in there for all I care.

I did not mean to burn anyone's buns on this... it's just that to us "outsiders" (read not tech geeks), tech geeks can come off as arrogant know-it-alls that just love to shove things down our throats even when they are being nice... and also to them I'm that CEO yelling his head off at them when things blow up. We're just from different worlds... I'm from the world of bottom lines, client meetings, deadlines and layout specs and they are from a world of ones and zeros that changes so often you'd think it was the leader of a contested banana republic. On a lot of levels I respect what they can do but when you get the attitude with it you sort of lose a lot of that respect. And on the flip side of the coin all they see is me in my suit shaking hands, walking around calling people "sport" and "dude" and asking everyone where their current project is... oh and breaking "their" computers.

Just shows how old I am. Last computer thing I learned was in a community college adult education class in 97 in Texas. Since then I never bother to learn all the new computer junk, it's easier to just hire someone at my business and have them take care of it. The COMM port thing was my own useage of geekspeak, I had no clue what our compu-dork was saying when he was trying to fix our game for us... but I did hear the words "port", "computer" and the typical office tech geek arrogance. I swear, if I could find some tech guys that know their stuff and are not insufferable asses I would hire them in a minute and drop these current guys I have. Do they teach that in tech school? Do they go from computer building 101 to how to look down on others and belittle them 101? You would think they would be a bit more happy and nice to the guy who signs their checks...

I'm running an ATI card like a few others on here (ATI Raedon 9800 Pro) and have yet to encounter one problem. A few of the gamers in my office got their copies on Friday and we set up a network game then... we only had one computer have trouble running the game and that was with an nVidia card. I think just like all games some people have systems that just have one small thing different in them somewhere, buried in their OS or their hardware configuration that the game just freaks on. The system at our office that is malfunctioning and crashing when playing the game has ideal hardware according to the system requirements... but the geeks told us all it takes is one little thing like a comm port at the wrong address or an out of date driver to send the whole house of cards down on you. ... oh and Doom3 on a LAN is the SHIZ-NITE.

It might have something to do with the lights in the game... aren't the lights all "real time" and not baked like they are in most games? (I don't know, just grasping at straws here) ... and for most people this is old news but the dead enemies burning away is one of the neatest tricks I have seen in a while... well that and when the zombies explode into goo, bone and bits.

Yikes that is toooooo green. My game does not run that green.

Got it today, just got home, installed it and played the first few rounds. Damn. That is about all I can say. The game looks how I wanted Doom 1 to look but plays like any old run of the mill shooter. Not much in the advancement of the genre but a massive step forward in the graphics department. As for the game itself, the constant creepy crawlies walking out of the dark corners is spooky but not frightening. The only thing that bugs me so far is the Flashlight, Gun, Flashlight, Gun, Flashlight, Gun play mechanics and the fact that when the facility goes "to hell" there is so much radio chatter, ambient noise and otherwise tacked on sounds going on that it is near impossible to hear that zombie or imp creeping up on you. The game is so noisy that my wife came into the computer room to see just what I was playing and even she was sucked in by the looks and the sound of the game. Oh well, wanted to post my initial thoughts like everyone else. Back to the game... except my wife has "next".

Obviously you do not work in retail in my town. St. Louis is terrible for retail stores. Yes, once in a blue moon you find a friendly, happy, upbeat, knowledgeable sales person in a mass retail chain... they are usually management, a lifer and a decent person. But that is one in a million in this town. Hence why I shop at mom and pop shops and small independent stores for most of my goods and only enter the mass retailers when I need something in a hurry. And just for the record in high school and college in the '80s and '90s I worked my fair share of retail and I know that 1) it blows, 2) there is a way out and 3) there are just as many bad employees as there are good ones and the good ones tend to be nowhere near the sales floor. Edit: I am not trying to bash each and every sales person or mass retail employee worldwide as I have no doubt there are a few shining gems... but for the love of jebus the people they have in my town are horrendous. Just now I had to run out to a Circuit City to get some DVD-R discs as we ran out and we needed them ASAP. So I walk in... empty. Not a person in sight. No employees, no customers, no nothing. I got the discs and found a register. No one. Waited and waited. Walked around and found a kid (perhaps he was 19) playing the X-Box demo. He had a name tag so he must have been an employee. I asked him if he could ring me out. He said, without looking away from the screen, "I'm on the stock team I can't ring you out". No effort to find someone who could mind you. Walked around some more. Found who I believe was a manager at a register. Asked her if she could ring me out. No go she was closing the register however she glady paged the person that was supposed to ring me out. Walked back to the first empty register and waited... and waited... and waited... ok here the cashier comes now, talking to her friend and taking her sweet time. She finally slowpokes her butt into the register and rings me out. By the time I get back to my car almost 20 minutes have passed. This... town's... retail... places... SUCK!