David Hingtgen

It's both! Cavemen in Egypt!

Wow, the number of video game links of the cast is insane. Rhona Mitra is one of the many former Lara Croft models.

Razgriz Tomcat. Yellow Flanker. http://www.xbox360fanboy.com/2008/01/26/ne...ing-next-thurs/

Exactly. ONCE? That's like saying you played Halo once. It's all about replay...

Lots of neat Raptor pics: http://www.airshowbuzz.com/photos/browse.php?category=4

I have the same issue with one hand, never figured out why though---I constantly compared to make sure they both had the fingers the exact same way, but one never wanted to stay in place. Except once. Don't know how, but I got it in place. For a while at least.

LAFtoys.com is getting in Rei within the next 72 hours or so.

Well that's exactly it--Beast Wars is a great SHOW. Many of the toys leave something to be desired. The TM1 and TM2 sub-lines had some very nice, G1-esque toys. But a lot of the rest were from "meh" to "that's just plain lazy design". Dragon Megatron is still one of the coolest TF toys ever IMHO. So cool I bought the repaint as well. (I do plan on selling a lot of my BW toys though, gotta fund the valk collection---everything that came with a box still has the box---I just don't want to do it on ebay)

I would say they're not vernier nor would they be called slats. Slats in the aviation sense means a track-mounted flap on the leading edge. They're vectoring louvers. It may even be a vectoring louver *cascade*. louver: movable slat (slat in the non-aviation sense--like a window blind) cascade: an assembly to re-direct airflow vane: fixed slat, or with a quite narrow range of movement (vane cascades are mostly seen on the thrust reversers of large airliner engines) Thus, a vane cascade has a fixed flow direction, while a louver cascade is adjustable.

Alt Grimlock is probably the most annoying to transform TF ever. He's just needlessly finicky and complicated. So many little black hinges that seem pointless but are in fact needed if you ever want to get things lined up. "This one up and this one down and these two in and the last one back" is the only way the chest will lock together, or it'll forever be 3mm too far to connect. Or is it "up down in back in"? IMHO, Smokescreen's the best Alt. It was all downhill from there. Tracks is neat, but mainly because of the awesome alt mode. If he didn't have the giant leg kibble and shoulder-launchers he'd be amazing. Sideswipe is pretty disappointing, I should have waited for the Sunstreaker repaint/remold--it looks twice as good. Hound's pretty good. I pretty much stopped buying after that though.

My point was that if the car modes looked like Classic Hot Rod etc, they would be free from licensing restrictions, thus (due to the size/complexity/price of Alts) they could then have an alt-style complex transformation, yet actually do something DIFFERENT. Classics have common/simple TF car transformations due to size/price limits. Alts have common TF transformations due to licensing restrictions affecting panel/part break up. Alts with Classic-like car modes would have no restrictions, and the engineers could do whatever they wanted, with a higher budget/complexity than any car TF has seen before. (Ultimate BB doesn't count, 90% of his budget went into electronics) Personally, I like complex transformations more than anything else. The Alts however were needlessly finicky, due to the many small joints in a single area, due to not being allowed to split up the body panels. If they had smaller kibble pieces, it'd be a lot easier to transform them, and Grimlock (for example) wouldn't have 2mm z-fold hinges all over just to give you that 3mm extra space needed for one sequence to clear the doors... MP Prime is nice and complex, but he's not finicky. Alternators may have 100 joints, but most don't really "do" anything other than slightly move parts to clear each other. The basic transformation is simple, there's just a bunch of little "adjusting" steps in each main step to make room for GM-approved seamless kibble to swing around.

The concept art for Classics Sunstreaker and Sideswipe is a perfect example of what GobotFool is talking about---they're VERY Lamborghini-esque, and even specifically Diablo-esque. But they're not Diablos, and thus no licensing needed. (I haven't seen the actual Classic Sunstreaker pics yet, so I don't know how the car mode actually turned out) I'm aware of the whole "GM etc don't want the body panels split in certain ways". If we got Alts that looked like Classic Hot Rod and Sunstreaker, with no licensing issues so they could transform in unique/interesting ways, I'd be all over them.

I often think I must be the only TF fan who saw Alternators Mirage in the store and didn't buy him. Twice. Came close, but at that point I was really getting sick of Alternators all being slight variations on the same transformation and passed, despite people saying how neat he was---I just didn't want to buy yet another Alternator that was still not all that different from the first one. There's only 2 real options: A. Hood=legs or Hood=chest B. Robot mode is mainly chassis or robot mode is mainly body panels. 4 total combinations.

Buy a 120gig drive, swap your info to it, then trade the whole thing in to BestBuy for a new one. That way you'll have a brand-new system for a fraction of the price.

No, but there is a Dancing at the Flux contest: http://masseffect.bioware.com/community/fluxdance.html ::edit:: OMG, here's the video from Fox News: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L13Ct40cFIU "Full digital nudity on the SeXbox"

Wow, the "Mass Effect is porn" thing keeps snowballing, instead of quietly going away. Apparently, Fox News had an "expert" on, and she said all the things the last guy did about ME---obviously, she just read his article/blog then went on TV and spouted it back out. EA had something to say (surprising THEY did, since they just bought Bioware and had no input into ME, while MS and Bioware are silent) http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php...1410&page=3 And now many gamers are striking back at the "woman who had no F'ing clue what she was talking about": http://news.filefront.com/gamers-strike-ba...ence-on-amazon/

Virgin has always done "WWII pin-up" noseart. Every one of their 747's and A340's has similar paint.

Pic works, it's just huge (over 4 megs)

And on a related note, now they're saying Mr Surfacer is going to be much harder to get in the US. Apparently since the label's all in Japanese and US Customs doesn't understand exactly what the various warnings are, they treat it like it's toxic waste now and won't allow large shipments to distributors/importers nor via US mail.

Having played with it, I can only think "there's no reason it couldn't be 10x as sleek as it is". I mean, there's a LOT of space around the legs. And why are the thighs/intakes so huge? They could be half as big and still have room for the upper leg sliding mechanism. Have the legs closer together in fighter mode, and have NORMAL arms with NO GIMMICKS tucked up alongside the legs. It'd still be bigger than a real F-22 belly, but it'd be so, so, so much better than it is.

5 runs of ME? Wow. I've only done 1, and am holding off on the next run until I get my HDTV. (Seeing it in high-res will be like an all-new game I imagine, plus I'm going to play it the complete opposite way--renegade female).

And that's the #1 reason to buy a game system or TV from a big chain. Game Stop etc doesn't care if your 360 died the day you bought it. (Same reason I won't buy my HDTV online, no matter how much money I may save--one dead pixel and I'm stuck with it)

It won't. The point is it's so "wrong" from both a fan and scientific/physics/realism point of view that it's well worth bitching about. Plus the fact that if it's any indication, it very well could end up having Silverhawks-level of "even a 6 year old knows that's not how space works" problems.

----part of the reason I never buy a used car, no matter how new it may be. I've seen how other people treat their cars, even when brand new. At least with a car, when you get it repaired while in warranty, you get NEW parts, (or at the very least, totally remanufactured) not old dirty parts with a new coat of paint. If that. My replacement 360 wasn't even clean. It wasn't filty, but they didn't even wipe the dust off, much less the smudges and the "goo" I found near the logo.

I'm going to have the disagree with that. A lot of the really early TOS stuff just doesn't work and conflicts with common sense/later things. Look at 1701-A's plaque. It says "San Francisco Fleet Yards". Which is known to be one of the main Federation yards in orbit above San Francisco. The original 1701 plaque also says it's a "starship class" vessel. Which is wrong/stupid according to every other Trek canon source ever. 1701-A's plaque is obviously intended to be a more "correct" and updated plaque than the 1701's, thus why it's built in the same place. Ent D was built at Utopia Planitia YARDS, orbiting Utopia Planitia. (a lot of people get that messed up too). IMHO, no decent-sized starship is built in the atmosphere, or even parts of it. They are built in space, and the yards are named for the place they're in geosynchronous orbit above. But they often omit "yards" when saying where it's built because you don't need to say it. If someone says a ship was built at Bajor, they know they mean the Antares yards orbiting Bajor, not Bajor itself. Utopia Planitia means the yard above it, not the plateau itself. San Francisco--the yards in orbit, not next to the Golden Gate Bridge. Of course, there's still a problem--Oberth class ships are specifically said to have been built/launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome. Which is a real place. Maybe very small ships can be? Or, since it seems every fleet yard has a "matching" base on the ground that presumably launches up supplies once in a while, maybe the Baikonur Cosmodrome of 2240 or whatever is both the original ground based facility, plus the added-much-later orbital assembly yards. But retains the original name due to historical importance.