JB0

My understanding is there's three or four companies that THINK they have rights but aren't ENTIRELY sure.And everyone's waiting for someone else to make a move so they can handle this in the traditional american way... by sueing whoever moves first and sorting it out in a court battle. Because Althena forbid they get together with the other potential rights-holders and talk it out like grownups when they can have a good old-fashioned brawl in the streets.

That's what a cell phone IS, though. Kirk's just had voice recognition instead of a keypad. Instead of tapping out a longs equence of numbers, he said "Kirk to Enterprise" and it auto-dialed Uhura for him. Though to be fair, it was actually more like a satellite phone than a cellular phone. I think you just answered your own question.

Oooh, technical discussion about old games! My favorite! Little of column A, little of column B. Thermal stress as it warms up and cools down from power-cycling will put some wear on the board. Most likely to show as socketed parts creeping out of their sockets. Maybe some broken solder joints. Fixable, but annoying when it happens. Leaving it on wears out the CRT. And risks burn-in. Do you WANT phantom "GAME OVER" text on top of everything? I'd vote in favor of power-cycling it. The electrical side is easily repairable, but the CRT is getting hard to replace. Turning it off when not in use also provides a lair of insurance to your hard-to-replace microchips. They're not at risk of wear, per se, but cutting the power means there's no risk of a power surge frying something that's been out of production for fifteen years.. Actually, the CPS3 board that Street Fighter 3 used loaded the entire disk into RAM at boot, then shut down the drive. Though more modern electronics are less resiliant than older ones. Lower voltages, higher clock speeds, tighter tolerances, and more heat to remove from smaller parts. A fan can't hurt, though it's probably not necessary. Convection will keep the heat away from the important stuff and get it out of the box(I assume there's a vent in the top like most arcade cabs). There's a good reason the logic boards are all BELOW the CRT. How many tube TVs did you ever see with a cooling fan? Modern arcade games use LCDs. They don't handle older games very well, though. Some LCDs make a good showing. Some make the game look like an over-compressed JPEG. Some exhibit weird shimmering and tearing. Favorite failure I've seen was a Sega Genesis hooked into a PC LCD monitor of unknown model. It got a quite nice image... with a big blue "signal out of range" box covering the center of the screen. If you get an LCD with RGB inputs(likely via a VGA port), it's probably POSSIBLE, but sub-optimal.Not so much refresh rate(the board and display are both geared towards 60Hz timings), but the resolution will be weird, HSync timings will be quite a bit slower than expected, and the LCD will probably do strange things while trying to "fix" the image.

You're lucky. My Classics Unicron has a foot that wants to ratchet out under the weight of the robot. If his weight's not over teh center of his foot, then a little while after setting him down I hear a click, he tips off-axis, and falls over.... I should probably tighten the foot screws, come to think of it. There is that. I've got a small army of smaller TFs standing off against him. Led by Classics Grimlock in T-Rex mode, holding the Matrix up in his tiny dino-claws. Because it sounded funny, and like hell we trust Hot Rod with that.

Stealthy? I thought Milia's SDF infiltration mission involved missile clouds. If I recall, she immediately opened fire as soon as the humans sortied, despite orders not to engage if she could avoid it. Then inserted the intelligence operatives while under direct fire... The Zentradi seem to have a remarkably poor understanding of stealth and subtlety, as an aside. Also, don't forget that in DYRL she shot Kakizaki between the eyes from the horizon. Which is a different kind of style than a PPB punch to the ribs, and a blatant trick shot. Heck, in SDF she devoted an entire operation to baiting Max out and then isolating him so she could fight him one-on-one, just because Kamjin said he MIGHT be her equal. That's not serious warfare. Really, from what little screen time she has, she seems the kind of person that plays with her job, if only because she's so good at it that it's mind-numbingly boring otherwise. Which does match with stylish and agressive, but ... I wouldn't hold anything she does up as proof that the 22 is good for SUBTLETY, as I'm not convinced she knows the meaning of the word. </thinking_too_hard_about_this> And as much as I love the VF-22, I'dve liked to see Max and Millia's VF-1s together again at the end even more. Yes, the 22 is the more logical plane to deploy two ace pilots, Space War 1 heroes, and top-ranking individuals in, being massively superior in every possible way, but how much of Macross 7 makes sound military sense? And the 1J is my favoritest Valk. Of course, they COULDN'T have a 1J reunion, because Gamlin sucks.

Hell yeah!

It's a Bethesda game. My understanding of that developer is that it's not a good idea to get their games on anything other than a PC, so you can mod the hell out of it.

For crap's sake! I'm giving that to someone for his birthday tomorrow, and I bought it the week before Christmas at sixty.

I'm just glad they were wrong about disco making a comeback.But yeah, near-future sci-fi is always awesome once it becomes set in the present. I've not looked at Macross: The First. I'm not entirely sure how I feel about modern style on classic Macross, as I kinda LIKE the retro-future style. ... Please tell me they kept the autonomous coke machines?

I didn't say their commenters COULDN'T be that dumb, just that I HOPE they aren't.

Alternatively, he's referencing the book, which is what matters for Starship Troopers. But if that's teh case, he damn well BETTER be sarcastic, since th book wasn't remotely satire and Heinlen's political views are distinctly "unamerican."So let's HOPE it was sarcasm, since otherwise the stupid is bad enough to be contagious.

IT's better than having to PLAY the latest FF game. ... Or do you mean you have to buy the expansion and then ALSO play the game to get the ending? Because that would seriously be kicking you while you're down.

Why would they do that when they can sell it to you for five bucks more elsewhere?Actually, I'd keep an eye on gog.com for that. They finally broke EA down. While you're waiting, maybe bide your time with some Ultima or Wing Commander.

Actually, the box calls them "full screen version" and "theatrical widescreen version"Odds that the theatrical presentation was actually 16:9 are low, but... it was probably A widescreen format. I think the confusion is because .... while Transformers was SHOWN in widescreen, it was PRODUCED in 4:3, then matted to the widescreen aspect. The 4:3 version is a full-frame transfer, and actually shows MORE than you would have seen in theaters. This is not an uncommon practice, actually. MOST movies are shot using 4:3 film frames. An open-matte release may not be technically feasable on many films, due to "garbage" in the matte area or special effects that were never rendered into the matte area. Or, of course, anamorphic lenses being used, therefore making a widescreen image the one originally comitted to the 4:3 film frame. Given the nature of the franchise, I imagine Transformers: The Movie was explicitly intended to be viable for TV broadcast and home video sales, thus the full frame had to be up to release quality regardless of theatrical presentation.

Syndicate wasn't an isometric shooter. It was real-time strategy. It was also fun as hell.

I'm actually pretty annoyed with EA about this. It's little more than a blatant attempt to cash in on the recent success the Deus Ex resurrection had, and there's no respect for the original Syndicate here. They may just call it Cyberpunk Shooter and be honest. They don't give two craps about what Bullfrog Software did back in the 90s, it's just the first cyberpunk name they found while searching their back catalog. ... And it's STILL more respectful than what they're doing with Origin's name these days.

Person: Me.

Ya know, I've throught those antennae looked a bit too bug-like for a while now. Spider Prime just proves I'm not the only one that noticed.

Because Yang is a master hacker, and he sabotaged the displays to make the -19 look better than it was and the -21 to look worse!!!That's my story and I'm stickin' to it.

I'd second this motion, but I think given my track record, it probably goes without saying.

Missed this earlier. It's not that he wants to stop making big-budget games and start making smaller games. It's that he wants to make games. The position he's stepping down from had elevated him far enough that he was no longer able to actually make games. He got to sit at a desk and do paperwork, and talk to the project leads who WERE making games. But he's been insulated from the process, and while he's had an indirect hand in many games these last few years, he's had a direct hand in almost none. Super Mario Galaxy seems to be the last game he actually WORKED on, if the credits at MobyGames are any indication. Supervisor and general producer aren't directly involved in production is my understanding. And I know Miyamoto said several years back that anything he's credited as general producer on isn't a Miyamoto game, it's just something he put a signature on some paperwork for. From what I gather, it was a crappy position for someone who genuinely enjoyed making games to be in. He's done his noble sacrifice for the business and worn that mantle for several years, but it's time to kick sacrifice in the nuts, get back to doing what he wants, and show some of these whipersnappers how it's done in the process*. And he's important enough to the company that he can get away with it. *I think that's how he's justifying it to the company, and the important thing long-term. He said he wants to work on lower-budget projects with a small team of recent hires. That's projects that can afford to fail, made with people that need room to make mistakes and find their own style. And cutting things down to small budgets with small teams means there's more time for actual mentoring. He didn't create Donkey Kong or Mario Bros. in a vacuum, he had Gunpei frickin' Yokoi showing him the ropes.

Whoops! Either I was just in a groove and not ready to stop typing 19 yet, or my personal fantasies are creeping out and that's how I think it SHOULD happen. You decide. It's a bit more complex than that, since VF production isn't centralized. As I understand it, colony fleets have a high degree of autonomy, and many choose not to gear up for the latest and greatest when there's something cheaper and good enough available. If I recall, this is part of why there aren't a lot of VF-4s out there, either. As cool a plane as it was, it just didn't fit the budget and needs of most of the colony fleets, so they didn't adopt it. I imagine you'd see the highest adoption of high-end fighters, be they the VF-4 in it's day or the VF-19 in the "modern" era, in fleets that had actually encountered hostile forces. But then, Frontier never geared up for VF-19 production after the Vajra showed up, so... go figure. ... Maybe Frontier held off because the VF-25 was so close to final approval, and who wants to retool to build a whole new fleet of planes that's ALREADY obsolete? But then there's the VF-171 EX... which has the advantage of being a partial retool instead of a whole new product? I dunno.

Oh, that's definitely part of the problem. Pretty much everything pre-Dreamcast outputs some variant of semi-NTSC that's only loosely compatible with the standard and does horrible unspeakable things to the spec. But part of it's also the problem of scaling 256*224 up to 1440*1080. It's just not going to look good unless you have the compute power available to apply something more complex than nearest-neighbor scaling and still get the image up in 1/60th of a second. And part of it(depending on how smart the parts inside are, possibly the largest part) is that my chosen test platforms have notoriously BAD composite video outputs. Even on an old TV, the 99/4a exhibits a terrible amount of ringing. They aren't cool anymore. Remember, they were never mainstream. They were reserved for higher-end gear. The home theater boom coincided with DVD and *blech* component video inputs, so THAT'S what everyone wants. S-video is some unloved bastard child in most people's eyes. Companies can change. I have no problems buying Western Digital hard drives nowadays, but back in the day, they were better used as paperweights instead of data storage devices. Similarly, I actually spent a few months doing research before pulling the trigger, and the LG set I have is a rather good one. This particular model even avoided the panel lottery issues LG is somewhat infamous for. Though it cries when fed the dark horrors of semi-NTSC, that is far from an uncommon problem with digital displays. LG tries very hard these days too. They make quite nice hardware in most of the markets they're in. The big problem with their TVs, and make no mistake, I think it's a serious ethics issue, is they have a bad habit of changing the LCD panel they use mid-run. Several of their TVs the past few years have launched with very nice panels, and a few months after the new models have been released and the positive reviews have come in, they start snaking other panels of vastly different quality into the supply line alongside the good ones. On the up side, the panel used is coded into the model number on the outside of the box, so you can sift through the pile to find the right revision if you know that they aren't actually all the same TV. On the down side, it's a fairly blatant bait&switch attempt. I have to take complete and unmitigated exception to this. Digital image scaling will NEVER produce a perfect, crystal-clear image, especially not when working from an analog source intended for home use(professional analog sources are MUCH better than the ones available for home use). The only time you get a perfect image out of an LCD is when it's fed an image at it's native resolution through either RGB or digital input.(and even THAT'S up for grabs sometimes). Given enough time and post-processing, you can get very close, but when you're doing it on a very minimal computer in real-time, with 0.017 seconds to sample the analog waveform, create a digital image, resize that image to the native resolution, analyze the result, apply any of a number of post-processing effects, and get it on the screen... there's a lot of work to do in very little time, and corners are cut to keep component costs under control. PCs and game consoles can get away with it because they have much more complex hardware that costs a lot more. Which is why I use system-side scaling on my 360, PS3, and PC instead of trusting the TV or monitor to do it. Claiming a flat-panel HDTV is always providing a cleaner image than the CRT it's replacing is like claiming the camera never lies. It sounds good on the face of it, but once you learn a bit about what's going on, it rapidly becomes obvious that it's a bald-faced lie. I won't say CRT is purer without qualification, but all other things being equal, it gets MUCH closer to what an SD source is outputting since it skips all that image processing. No A-D. No image resizing. No post-processing. No lag. No chroma encoding glitches. Just picture in, picture out. Certainly a bad CRT will hide a lot of detail due to poor focus, but a bad LCD will hide a lot of it too due to poor blacks and blown-out whites and 6-bit color channels. Optimally, I'd be playing my old games on a healthy multisync RGB monitor. 256*224 on a display capable of doing razor-sharp 1024*768 isn't a bad deal at all. But as I don't HAVE a healthy multisync monitor, I'm settling for healthy high-grade CRT TVs. Both my current tube TVs are SD CRTs from the peak of that market. At the time they were made, they were a step or two down from top-end, and consequently don't support progressive-scan inputs, but are still sharp enough that you can see the individual scanlines easily, and have more jacks on the back than you can shake a stick at(composite, component, and the lonely, unloved s-video). Young enough that the capacitors haven't dried up and the tube phosphers are still in good shape. They're also both too damn big, but beggars can't be choosers. But the next time I move a 32-incher, it better be because I found a freaking XBR-960 for cheap.

Sheeeez... I never even HEARD of Grimstone until now. Not that I monitor the TF news outlets closely, but... I'd've bought him. He looks awesome. I've got Smolder. He was a fun mold. The fact that the flip-out mini-con mount on his chest looks kinda like a built-in cannon doesn't hurt matters, either.

VF-19 is supposed to be mainstream, a replacement for the VF-11. VF-22, however, is an elite special forces plane, and replaces the VF-17. IT does NOT replace the VF-19, no matter how hard I wish. This is, of course, because the VF-22 is AWESOME.