JB0

I dunno about consensus, but I'll go on record as saying it's the best of the three, by far. Which STILL makes it average at best. Any director that can make a chase through a collapsing skyscraper BORING should be fired. Out of a cannon.

I like that theory. This is canon now. No one can convince me otherwise.

I thought he was fixed, but it was a patch job instead of a proper repair, so he continued to use the radio because it hurts to talk.

To be fair... people were treating the Autobots like crap in Revenge of the Fallen AND Dark of the Moon. They've been treated as slave labor since the end of the first movie. The US controls where they go, who they speak to, what they do. They LIE to the Autobots about matters of extreme importance to both parties. They APPARENTLY won't even give Ratchet the resources to fix Bumblebee's voice box properly. And to top it all off, they keep coming into their little robo-labor camp and have the audacity to chew them out over how much trouble they cause by merely existing and politely doing what they're told to do in between savings of the world. Prime could be understood to be in a little bit of a bad mood. Besides which, how empathetic IS this Optimus? He had precious few robotears to shed over the deaths of Jazz, Jetfire, and SPOILERS, after all. He never seemed particularly bothered by the fact that he sentenced his entire race to extinction by destroying the Allspark, either. He had a good sulk and a hissy-fit about the Ark, but other than that... he seems pretty cold-hearted. So... I'm not really convinced this Optimus has much empathy to spare for his fellow sentient beings. If a few million humans is what it costs to get some mother-loving respect, then by all means let the Decepticreeps murder some civilians. It's not like there aren't plenty of spares to go around. And unlike SOME sentient races, they can always make more squishies.

I actually like it. I think the black and purple works really well with Hot Rodimus' "space car" design. Not that I'll be buying it(Masterpiece series is too rich for my blood in general), but... I like the look.

Yeah.... I have a Wreck-Gar. Only one I ever saw. I really wanted a second one, since he's explicitly constructed to be able to ride a Junkion motorcycle(two pegs in his pelvis mate to a pair of holes in the saddle).

It's like Asteroids with gravity!

You forgot 3. Hasbro tends to avoid playing ball with Bandai to avoid pissing off Takara. So while Takara CAN'T do a Jetfire reissue(FIRST issue for their market), Hasbro WON'T do a Jetfire reissue. But then.... the classic toy reissues seem to have done much better in Japan than in the US, so it may just not be worth Hasbro's effort to do a reissue that Takara can't do too. Actually... I wonder if Hasbro still has the rights to that mold or if they'd have to re-license it. Re-licensing it would add the obvious complication of "costs more money than something we actually own." Especially for a franchise that has become worth something in the intervening decades.

Actually, at this point in the narrative, Kyon's done more time travel than Mikuru. And through the events of Disappearance, he's arguably ALREADY a slider. So I'm waiting to find out how he becomes an alien and esper, and consequently Haruhi's perfect man.

And now you know the REAL reason she flipped out.

I'd've already ACTUALLY known that was coming if I paid better attention, wouldn't I? Seriously, though... all the possibilities, and they do ANOTHER Optimus Prime?

Man, Tentative Name was my FAVORITE Transformer as a kid. Absolute best, bar none. ... Even odds it's another run of Optimus Prime.

Probably never gonna get closer than the old Lithtech 2 demo trailer. Still warms my heart. Even if YouTube DID kill the audio.

My problem with FEAR is this: Every man-hour Monolith spends on FEAR is a man-hour they AREN'T spending on Shogo Freaking 2! ... What? I can't be the ONLY person that really really liked Shogo...

I'd heard they were planning to hack Bethesda. *sigh* Really, that's just ... ridiculous. What is wrong with people?

Personally, I'm having fun. Duke's ego isn't that bad, because you don't have a lot of it... well, from a gameplay perspective. It's more a safety net if you screw up and less easy mode: It DOES play largely like an older FPS, in spite of the regenerating health and two guns thing. BTW, two guns is actually 5 guns from a 90s perspective. Pipe bombs and trip-wire mines get their own dedicated buttons, as does melee(sadly, melee attacks involve smacking people with your gun, not The Boot). So that's half a Duke 3D arsenal at once. Not that carrying two guns around isn't lame, but... it's not as bad as it sounds at first. Note that this all comes from a single-player story mode perspective. I make no claims regarding multiplayer either way, as it's simply not my thing. And don't get a console version. It's an insult to Duke, and the console ports are objectively terrible things. They run at sub-HD resolutions, have no antialiasing, struggle to maintain a playable framerate, and are just not very good. But it looks damn good for a game developed in 1997. I just assumed the jump animation was for nostalgia purposes, seriously. Personally, using some lower-res textures(or more likely, not spending money to upgrade all of them) in places where you can't get a close view makes SENSE to me. All objects are not created equal, and it keeps the system requirements down. Their recommended system has a GeForce 8800 or Radeon 3850 with 512 MB of RAM. I can't think of any other PC game I've played when it was new that I could run at anything close to max detail... not since the 3D accelerator wars started, anyways.

Hail to the king, baby! Duke Nukem Forever successfully launched, with no apocalyptic events occurring! I'm having plenty of fun with it so far. Though apparently the console versions are terrible terrible ports and to be avoided at all costs. My biggest disappointment is that the packaging(yes, I bought retail) makes no mention of the award-winning development process. Tempted to take some card stock and print up a Vaporware of the Year Edition box.

You misunderstand. I know we will be hitch-hiking for a while, but it was looking like that was ALL we were going to be doing after Constellation got canned. Now there's a plan to return to flying our own spaceships again.

Apparently NASA pulled a fast one while I wasn't looking... http://www.nasa.gov/exploration/systems/mpcv/ They took their work on the cancelled Constellation and slapped a new name on it. We DO have a plan to go into space that doesn't rely on hitch-hiking in Soyuz modules!

Ooooh, fun toys. Something to do once our 32FS100 gives up. Not the best TV EVER, but it's pretty good. And raw NTSC, so no issues with fancy HD circuits "helping"

SNES can do RGB(as long as it's not the redesigned SNES2, which can't do s-video either). Odds that a VGA input will handle the relatively low scan rates it generates are low, though. So it doesn't really help matters that much. Though I guess an RGB->component transcoder would work. But, but... the video chip used in the SMS can't GENERATE an interlaced signal, and almost certainly doesn't generate an exact 59.94 Hz vertical refresh, especially after a quarter-century of aging on the components. And the LCD shutters are dead simple. SMS switches one lens off at VBlank, and then switches back at the next VBlank. It's literally the EXACT same implementation aside from the new ones running twice as fast and commanded wirelessly. The TV CAN'T be displaying at any other frame rate than the SMS is generating, or it would get out of sync with the game(either running ahead of available frame data and start flickering, or running further and further behind until the buffer filled and the TV choked to death on it's own crappiness). Remember, it's a one-way communication. The TV can't tell the SMS or any other analog input device what IT wants, so it has to adapt to what THEY want. I'm not really surprised the computer LCD choked, though I AM surprised the HD CRT did. Curious what's going on in the electronics to muck it up. What kind of failure mode did you get, anyways? Simple double-imaging, inverted left and right, or something more complex/interesting? Meh. I need some SMS shutter glasses to experiment with now. They abandoned s-video before they abandoned composite. It's always been the bastard child of video connectors and, along with component video, exists solely to prove that consumer electronics manufacturers hate people. ... Especially component. 3 RCA connectors, one sharing a color code with the paired audio RCAs? WHO thought this was a good idea? There's not even that much of a resolution gain over the one-plug s-video connector, since it's still chroma/luma. And don't EVEN get me started about the RGB lie! Why couldn't we just get a pretty SCART connector like the Europeans? Best thing to ever come out of France, right there. Hell, the japanese RGB-only SCART look-alike would've been nice too, if a tad less versatile.

As awesome as LaserDisk is, it's time to get 'em on BluRay. Which actually STILL isn't high enough res to see Last Starfighter as intended(the CG scenes were rendered at 3000 x 5000 in 36-bit color). But it's far better than DVD(especially if you have the old DVD release and not the remastered 25th anniversary one). Your TV CAN offer a significant fraction of the original film resolution. EMBRACE HIGH-DEFINITION. RESISTANCE IS FUTILE. YOU WILL BE ASSIMILATED.

Actually, Trek gradually imploded under the weight of apathetic and ignorant executive producers until Paramount fired their asses after Enterprise. No one can explain why they weren't fired after(or DURING) Voyager.

Not true. The SMS LCD shutter glasses are the exact same tech used in modern 3D TVs. Just at 60 Hz instead of 120 Hz. They don't rely on interlacing or electron beam scan, and the shutter signals come from the SMS, not the TV. As long as the TV displays the frames when it's supposed to, or lags by an even number of frames, you're good. In fact, the SMS doesn't even output an interlaced video signal. Like many game consoles, it abuses the timing signals to create a 60Hz progressive scan display, a practice which is informally referred to as 240p nowadays. You'd probably be right if we were talking about light guns, though. But I still have me an SD tube either way, so I'm actually concerned about the future of my game collection when these things start crapping out. Lot of modern digital displays don't play well with the funky signals output by most game machines. And composite video is being phased out(never thought I'd see the day). What's a guy supposed to do when there's no composite video input? And the first era ALREADY requires mods to interface with new displays. They were all RF-only and there's no longer a TV available with an NTSC tuner.

What he said. Though mine has been visited by the Crimson Pacman, free repairs put it back in operation. I still say MS is being a cheap bunch of crapheads by not upgrading them to HDMI at the same time, especially after they designed a new motherboard exclusively for refurbs that uses the new more reliable chips, but doesn't have HDMI. They spent EXTRA MONEY to ensure they didn't have to upgrade anyone's feature set. But hey, one of your early adopters that made the system successful might not buy a replacement console just to get HDMI if you did that, and you'd be out a sale! And hey, it's not like your shoddy untested cooling design inconvenienced anyone when it failed miserably! You know what? I've got a VGA cable, and I'm not afraid to use it.