JB0

Of course it doesn't. Many of the people that have granted it this title have never played it. The thing that makes the landfill so frustrating is ... it's technically true. But what people miss is that smashing a truckload of unsold merchandise wasn't exceedingly strange. The Kool-Aid Man was a one-man franchise for a little while, and I'm really not sure how. 'S a lot that happened outside Atari too. There was a glut of awful games from a bunch of me-too companies. And nobody really understood the market at the time. Retailers stocked equal amounts of every title. Needless to say, certain titles sold out really fast and others lingered on. And when stores were left with a big pile of unsold video games after Christmas, they concluded that the video game fad had run it's course. Instead of something crazy like Asteroids is better than Deadly Duck and Defender is more popular than Star Fox(no, the OTHER Star Fox).

Hell, there were people that'd see Dreamcast demos, talk about how awesome it looked and it had to be a PS2, and when they were informed it was a Dreamcast, immediately whip around and start explaining how shitty it looked and how the PS2 was way better. *twitch* *twitch* *twitch* DAMN YOU SEANBABY! DAMN YOU TO NEBRASKA! http://www.macrossworld.com/mwf/index.php?...st&p=773604

I like the ad for other robot merch on the bottom. "Over 5 more Virtual On robots available!"

Actually, they CAN'T switch to a better solder. Lead-based solder is banned in the European Union, so they(and everyone else) have to use RoHS-compliant solder if they want to sell in Europe. RoHS solder SUCKS. BUT... since everyone is using RoHS solder, and PS3s and gaming PCs aren't failing left and right(Wii is ignored as a far less challenging device), the fault is back on the design. Whether it's excessive stress on the board from a bad heatsink design, a GPU that runs obscenely hot, poor airflow and ventilation, or the alignment of the stars, the fact is the 360 is a poorly-designed trainwreck. ... Unless it's the alignment of the stars. Then it's just unlucky. Really, I think the primary problem is it was forced out early. They wanted to beat Sony to market, and they were gonna do it, no matter WHAT corners they had to cut. They also compacted it significantly, no doubt tired of hearing "LOL HUGE LIEK XBOX." While moving the power supply outside the system certainly helped the cooling situation, there were other sacrifices made in order to pack things in. The original XBox is a tight, but intelligent case layout. There's a logical airflow path through the entire system that isn't there on the 360.

So... the latest Basquash!... pretty sweet, huh? /me hasn't watched a Haruhi episode since Endless Eight 3. /me is pretty pissed about the whole situation.

There are multiple episode numbering schemes for both seasons. Season 1 was broadcast out of order. Then sorted into chronological order and renumbered for the DVD release. Then renumbered AGAIN when it was interlaced with season 2. Season 2 has numbering that includes season 1 episodes and numbering that does not. And if you keep getting Endless Eight, you're doing it right. There are currently SEVEN episodes titled Endless Eight. 6 of them are ALMOST identical to each other. Each one has a slight variation. I hate you, Kyoto Animation.

I'd actually left out a note about the PS3's CPU being somewhat odd, given it devotes so much silicon to work that has to be transferred to a different set of RAM before it can be used. CPU can only work on main RAM, and anything you're sending to the display has to be in graphics RAM. Transfering data between sets of RAM takes time. It'd make MUCH more sense in a unified architecture like the 360 has, where the CPU has access to the same data the GPU has, and you can more easily split the work between them. Was worried I was ALREADY making the issue too convoluted, and I wasn't entirely confident in my evaluation of the situation. I bow before an actual developer's evaluation of the situation, though.

Since you put a ? on the end, I assume that doesn't make sense and shall attempt to explain. The disabled coprocessor wasn't ADDED to improve yields. It was DISABLED to improve yields. The original PS3 design called for all 8 coprocessors to be enabled. But they had a very high failure rate on Cells. Assuming one would be defective increased their yield dramatically, since they could disable the defect instead of throwing the entire chip out. It didn't do any good if the defect landed on the CPU portion, but they no longer needed all the coprocessors to come out right. Does that extra coprocessor make more sense now? This is actually a common practice in the CPU industry. Back in the ancient prehistor of of 1992, the 486SX wasn't a separate chip from the regular 486. They were regular 486es with defective floating-point coprocessors. So Intel disabled the FPU and sold it as a cheaper component*. More recently, AMD's 3-core Athlon64s are actually quad-core parts where one core failed. And both AMD and Intel offer parts with two different cache sizes. The smaller-cache parts are the same as the larger-cache parts, but one half of the cache failed. So they disable the bad cache and sell the processor as a lower-spec part. *(Once the yield on 486es went up and FPU failures became less common, the 486SX WAS a separate part that didn't have an FPU at all, but that's another story) The MAIN difference is actually that the Cell's extra "processors" aren't really full-fledged processors. They are coprocessors optimized for certain types of complex math, that can ONLY perform those specific complex math functions. Not coincidentally, the forms of math they are good at are the same kinds of math that modern video chipsets process*. It's very useful for graphical effects, but not so useful for general game logic. *(In fact, nVidia offers provision for using their graphics chipsets in supercomputers for precisely that reason. The specialized design of graphics processors means they can run these complex math problems MUCH faster than traditional processors.) The 360's three processor cores are all full-fledged processors, much like a dual-core processor on a modern PC. This gives it more general processing power, but less complex math power. The end result is the 360 is more powerful in some respects, but the PS3 is more powerful in others. Which is superior depends on what you're trying to do. As I understand things, the 360 design offers more of the kind of power which is useful to game logic, while the PS3 offers more of the kind which is useful for graphical effects.

There is not one system in the entire history of the industry that has been pushed to it's limits. Period, end of story. Hell, they're still finding new tricks to squeeze out of the Atari VCS/2600. A system with 128 BYTES of RAM and TWO sprites. THIRTY YEARS LATER. You look at that and THEN try saying anything's been pushed to the limit with a straight face.

It is translating, in a form you don't care for. It's also notable that SCEA typically REQUIRES a dub(ask Konami what happened to Symphony of the Night), so it's not like they had a choice ANYWAYS. As long as they're dubbing the story scenes(which is a requirement for a mass-market video game, whether you like it or not), dubbing the battles is required if you want to look like you expended any degree of care whatsoever. Otherwise you have one character with two voices. Personally, I'm still mildly annoyed off that Tales of Destiny has no translations for the victory quotes. And that Namco decided the appropriate way to handle voice-only cutscenes was to delete them rather than dub them. I grant that they would've done a BAD dub. But hey, I'd know what they were saying, and they wouldn't have had to slice out content because it wasn't in english. More recently... SRW: OG Saga: Endless Frontier has voice-only conversations after battles... in authentic, undubbed, japanese. Not grunts, attack names, and other miscellany. Actual inter-character conversations. Spoilers: most english-speakers don't understand japanese. That's why they buy english games. This is not an english release.

Seriously, do you listen to yourself? GRRR, THIS GAME TRANSLATION COMPANY IS TRANSLATING THE GAME! THIS IS EVIL!

Dark Empire involved Luke's corruption, I believe.

I can see it now... Ulala: "Dodge... dodge... shoot, shoot, shoot." Vanessa: "What is this crap? THUNDERBIRD!" Ulala: "Hey, that's cheat-ARGLLBLARGGHHHH!!!!!!!!!! *twitch*" Seriously, I can't see it working well on the Wii. For a game as focused on precision and timing, the Wiimote just doesn't work well(and I just don't see them releasing a classic controller-only game at retail). Honestly, if there was an endless mode on the 'Cube, I'm not sure I'd be looking for a sequel. Because really, that's all that PN3 is missing.

The great Sega VS Sega war. Infighting between Sega America and Sega Japan after the Genesis decimated their market position so incredibly fast. The 32x fiasco never should've happened. The Saturn should've been sanely designed and properly supported. But it was more important to Sega Japan that Sega America looked bad than that Sega maintain a position of power and relevance in the market. And hey, it worked! When your company is actively sabotaging itself, something is EXTREMELY WRONG.

And if the coin lands on it's edge, we get DANCOUGA!

No, not really. Any way you slice it, after episode 3, it's just wasted air space. Moral of the story: If they don't stick close to the source material, they can't do squat. And continuing my dislike of Someday in the Rain(Hey, we can't JUST talk about "Endless Eight is endless")... I realized why exactly it feels so wrong. It's the only Haruhi story anywhere that isn't first-person. Large chunks of it are across town from Kyon. Aside from just being WRONG, it also strips the sarcastic commetary out of everything. And what fun is a Haruhi story without Kyon being a sarcastic ass?

A PN03 continuation would be nice. PN03.2? PN04?

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! According to both him and KyoAni, he left voluntarily. He even says as much in his apology. That he's apologizing not for doing this travesty, but for leaving when he could've stayed and fought the good fight. Now it may be that KyoAni made life suck until he felt he HAD to leave because he wasn't getting anything done, but...

That's the thing... it DIDN'T happen in the book. Endless Eight 2 was the first, last, and ONLY iteration published in print. Apparently, one of the Haruhi season one staff has apologized for not being there to stop Endless Eight. Apparently he quit while they were planning E8, and was arguing for no more than 2 episodes. After he quit, they plowed ahead with the Summer of Hell. Kyoto Animation has issued a statement saying, in effect, that he don't work here no more, so his opinion don't matter. http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/encycloped...le.php?id=62666

Man, I haven't seen Danger Mouse in forever.

The thing I dislike about such idiots is that if enough of them say it, it becomes "true." To take an example from my other great passion, video games... ET was so hideously awful that it single-handedly killed Atari, nay, the entire video game industry! And they had to bury most of the print run in a landfill because they couldn't give it away! EVERYONE knows this. But... it's a combination of severe exaggeration and outright fabrication. ET was symptomatic of fundamental problems with management at Atari. The huge numbers of unsold carts had less to do with it being a bad game(it's actually a half-decent adventure game) and the fact that Atari made more copies of the game than there were systems in existence. They expected EVERY existing Atari owner to go buy a copy of ET AND for countless more people to go buy an Atari JUST to play ET. Screw-ups like this were quite common in the later days under Time-Warner's management. One game, Quadrun, had a retail release canceled because it didn't play-test well with ten-year-old girls, and thus had no hope of commercial success. PacMan's VCS port was blatantly phoned in. No one gave a damn because the name would sell it. And gamers were outraged. The VCS was simple hardware, but it was capable of so much more(if there were any doubts, Ms. PacMan and PacMan Jr. proved it.) And on and on and on. ET didn't kill Atari. Atari killed Atari. And the industry at large? A lot of things happened to cause the crash. ET wasn't one of them. As for a large number of copies being buried after retailers returned them to Atari... that's 100% true. BUT... it isn't the ONLY game to suffer this fate, nor indicative of the game's crappiness. The game industry at the time was a lot less hostile to retailers*, and this was a fairly common occurrence. Rather than leaving the retailers stuck with unmovable product that would plug clearance bins for years to come, Atari would buy back excess stock, destroy it, and write it off as a loss on their taxes. *And retailers were a lot less hostile to consumers. You could actually return a game just because it sucked. THIS is why I dislike idiots that won't do their research. They BECOME other people's research.

At this point, reality can't live up to the legend. But if you REALLY want it... the search button is up there. Search for doorknob, sort results in ascending order instead of descending.

Ultra Magnus is like that too. Pretty disappointing. I think they mandated that as the gimmick for the size class, then realized it made no sense whatsoever since Starscream and Sentinel Prime weren't destined for Leader-class.

Trust me... if the Joes had met Agent One, they would've offered radically different advice. Like "install automatic sliding doors on your house so you never have to touch them again.

Only time I've ever been banned was... here, actually. For a few days. I had a gag account. I thought it was all in good fun. Apparently it was offensive, and secondary accounts are suspicious activity. ... Why can't I have any awesome stories?