JB0

That's one thing I like about top-loaders. The drive mech (usually) has a much more stable grip than tray- or slot-loading drives. They're also far simpler and more reliable. And my bad. The first 360 chipset revision WAS the HDMI revision. Either they added HDMI sooner than I remembered, or the first hardware revision was later than I remembered. In any case... hooray bullet-point parity! Doin' good. I honestly can't remember what embarrassing statement I doubtless made that you're referencing. Jog my memory and I'll let you know if she escaped.

Why do you do this to people? I've heard so much about this, I almost HAVE to watch it to see if it's all true. ... *clicks link* I hold you personally responsible for any mental damage this causes.

HDMI isn't the first revision. It's the third, I think. I know there was at least one motherboard/chipset change before HDMI was added. I THINK there was a second, but I'm not certain. Mine is one of the last non-HDMI ones, and it's failed once. Got a buddy with a launch unit that still hasn't gone down yet. No clue what dark force he channeled into it.

Naw. I thought they did, then realized they didn't. I'd just already written it off as not happening because there's no way they can do Sighs AND Disappearance right. Unless they decide to skip the rest of the reruns.

Pfft. My SO2 clear file is at 172 hours. Now, to be fair, the final boss one-shotted my party once phase 2 of the battle began. So I turned around and went to the Cave of Trials, with a healthy dose of playing in the Arena sprinkled in for good measure. When I was done with Trial Cave(which was extremely grindy), I came back and shredded him like ham in a blender. I don't recall my timer when I initially made it there, but it was still WELL over 60. In short: tri-Ace is getting lazy.

Indeed. At the end Starscream, Bulkhead, and Sentinel Prime were the only 3 that Headmaster compatibility made sense for. Which isn't to say I don't have MY Headmaster on Ultra Magnus. He's gone undercover. Don't tell anyone.

They've gone ahead and moved into Sighs? Of course they would...

Actually, NINTENDO backed out of that. It was happening in the midst of the end days at TimeWarner. They were meeting with different people on a daily basis. No one knew what was going on, and it was a total trainwreck. Nintendo was rapidly figuring out that, brand or no brand, Atari was NOT in a position to market their product and they were better off alone. Shortly thereafter, the Tramiels bought Atari's home division, fired everyone, and killed the console division. All they ever wanted was the home computer division, and they wanted Commodore 2.0, not Atari Computer. So Atari WOULD have bounced it in another month. But the actual blunder they DID get to make was killing the 7800 and shelving it for 2 years, then not supporting it properly when they DID dig it out of the warehouse and ship it. The 7800 could've been incredible if it'd come out when it was originally supposed to, with all the accessories it was supposed to(including a high score cart for saving data!)and been given a workable budget. Indeed. Games like 1989's Secret Quest, a 2600 game that prominently advertised it was created by Nolan Bushnell on both the front and back of the box.

Except that he really NEEDS to be a leader-class toy, as one of three bots in the entire show that were actually taken by the Headmaster(making that a leader-class gimmick was one of the worse ideas the franchise has had). TOTAL OWNAGE, NOOB!

http://www.gamesx.com/avpinouts/saturnav.htm What? You wanted pictures of the games that might not exist?

Except for the broadcast order DVDs, which don't even look particularly good at their native resolution.

Saturn is before the component video standard had been created. It's RGB. Feel free to rig a VGA cable, though. And only select games are capable of it(I'm not sure if ANY retail games make use of the capability).

We were hoping(fearing?). I thought episode 2 did that well on it's own. Watching essentially the same episode 6.5 times in a row*? I don't think so. *(With the first episode being different and the last episode having a different ending)

That's a lot of Norikos...

So... I can actually start caring again... in another month and a half when the reruns are done? I'm just assuming they aren't doing Sighs at this point, and will be doing Disappearance based on the ending theme and remaining episodes. Well, let's see if I can recover from my apathy in that time. I haven't watched E8 past the third iteration, and at this point I don't really care to see v.8 at this point. Good work, Kyoto Animation. You've successfully trolled the hell out of the fanbase, and probably destroyed the franchise' worth as animation in the process.

I like the SegaCD. It's also worth noting that SegaCD is what made the Genesis/Megadrive start selling in Japan, so it was probably important to keeping the system alive overall(as the Japanese game companies tend to care about their home turf first, the rest of the world second). The 32x... I can't really defend. It's hard to find a platform I can't say good things about. The best intentions, and all that. The Sega Amerca VS Sega Japan stuff is hard to come by sometimes. It'd take a good bit of digging to find a link. Duke Nukem Forever is dead(maybe. They laid most of the dev team off, but apparently admit to still working on the game in a lawsuit filed against Take-Two). The OTHER Duke Nukem projects are still going along. And there is no other developer. 3D Realms is still around. They scaled back significantly, but did NOT go bankrupt or merge as many "news" sites were reporting. It was rumor, never substantiated fact. The reports of their death were greatly exaggerated, and while the story changed 4 times in as many days, every one quit paying attention after "3D Realms is dead. Duke Nukem Fornever." To make maters worse... there are currently TWO companies using the same name. The developer that used 3D Realms as it's public name but was still legally named Apogee Software Ltd started a publisher named Apogee Software LLC. Both companies are legally separate entities, but use almost exactly the same name. Apogee LLC is the one doing the other Duke Nukem games. Which aren't developed by 3D Realms/Apoge Ltd. Confusing enough? http://www.kotaku.com.au/2009/05/3d-realms...-nukem-forever/ I hesitate to link Kotaku, but even THEY can't foul up a complete cut/paste of a press release. Just scroll past the editorial content until you see a gray box with a giant quote mark at the beginning. The press release says they let the DNF team go, but... http://www.shacknews.com/featuredarticle.x?id=1154 The lawsuit that confirms Duke Forever is STILL in dev hell and says they let MOST OF the DNF team go.

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.