JB0

I admit it's unlikely, if for no other reason than black isn't the standard treatment. But it's generally assumed there IS overscan. Don't forget many of those same scenes were used in the movie. So they were probably all shot on movie stock(assuming it wasn't all done in computer). Actually, it does. It's just in the form of film grain instead of pixel counts. In a movie setting, it's generally far finer than DVD. In a TV setting, not so much. It's why if you saw Fantasia 2000 in IMAX Sorcerer's Apprentice looked like ass. It was a far larger screen than it was ever meant to be displayed on, and the grain was blown up HUGE. More relevantly, it's why the modern DVD releases of Macross have film grain in them. They DID edit the grain out during the restoration, but they had to put it back because it left everything looking really flat.

That could be why the border is there. To reduce the amount of image lost to overscan.

Solid Snake flying the Vic Viper! Snake on a Plane!

Cannon Fodder's Eulogy.

I'm watching it. Hopw many times did the Vic Viper show up in that ep before the fansubbers put in the (totally un-needed) translator note about it's origins, anyways?

Yeah. I can reocmmend a browser that doesn't crash regularly. Like Seamonkey. http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/

Screw the collection. I wanna see pics of the war.

You recall correctly. There's no XBox ports on the 360. And even if you buy/make a XBox->USB adapter(the XBox actually uses USB, so it's just a matter of wiring the plugs), they STILL won't work because 360 game controllers have to use a proprietary encryption scheme, and XBox 1 controllers don't. Odds are that the 360's emulator will never contain a Steel Battalion profile for this reason. You'll be able to play Steel Batalion on a PC before the 360. I gather the controller issue would also cause a problem with any game that required pressure-sensitive buttons, too. Which I think consists of Metal Gear Solid 2 and... MGS2. Other games CAN use the pressure-sensitive buttons, so it limits your control config choices on those titles. But I think only MGS2 REQUIRES them. It would ALSO cause a problem with House of the Dead 3, if you wanted to use a lightgun. But then again, I don't think anyone made a decent lightgun for the 360.

Yah. My big objection to the Core was always the complete lack of save media. Given the cost of a memory card, it just didn't make sense. But add a memcard and 5 free games, and it looks a LOT more appealing.

Happy b-day!

Well, at least it's a manufacturer issue. Not just retailers consistently under-ordering. That's... not exactly good, but it's better than it could be.

Look at it this way... I'm gonna have to skip it entirely. FAR too many needles for my poor phobic brain to handle.

Sky Lynx alone would do it for me. I lusted for him as a kid. Omega Supreme and Trypticon not so much. SHOCKWAVE REISSUE!

Reasonably sure. Dad bought the 3-disk changer, which was ... I believe it was 200$ at the time(it also sucked from day 1, but that's another story). They had a 1-disk model available at the same time for significantly less. Apex had been on the market for a while by the time they made it to MalWart. I don't deny that their first players cost more than a hundred. I know it had SOME impact. I know a guy who's first DVD player was the PS2. Launch PS2 even, with all the incompatibilities. But it wasn't the major deciding force, or even a significant force. DVD had already gained traction. We were even through qith the "format war" people had claimed DIVX was starting(though it took a while after it imploded for the laughter to die down).

Apex. Neither WalMart nor major brand. At the time, WalMart didn't have their own electronics brand. But the Apex players were carried many places, and brand-name player prices in the US were well below the PS2 launch price. By the time the PS2 hit, most retailers were devoting similar amounts of space to VHS and DVD. The situation was different in Japan, where DVD player prices had stayed high and the 300$ PS2 was the cheapest DVD player available(and I don't doubt that the region unlock cheat code boosted appeal once it was known). In that specific case, the PS2 was sold primarily as a DVD player. Many early PS2 purchases weren't accompanied by any software sales, just movies. But again, that was ONLY Japan, and the PS2 was largely irrelevant to the success of DVD in most regions.

All I can find is REal Gear, Cyber Slammers. and empty pegs reserved for the mainline TFs.

IN JAPAN! That was NOT a worldwide phenomenon! There were $100 DVD players in WalMart a year before the PS2 reached the US.

I'd buy it all over again for Prime. IMNSHO, that's one of maybe a dozen "perfect" games in existence.

Projectors. It's actually been done in an arcade setting. I can't find a link right now, but they used a hemispherical screen in front of the player, and a projector mounted right above the seat. Back view is harder, but not impossible. EASIEST way would be raising the seat assembly into a spherical chamber, and using a handful of projectors to get near-360 coverage(You can't see under your chair, so who cares if there's no screen down there?). Feed would be provided by several cameras mounted in the fuselage, possibly with computer interpolation for perspective correction and adjusting image overlap for a seamless sphere. Ejecting would be an interesting engineering problem, though...

*laughs* I LOVED Atomic Burn*. Pity it was a caster-area spell and Lucia's AI was worse than pure random at picking spells and targets. For Lucia's use, plasma rain WAS her best spell, since it was good damage AND unfocused.... *SegaCD names, they shuffled most of them for the PS version, and I can't recall what wound up on what. Whatever Lucia's caster-area attack spell was. .... Gah.... If I had space to connect both power bricks, I'd be replaying Lunar 2 right now. Poor SegaCD.... victim of my lack of outlets.

Naw, people have just suddenly started to realize that there's a big ball of nuclear fire in the sky that gives you cancer.

Evil god is trying to resurrect himself with a corrupt church that claims to be worshipping the good god. Good god is dead, but no one knows it. Evil god can only be defeated by the power of humanity! Seriously, it wasn't overly blatant, but the Granas/Valmar thing left me with a very strong "Lunar 2.5" feel. Not just the general concept, but the development path. Character-wise... Party consists of a scruffy adventurer with a mouthy animal sidekick, a divine force discovering her humanity through the lovable rogue, a circus performer with a secret past, a noble beastman with a strong sense of justice... I'll grant one or two, but too much overlap starts looking pretty funny. Android girl reminded me a lot of early Lucia. Only with less awesome(it was stolen by Millenia!). Mareg gave me a VERY strong Leo vibe. They're generic enough that it shouldn't matter, but it felt a lot closer than most generic stereotypes. Maybe due to the setting. Also to be fair, I only just now noticed the Skye/Ruby/Nall connection, so that's probably not fair either. And I DO grant the scruffy adventurer had a lot more depth in Grandia 2 than Lunar 2. Lunar series was about the people AROUND the hero more than the hero himself(Heck, in the first game Alex was a classic mute character).

Grandia 2's big problem for me was that I'd already played it when it was called Lunar 2. Both times. Okay, so it's a tad of an exaggeration, but large portions of it WERE lifted straight from L2. Was really one of the major signs that Game Arts had gone totally bankrupt, creatively speaking. Especially coming so close after the Lunar 2 remake. Or maybe it was their last hurrah. Lunar Legend was really the point where they went totally down the crapper(even ignoring it was the second remake and FIFTH release of Silver Star in 6 years... at least they stopped at 5 versions instaed of making the SS remake an anual project)...

Perhaps they're a non-combustable propellant? I think you could technically call the reaction mass used for space motion "propellant," though most poeple will think of a combustable product.

Don't those shoots almost always use hand-painted protos that look nothing like the end product anyways?