JB0

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?

I've seen the Frenzy on shelves. It's a "Fast Action Battler" Whoops, beat me to it.

The Studio 2 was RCA's video game system. It featured exceedingly low-res black&white graphics(no grays, just on and off), had a speaker for sound(it was incapable of sending audio to the TV), and two integrated phonepads for control(yes, if you could talk someone else into playing, you'd both have to huddle over the system). It came out after the original Odyssey, and WOULD have been the world's first programmable video game system(The Odyssey, while reconfigurable, wasn't programmable. The "game cards" actually physically rewired the system). BUT.... Fairchild's Channel F beat it to market by a few months and was a vastly superior system, featuring such things as "high-res" color graphics and wired remote controls. Both systems were rendered completely irrelevant a few months later when the 800-pound gorilla known as Atari released their own Video Computer System(later renamed 2600), which was itself vastly superior to the Channel F. It's a hard platform to like. It's klunky and unreliable(there's a ribbon cable inside the adapter that tends to work loose over time), with a smaller library than even the Jaguar. And it's a shining symbol of everything that was wrong with Sega at the time. Though it DOES have a few gems(even some EXCLUSIVE gems, like Knuckles Chaotix and Star Wars Arcade). The biggest flaw, IMO, is that you can't use a Power Base Converter through a 32x. Given the choice of SMS games or 32x games...

I assume you know it's already coming back, albeit after having a love afair with a SRPG?

To be honest, I've only ever played VO in the arcades. So it just seems WRONG to play it with a gamepad. And yah.... Saturn, especially with a RAM cart, is an absurd 2D powerhouse. Puts a lot of arcade systems to shame. ... I wonder if Saturn or CPS3 wins in that regard... Guess it doesn't really matter since CPS3 only got 5 games, and three of them were Street Fighter 3.

I have the US VO:OT. Never actually played it, though. Picked it up, then realized I'd never be able to find a set of DC Twin Sticks, and was greatly saddened.

It's not unheard of, particularly if a glitchy game makes it to market. FF3 was REALLY good at corrupting saves when the sketch bug was triggered. Sometimes with incredibly awesome results. Other times with the complete loss of all 3 save files.

I know. Personally, I'd add Mars Matrix to the list. It's just amazing how quickly the system's reputation got turned around in the eyes of the masses after it was killed. I think it was just taking potshots at Sega because "LOL TEH SEGACD AM SUX!111 32X AM ROFL!1111" Sega only made 2 expansions. One of which was intended to be their next-gen system(at least, that's what Sega Japan told Sega America when Sega America started developing the 32x, JUST so the american branch would look like idiots when the Saturn was announced a day after the 32x was unveiled. Yes, the America/Japan infighting was THAT messed up.). Neptune never got out of the prototype stage, and was nothing more than a Genny with a built-in 32x. Given Sega America was told the 32x would be Sega's next-gen system, it made good sense to offer an all-in-one 32x console alongside the upgrade component for existing Genesis owners. As far as major Genesis revisions that made it to production during the system's life, you have the Genesis, Genesis 2, CDX, and Nomad. There's also the X'Eye, but that was manufactured by JVC(apparently they licensed the hardware to JVC to get a discount on SegaCD components), and wasn't sold in large quantities. Genesis 3 was post-Saturn, and manufactured by Majesco, not Sega. It was a mild rebirth of the system, smaller than even the CDX, and... plagued by quality control issues. But hey, it was cheap. 2 major revisions is standard in the console industry. The Nomad was a good idea, hindered by poor battery life(much like the TurboExpress, only with a larger software library). CDX was a deliciously tiny combo unit that also functioned as a portable CD player at a time when such devices were uncommon and expensive. And a great option for people that didn't own a Genesis, and wanted to go straight to full SegaCD. But it was all cosmetic anyways. They all played the exact same Genesis games. And with the exception of the Genesis 3 and Nomad, could play the exact same SegaCD and 32x games. The Jaguar library isn't half as bad as it's made out to be. It's easy to say bad things about a system with a library of roughly 50 when about half of those suck, but really... half of it's games don't suck. How many systems can you say that about? Probably a lot less than you think. And it was quite impressive hardware in it's day. The Cybermorph pack-in, despite being crapped on regularly now, absolutely blew the doors off ANYTHING the SNES or Genesis could offer. It's not the greatest game ever, but it IS damned impressive for a game released ion 1993. Besides, no system with Worms can truly suck. I KNOW both systems were good. It's a comment on how bad the video's selection was that I EXPECTED to see the Saturn. I said it was a GOOD thing they didn't show up, and was probably the only good thing I COULD say about the video. The Saturn's big flaw was actually that it was a monstrous beast that was both expensive to make and difficult to program for. 2 CPUs, 2 GPUs, and 3 more processors in the wings(2 in the sound system and 1 more processor designated as a CD controller), all handled in raw assembly. Compounding matters was the fact that the twin CPUs didn't have their own memory. So whenever one was reading or writing to RAM, the other couldn't do anything. The PS1, by comparison, was delightfully easy to code for, and this was made easier by the fact that Sony was the first company to include C libraries with devkits. ... That and Sega'd been abusing developers almost as badly as Nintendo was in the NES days. PS1 was also cheap to manufacture, and Sony was turning a profit at every stage of the price war while Sega was bleeding red ink on every Saturn sold when they attempted to keep up. Saturn actually outperformed the PS1 in 3D as well as 2D, in many cases. But Sony pushed 3D aggressively, making the PS1 library heavily weighted towards 3D, and the Saturn's more balanced library combined with Sony's marketing left the impression that Sega focused on 2D because they COULDN'T do 3D. The early PS1 titles looked FAR worse than the Saturn's 3D games did. In conclusion: No system sucks. Except the Studio 2.

An LCD is an LCD, far as I'm concerned. Neither can plasma sets. Nor most DLPs, even the ones advertized as 1080 sets(for a while they were using offset mirrors to "fake" 1920*1080 display with a good deal less actual pixels) Yeah, I've got no idea where the 1366*768 LCD comes from. I suppose it's POSSIBLE someone thought that elongating a 1024*768 panel was a good idea, but it doesn't really make sense to me from a PC OR TV perspective. 'S what happens when anything goes mass-market. 'S pretty embarassing how badly things get mucked up when they move to a market where buzzwords can make up for low quality. Example: I was looking at mice a while back, and realized while everyone was hyping "high resolution," "2x resolution," and "superior tracking resolution"... no one was printing the actual resolutions except on the highest- and lowest-end products. And I assume the lowest-end was just to impress with more technical-sounding "high" resolutions, since anyone of competence knows 300dpi sucks for a mouse. Far cry from ye olde days, when most computer part manufacturers printed their actual product specifications on the packaging, often in absurdly high levels of detail.

I thought the DC was subject to the same revisionism as the rest of Sega's work(people will argue the GENESIS was a massive failure). I've been told the DC had "no good games." Mention Soul Caliber, they stare blankly for a minute, and go "Okay, it had ONE good game!" I figure it's more the DC and Saturn fans are a lot louder than, say, Jaguar fans. They didn't want to wade through the hate mail naming either of those would've gotten them(though Saturn was probably closer to inclusion). And the world's only Virtual Boy fan isn't gonna e-mail them. But seriously.... Studio 2! Let's be honest. I LIKE the Virtual Boy. I can find GOOD points to the 32x. I at least respect the Odyssey's place in history, if not the actual system. When I can't find a good thing to say about a system, you KNOW it's bad.

There's no functional PS2 emu right now. BUT... VFX and VFX2 are PS1 games. They can be emulated. I recommend pSX. http://psxemulator.gazaxian.com/