JB0

As if making a mess ever stopped anyone from playing with their food.

"How can they cut the power? They're animals!"

What, you don't have an NES? The PS3 has a metric buttload of CPU power, which IS quite relevant. It's just set up in a fundamentally different way than the 360, so it's difficult to use without explicitly planning for it. It's split up a LOT more than the 360 processor, so if your code isn't VERY threadable it's hard to make good use of a PS3. PS3 also has massively more floating-point power, while the 360 has moderately more integer power. So if you aren't coding with a heavy bias towards floating-point(which you aren't if you weren't explicitly planning for PS3), the 360 has an edge. And actually, they have the SAME amount of RAM. BUT... the 360 has 512 MB of "unified architecture" RAM and the PS3 has 256 MB of system RAM and another 256 MB of graphics RAM. Again, this results in fundamental differences in approach, and if you aren't considering the PS3 while developing your game, it WILL hurt it when you port from the 360. And yes, I'm a raving Sony fanboy. That's why I own a 360 and not a PS3D0.

Spamspamspammityspam! I got hit by the flood control earlier. Doesn't happen often, but occasionally... We should all set up a spare computer, then DDoS the spambots!

I'm tempted to mod my 360 so the standard power light is a red ring. It'd be hilarious. If history is any indication, that'll be ported to the PS3, Wii, DS, PSP, GBA, and PS2. It's good to see the original omnigame still has some ports in it. And Son of Prince of Persia still has some miles left too! Seriously, the resprite is beautiful. Should be done far more often.

Remember, the records Skynet has access to were sketchy. It didn't even know who to look for. All it had was a name. The original Terminator was just running around shooting everyone named Sarah Conner. And going back another 2 generations and killing absolutely everyone named Conner might be just a LITTLE more damaging to the future than Skynet wants(what if one of those Grampa Conners was an electrical engineer that laid the groundwork for one of Skynet's critical components?). Hence, it needs to stick to a close generation, where it can more or less guarantee it's own birth. As far as the end of the war being known... Yeah, it is, for the most part. Skynet's gotten desperate and started playing with time travel, which is dangerous at best. But the war isn't over yet(heck, Skynet's still designing and deploying new models according to the later movies), and you still have billions dead in a nuclear holocaust and an Earth that's been utterly devastated by everything. It's a dark future regardless of who wins.

What about alien robots from another planet that evolved from naturally occurring gears, levers, and pulleys? http://transformers.wikia.com/wiki/Image:Pulleys.jpg That's from the first issue of the comics. And since the comic bok made it to market before the TV show, that's the first piece of Transformers fiction ever. I actually have that issue. I laughed the first time I saw that panel.

Ironically, I feel the opposite. The first, in both cases, was a modern update of the traditional horror movie. In Terminator's case, there's no "happily ever after" either. Sarah Conner is hiding out in Mexico, waiting for the robots to launch a nuclear holocaust that wipes most of humanity off the face of the Earth They don't explicitly illustrate it, but you know it's going to happen, because it HAS to happen. The entire movie fails to occur otherwise. It's a causality paradox. (Not that Ripley being adrift in Middle of Nowhere, Deep Space, population 1, with nothing but a cat and her underwear was particularly uplifting, but the aliens aren't already destined to get loose on Earth and kill everyone) Terminator 2, like Aliens, was converting a horror film into a standard action movie. But while Aliens remained respectful of it's roots if not true to them, Terminator 2 bends the original over a table and rapes it in the ass. The robot is a GOOD GUY, for Pete's sake! And to top it all off, there IS a happily-ever-after ending that, at least in theory, stops the entire franchise from ever happening. And it merrily ignores the fact that the Governator's swim in a vat of molten steel aborts John Conner's existence. If they'd made the causality paradox an actual plot element, with John being forced to choose his existence or the billions of lives lost in the impending rise of the robots, and kept the entire rest of the movie the same(even the cheesy scenes and the intentionally humorous ones), I'd have a LOT more respect for it. Instead it was about a kid teaching a robot to be a cool person, and saving the world in the process. Terminator 3... actually gets back to basics in many regards. I heard people cursing in the back of the theater when they started nuking everyone, but I was ready to cheer*. That one scene fixed the entire franchise. John's continued existence is explained, and rather than just imply the future isn't all sunshine and roses, they explicitly SHOW it. And on top of it, heroic macho man John Conner's gonna die too! At the hands of heroic macho man Arnold, even! Even T1 didn't have the balls to say "BTW, Sarah... You gonna die. You know why? Because your hubby's gonna come back from the dead and shank you!" *Especially given they swore up and down they were going to a secret base where they could STOP Skynet, painting the whole thing as Terminator 2.1 right up until the final minutes, where it goes Terminator 1 on everybody.

Try cleaning your cookies out, then logging back in. It's been known to help. Also make sure the check box to make it remember you on the login screen is checked. And if it's an accessible option, make sure Firefux isn't set to only allow session cookies. If it is, it'll delete them when you close the browser. (I don't really know what all's currently missing from Firefox. I know they stripped all the cookie options out way back in the day, then added some back in, but not which ones.)

Not to lend any real weight to the argument, but over time it will be. 'S one of the things I REALLY hate about the polygon-era hardware. It's all doomed due to lots of moving parts that aren't easily replaceable. Hell, the XBoxes have (semi-)proprietary hard drives to go with their (semi-)proprietary DVD-ROMs. Add active cooling requirements for everything Dreamcast and up. Also: I have a 360 now. And Bullet Witch, which I very much like. Library set to expand soon. Still debating an extended warranty. I probably need one, but I hate the idea of making a monetary bet that my system will fail in X amount of time.

Your examples are things the franchise has done a lot to distance itself from over the years. While they may not adhere to strict mass requirements nowadays, they DO try to make the robots "more or less" in scale with their alt modes. Then there was Beast Wars, where they just made the alt modes out of scale. Doesn't work well for "robots in disguise" though. That's my big problem. The primary draw at this point is character design, and the designs I've seen, to put it bluntly, suck. If you acknowledge the internals of the boom box, you get back into mass-shifting. They're mostly empty space. ... Actually, a 4-foot robot with the mass of a boom box will blow away with a light breeze wind ANYWAYS. You can't make a viable humanoid of any real size without going significantly over 10 pounds. So odds are quite good that Frenzy DOES have mass-shifting. He just uses it to change his density, not volume. I'm not sure which would be sadder, a frenzy blowing away every time he passes an AC vent or the movie ACCIDENTALLY including the banned mass-shifting because no one thought about how heavy a boom box was.

How exactly does a lack of mass-shifting improve things? Don't say it adds realism. The entire license is completely devoid of that, and mass-shifting has very little to do with it. All I see it doing is creating some ugly Transformers, even by movie standards.

HAHA!

Real-world fighters get upgrades, why should fictional ones be any different?

The SDF design of the SDF-1 is canon. For the time period, anyways. The Macross is refit after the end of the TV series, and the ARMDs are attached to the location they were intended to be in the first place. Docked with the ARMDs was the design as originally conceived(in-continuity), and as it existed post-refit. But docking with the ARMDs at launch failed due to zentradi interference, as seen on TV. Hence the Prometheus and Daedalus still get jury-rigged on after the space fold accident. You can't remove the Prometheus and Daedalus without removing chunks of the TV story, which is the current official story. Besides, the official story is that DYRL is a movie created within the Macross universe, and the VFs in it are a later revision of the VF-1 that wasn't actually available during the Space War, making them wrong. (And in that context, the Macross used would be the refit version, because the audience is familiar with that design and not the historically accurate one).

Only game system I've had actually fail on me is my PS1. Other decks with issues: My XBox doesn't always eject, but it was bought used. My NES is finicky. But you knew that... it's an NES, after all. I've blown a 2600 power supply or 3. Also had to solder down a loose power connector once. Really lousy choice of connector. One of my Virtual Boy stands is cracked badly. Original brick GameBoy lost several screen columns. Done a LOT of 5200 controller cleaning. Modded sticks seem more or less worry-free, but I HAD to mod them. Had to clean out a PS2 pad once, too. Fortunately it's not Atari 5200 Part 2, but the fact that I had to open the gamepad is... unimpressive. ... I think that's it. Admittedly, I don't own a 360 ... yet. Planning to change that this weekend. Seems I've successfully failed to wait for the new chips to enter production.

If I had the money I'd go for DYRL. Because I love a challenge.

The question is.... is it Uncle Gadget?

I dunno about cable, but my DSL provider supplies subscribers with a free dial-up connection too. I used it once as intended(emergency back-up) and once to take my Dreamcast online just for the hell of it.

We have a winner!

Apparently, since mine is gold too.

Seconded.

"OBJECTION!"

Spidermech, spidermech! What the heck? It's a spidermech! Can't spin webs or catch flys. Can run down badguys if it tries. Look out! Here comes the spidermech!

Neither game ever had more than a Japanese release.