JB0

Thoughts on Classic Megatron: He's too small. I was crushed to realize he wasn't sized properly for an adult to use the gun. Too much purple. I keep catching myself thinking "When did I get another Shockwave?" Too much neon green too, even though it's ALL in the wings. They desperately needed to apply some paint on the inside as well as outside. The gun needs flippable decepticon logos, or the ability to move on top of his arm. Having the logos hanging upside-down is lame. Overall, though, he's a pretty good design with an interesting transformation. And the presence of several prominent decepticon logos makes a strong character statement in a line where everyone else has no affiliation logo aside from a single rubsign.

My first thought on seeing the thumbnail was "Why is he photographing Shockwave?"

Plot isn't always the guiding principle behind game design. Case study: Asteroids. The LOGICAL thing to do would be to fly out of the asteroid field, not blow every rock in the universe up. I have no real objections to defensive missions, but Battlecry had too many very hostile ones. Less Cat's Eye, more celebrity Valkyrie plzkthx. ... Acutally, I wanted to see more Destroid Rage. But I'm a shameless destroid fanboy.

I disagree. Mode swap is to be loved. My advice: Screw flares. They're for escort missions. When she launches missiles, go to battroid and use secondary fire to shoot 'em down. Battroid is also good for getting turned around when she flies by you. Don't be afraid to take a few potshots at her with the battroid's primary fire, but don't really count on doing a lot with it. Lacking cover or gravity, battroid is a sitting duck, so don't stay in this mode. Personally, I found GERWALK... err, guardian... missiles to hit with far more dependability than fighter ones. But in space it still lacks the speed and agility of fighter mode. I say use fighter to move around, guardian to deal damage, and battroid for missile defense. The sooner you get rapid mode swaps down, the happier you'll be.

Well, the cockpit doesn't leak underwater...

Am I the only person that remembers BOTH versions as being Kawamori designed?

The saddest example of that in Macross is the VF-22 losing the flexible shape-changing wings of the YF-21. ... C'mon, those were awesome!

I'm fairly serious. That seems more or less how every episode went, though I admit my memories are more than a little fuzzy.

Ummm... that just says the VF-0 was never intended to be deployed in a combat capacity, but was anyways because the VF-1 wasn't ready. There's nothing that even implies the VF-0 was intended to use fusion engines. The VF-1 is a fighter first. Battroid mode makes far more concessions to the fighter mode than fighter does to battroid. If it'd been designed as a battroid first, you'd see something more like MOSPEADA or Gundam, where fighter more relies mainly on brute force to stay up.

*laughs* You've summarized the show so well.

The yellow was the only part on Classic Prime that really bothered me. I'm tempted to repaint his headcrest and codpiece. But on the other hand, I'm lazy.

Even if the Alternator instructions ARE complete(enough), they still get VERY vague at points. I've been left several times wondering "What the HELL did they do there?" Someone needs to tell Hasbro that a static picture with a colored arrow isn't always enough, and a static pic with 3 seperate arrows going in diffrent directions is NEVER adequate.

google.com Gee, aren't we a bunch of friendly helpful people.

The Gundam one at least isn't melting.

I picked Prime up earlier. The smokestack mounts are too fiddly. Mine, at least, "stretches" the stacks a bit when mounted in "shoulder cannon" mode. One part or another isn't lined up quite right. So no shoulder cannons for my Prime. The back sucks. But then, most Primes seem to have crappy backs. At least this one has some play value. The rifle can be mounted back onto the mounting peg for the round thing. Doesn't fit perfectly, but it works well enough, and turns the hinge assembly on the back into a gun turret, which I find a more appealing configuration than anything official for the back.

If the VF-1 were designed today, it'd be a shameless Eva knockoff with wings.

Nonsense doesn't equate with humor. Okay, so I forgot a step. It's still stupid. But now I'm laughing at the YTMNDtards that think they've guaranteed they're in the movie, and hoping the producers have a dash of taste.

"Do a barrel roll" was NEVER more than random stupidity. I've laughed at some of the retardedness those 2 sites have spawned, but this one was never more than an "WTF?" moment.

Yes. It is. I would've done it anyways, just in a desperate attempt to add A redeeming feature, but everything I would've submitted was a signifigant character quote, and thus guaranteed regardless.

Finalists for the new movie's "Make Prime Speak" contest have been unveiled. Predictably, promises that Prime's character would be a factor in choosing submissions seem to have been totally ignored. If you'd like to see Prime utter something OTHER than "Do a barrel roll!", I suggest you vote now. And hope the Transformers fans rally harder than the YTMNDtards. Second place right now is "Megatron must be stopped... no matter the cost." I'm voting for that because it's the closest to being competitive. It wasn't my first choice, but it's the strongest and thus in the least bad position right now. I'm not gonna sit by and let total nonsense get stuffed down Prime's throat. ... Or maybe I will. You have to have submitted a line to vote. I hate people. Really. Almost as much as I hate this movie. I apologize for ever saying it had a chance to be decent.

Never said I didn't want something better. The GeForceFX series has major pixelshader issues that serve to limit it greatly on modern games. It's hard to justify buying an AGP card right now, especially with retailers gouging the crap out of people on them. And I'm not ready to build a new machine right now. I'm just glad FEAR didn't make as crappy a showing as some other games have made on machines towards the bottom of their "minimum" requirements. Though if I recall, they had to special-case the GeForceFX to make it playable(the demo sure as hell wasn't). Your argument ignores that it's been becoming a smaller market while gaming as a whole is growing. It's a niche because expensive upgrades are generally expected, and they get more expensive each generation. Doom 3 is a perfect example of what developer expectations are and what CAN be done. Remember the talk around the time of the leaked beta? About how it would only run acceptably on a not-yet-released top-end card? So when it was scheduled to hit shelves, NO ONE's computer would run it. And remember the final product, which was highly optimized and ran with minimal quality diffrences on a wide range of hardware? One was an extreme case of the average PC game developer attitude. The other was what's possible if they actually give a crap and do some optimization instead of brute-forcing everything. Having been PC gaming to some degree since the days of DOS, I've SEEN it getting more and more insane. I remember when ANY PC was good for gaming. Then they ran better with 3D acceleration(usually Voodoo). Then 3D acceleration was required. And things've been moving steadily upwards since. And system requirements have gotten more "creative" too. Quake 1 was quite playable on a 486, despite officially requiring a Pentium. I was surprised when I checked the box. Good luck getting a game to run on a system below minimum spec now. Much less at near max levels. The people that are willing to pay top dollar for the most hardware are the people the game developers target. And the bottom end gets closer to the top with each iteration. That was the whole point behind SLI. It was a way to make a new top end, since there basically WASN'T a bottom end anymore. And once THAT became commonly accepted, they moved on up to quad-SLI. And now we have the 600$ PS3 that most people think is too expensive but a small niche is vehemently defending... Yep, they're copying PC gaming. BTW, the consoles have been on the leading edge except for the current and next generation. Saturn/PS1/N64 was the last generation to start ahead of PCs. The Voodoo launched around the same time as the N64, and the PC market got in the habit of making major hardware updates annually, which let it pull ahead. *laughs* If that's what you have to tell yourself...

There's a few nasty stumbling blocks here right now, too. If you go cheap, you'll probably get a motherboard with AGP. And graphics manufacturers have dropped that like a really heavy thingie, so there's no room for upgrading the video card. You'll also wind up with a P4 board or socket 754/939 board(yes, 754 is still out there). So there's no room for processor upgrades either. The video point really pisses me off, actually. NO ONE is making a viable upgrade path. The few boards that support "AGP" and PCI-express have a hackjob AGP that's actually just a funny PCI slot. So they're only partially compatible AND slow as hell. No big deal if you're building an entire system at once. Just get a PCIe vidcard. But there's no realistic way to upgrade since you can't keep your AGP card and still have a mobo with reasonable life in it. And the new games are STILL nice enough on a lower-end setup. I can play FEAR on my GeForce 5900/Sempron 2800+(built insanely cheap. Between vidcard recycling and some damn good sales, it came out under a hundred dollars). It's not near as pretty as it could be, but it's still quite enjoyable. I will never own a machine using dual video cards. Period. PC gaming is a niche market precisely BECAUSE of that sort of insane grab for power at any cost.

Only place I've seen them so far is Fry's. They have them tucked away by the registers so you have to get lucky to see them. I'm not even bothering with Toys R Us. The ones in my area barely have Cybertron toys.

I just moved from an original Live to an Audigy SE... then found out the SE is stripped down as far as possible and offloads a lot of stuff to the CPU. If I hadn't been short on cash, I probably would've got something else, but I mainly wanted an excuse to mess with my computer more than anything else. I COULD have used the on-board audio and left the Live in my 98 legacy machine, but I've never had much luck with cheap parts in the past. And your Live is probably better than the on-board audio. On-board solutions usually use shitty DACs, and the original Live used fairly good ones.

YAY! Radiata Stories was like that too. On the buying the music part. The "sound test" was introduced very early. So there IS a replacement for level 8 survival! I was mildly disappointed to see the VP2 survival only activates if your HP is over 10%, so it can't chain. I had some silly boss survivals in VP1 due to chaining.