JB0

It was GOING to be able to, if you purchased an external dongle like the XBox1(keeps the DVD playback license cost out of the system). It's not going to now. Nintendo decided there was no point, what with you being able to buy an entire standalone DVD player for 30$. The "classic" controller is like a handle-less DualShock, if I recall. 2 sets of shoulder buttons, 4 face buttons, select, start, and a pair of analog sticks(dunno if they're clicky). I'd be hesitant to place Saturn and 32x bets, but SegaCD has good odds. It's a matter of processing power and system complexity more than licensing. Both systems are very complex and fairly powerful. I wouldn't place bets on either of them being practical on the Wii.

I'm still waiting for a localized Rondo of Blood. But I hate NES Castlevania, so... whatever. If they offer Ninja Gaiden, though... What I've heard said is that just wrist motions will work, but they'll be "more fun" if you make a complete fool of yourself.

Reverse-engineering alien technology isn't that easy. You can't just hand a caveman a nuclear reactor and say "Here. Fire sucks." There'd be massive tech leaps while you figured out the easy parts and worked up from there. Good grief, the water car? It CAN be done, for the record. It's just not practical due to the mass of the catalyst required to split the water apart. That and water doesn't carry a whole lot of energy relative to other fuels. Other more realistic attempts, like natural gas, have failed because gasoline has a massive existing infrastructure that alternatives don't. You can't pull up to any street corner in the world and fill up with a couple gallons of CNG. No one wants to build the refueling facilities until the vehicles are there, and no one wants to build the vehicles until the refueling facilities are there. Government COULD mandate the addition of natural gas pumps to existing stations, but it'd put a lot of them out of business. Recent years have also seen a very hands-off government in terms of business. Religion's easy. You can justify other inhabited planets as easily as you can a planet that's a few billion years old instead of a few thousand. Education isn't greatly affected. I can see military spending jumping. Especially space defense programs. The fact that we agreed to not put weapons in space and never revisited that agreement says a lot about how many aliens we know. Or that we're doing pretty good and most aliens take their cold wars hot. It's highly odd that humanity as a whole considers itself inherently superior to everything else on Earth and inherently inferior to everything off Earth. Also worth noting that the odds of finding another inhabited world are infintessimal. There's just too many stars out there to check. Indeed. We actually KNOW our current laws of physics are fundamentally broken. No one likes to talk about it, but... No coverup needed. You can rig plenty of nice, deadly toys with stuff in your average garage, drug store, and/or Home Depot. Simple bleach + ammonia = good clean homicide for the whole building. A wine bottle, rag, and match is even more fun, as it involves fire. Individuals are just too smart, stupid, or apathetic to do it. Nations have too strong a sense of self-preservation. Sure the US could run around nuking people in a power grab. But the rest of the world would rush us pretty fast, and there's limits to how quickly we can vaporize stuff. We can take anybody in a fight, but not everybody. And past experience tells us that spies can and will sneak any "superweapon" details out of the nation, so our enemies will be very close behind us. We've also got a lot of really fun conventional techs that don't get used. Any idiot nation with a rocket can gain high levels of firepower cheaply. Step 1. Put a satellite in orbit with some rods made of a dense material like tungsten or depleted uranium. Step 2. Shoot rods at target. Step 3. Wait for rods to land on target after accelerating at a rate of 9.8 meters per second per second for the entire trip down from orbit. Step 4. Smash stuff good. Of course, you have to either have defenses for your satellites or convince everyone they're comm devices. Otherwise people start shooting at them, and they blow up easy.

Wouldn't it be cheaper to buy an NES/SNES/Genesis(it was on all 3)? Though the arcade machine has the advantage of steering wheels and a gas pedal.

Pre-order and pray, I assume. With only 400,000 in the entire US, and previous eBay fiascos indicating a possible worth of thousands of dollars, I don't see very many people getting them. Certainly not everyone planning on it.

I don't know, but I want to!

Sony's argument is that BluRay's capacity will be needed for hi-def games down the line, similar to how the first-year PS2 games were all CD-ROM, but now fill a (single-layer) DVD. More likely, they just want a headstart on market integration of BluRay. A 600$ movie player, HD or not, isn't viable. If they can move the PS3 though(And according to SCEEurope, they could sell the PS3 with no software just because of the Playstation name, so they don't see a problem), they win the HD format war before it ever really starts. But like I said, BluRay is only PART of the price. The "Cell" processor is an absurdly expensive part too. And from what I've heard, their graphics processor ain't exactly cheap(though it may be next to Cell and the BD-ROM drive). Scrapping the drive may shave 50 bucks off, but it still won't be cheap. What it WOULD help is yield. Their current yield limiter is the blue laser diodes used in the BD-ROM. They have a lot of difficulty making those.

Bump! Haruhi-ism must not die! Seriously, though... Someone added Yuki to Mugen. While this video isn't the best use of the character(see for better applied use), it wins it all back in presentation style.Poor Ken and Ryu never stood a chance... For those unfamiliar, Mugen is a homebrew fighting game with an open character format and roster, so anyone can add a character if they can imagine it.

Same here, save the last sentence. I don't know about actual hours on Sony systems, but my PS1 library is signifigantly larger than everything but my 2600 and 99/4a libraries. My PS2 library isn't exactly dwarfing anything, but it IS larger than any of my other current-gen libraries. But I think the PS3's price tag issue extends beyond BluRay(though it's certainly PART of the issue). Remember, MS is taking a loss on their 400$ DVD-only system. HD gaming just isn't mass-market affordable yet without feature sacrifices that MS and Sony don't want to make. The silicon is just too high on the ladder for a reasonably-priced console.

Indeed. But between distractions, fact-checking, and whatnot, your post wasn't up there when I initially started mine, despite the >half-hour timestamp diffrence. So I hadn't seen it.

Ravage looks pretty good, IMO. I also like making him a Jaguar. In other Alternators news: I found another Mirage! Sweet toy, aside from the engineering snafu that left the panels to the sides of his chest unable to dock with the hood. They're either too long, or the hinges snap to the wrong angle. Your choice. The feet, while a tad petite, are a major step up from the RX-8 feet(no wheels on the bottom, and they actually LOOK like feet). The "real" license plate is also a nice touch. I'm tempted to take some tape or wire or something, and suspend him from his feet so he's "standing" on the ceiling above Shockwave. Just because it'd look cool. But I'm not gonna. It'd be pretty ugly when he fell and I had to buy a THIRD Mirage.

The biggest disicentive is it's really expensive and there's not an immediate financial payoff. We went to the moon to beat the dirty commie russians. After that, we were hoping there was some way to exploit it via mining. What we found was it's an incredibly hostile environment, sending people and equipment up is very expensive, and it's not easily exploited with conventional technology. All of which made it far cheaper to continue to buy stuff from terrestrial sources. It also takes a long time to get anywhere. The Voyager probes, the fastest man-made objects, took a year and a half "just" to get to Jupiter. Same for close relatives Pioneer 10 and 11. The Voyagers took 2 years to get to Saturn. Pioneer 11, the first probe to visit Saturn, took SIX years to get there.* It will take New Horizons 9 years to reach Pluto, and will take it about a year to reach Jupiter*. All 5 devices were built as light as possible, and the Voyagers and Pioneers were timed for a closest-approach scenario, which isn't feasable most of the time(in fact, Pluto was inside Neptune's orbit for their flights). A manned mission would be exponentially slower due to the much greater mass it has to haul. To illustrate: New Horizons reached lunar orbit in 9 hours. Apollo 11 took 3 days. And the Apollos were about as small as you could possibly make them, as well as riding a much bigger rocket. The further you go, the slower things get, due to the fact that you have to carry more consumables. *If you're wondering why the Voyagers wind up so much faster than the Pioneers when they start out fairly close, and why the New Horizons is slower when it will reach Jupiter faster... The V'gers used Jupiter's gravity as a "slingshot" to accelerate, while Pioneer 11 used a SINGLE slingshot off Jupiter to direct itself towards Saturn and Pioneer 10 made no use of the slingshot maneuver. New Horizons will use a single slingshot to accelerate itself towards Pluto, but lacking the slingshot off of Saturn, and V'ger 2's Uranus and Neptune shouts, ends up being slower even though it starts out faster. Pioneer 11 also had to double back across the solar system to reach Saturn, which was on the opposite side of the sun from Jupiter for the point where the 11 flew by. That added a lot of time. The Voyagers had a trajectory much closer to a straight-line run, as Jupiter and Saturn were more conveniently aligned for their flyby. ALL the gas giants for Voyager 2. They COULD have even done a Pluto flyby, but chose instead to do a more detailed look at Neptune. To be fair, they expected Voyager 3 to visit Pluto. They didn't know NASA's glory days were ending.

Awww.... ninja mechs rule! Yeah... Atlus says Banpresto had them on a short leash, so they had to get approval for every single thing they did, down to item spellings. But given Banpresto seems physically incapable of consistently romanizing names, that isn't necessarily a good thing. Ooooooohhhhh.... me want!

Because all the people in charge of the TV and movie companies don't understand why it was successful. So they take a formula they've constructed, where they take the features THEY noticed about the last really popular TV/movie, and try to fit whatever story they're given into that formula. Said formulas are usually off by several lightyears, and wind up reading like "bullet-time+R rating = blockbuster hit"

That was the premise of Metal Storm.

Only if you're lucky...

Nah. It made it out fine, they just never got a localization team.Which really sucked, but... whatcha gonna do? I'm under the impression it was intentionally spoofish.

I still say it's not a rush. But yah. The rapid discovery of new Pluto-like objects since 1992 , and subsequent establishment of the Kuiper Belt as fact rather than hypothesis, has really made it necessary to actually define planet. And while the IAU has tried to create a definition that keeps Pluto, they haven't managed to come up with a half-decent one that isn't special-cased to heck. The best shot they had was defining a planet as any object in orbit around a star above a certain size. The drafts using that definition intentionally set the threshold at just below Pluto. That definition wasn't liked because it was rather arbitrary. The last definition before the current one just set it as any object massive enough to pull itself into a roughly spherical shape, plus the clause about centers of gravity to block moons. It's a less arbitrary size, as it's based on a physical property instead of a random number, but it's also a really small size. I'm really seeing it a lot like Ceres. They called it a planet, then discovered how much other stuff was there and how small it really was. Only Pluto sat there longer because it was harder to look at. Had it's mass been accurately estimated at the time of discovery, it never would've entered planetary status in the first place.

As a sidenote: If Voltron came out dual-language, a large part of it would be english-only anyways. World Event Productions commissioned several new episodes of Golion/Lion Voltron exclusively for the US market, essentially doubling the series length.

Moral of the story: 80s cartoons were for future real men. Modern cartoons are for future sissies.

But it's okay, because the moon is now a "lunar planet."

Are you aware of how stupid you are? In point of fact, the FIRST proposed definition, which DID keep Pluto, was chased out because it opened the floodgates to everything else. Not Kuiper Belt objects, EVERYTHING. The only requirement was that it be round and the orbit's center of gravity not be inside a planet. There were at least a half-dozen asteroids on the list. The solar system would have something like a hundred planets before the dust settled. Hell, it was even possible to have "sometimes-planets" because the orbital clause(intended to keep moons from becoming planets) couldn't handle elliptical orbits. If you actually paid attention instead of just guessing based on media soundbites(and if there's one thing I've learned over the years, it's that the media CANNOT get a science article right), you'd know that they did everything they could to keep Pluto, but found no way to make a definition that kept Pluto without defining every rogue piece of stellar debris as a planet. Pluto has been the only thing holding a formal definition of planet up for several years. There's just no way to make a rational definition AND include Pluto. The only reason anyone fought about it is that Pluto has sentimental value. "My very elegant mother just sat upon nine" seems to be missing something. Diffrence is pluton was intended to augment planetary status, not replace it. Essentially would've divided things into the inner planets, gas giants, and plutons. It was also purposely constructed to maintain Pluto's signifigance in the face of the bumrush of Kuiper Belt objects that would have joined it on the planet list within a year. Dwarf planet is a formalization of the older minor planet status. Slightly? And Pluto has been debated since 1978! Before we were even sure there WAS a Kuiper Belt. I was mistaken earlier when I said '30s. That was when Pluto was found. Some of Pluto's problems relative to the 8 planets: It's orbit is highly elliptical. It's orbit is inclined relative to the plane of the system. It's absurdly small, and is in fact smaller than many known moons. It's moon is almost as large as it is. It's moon doesn't even orbit it. They actually orbit each other. This point was acknowledged in the former proposed definition, which promoted Charon to planet and the Pluto/Charon system became the first known binary planet. Acutally, Pluto's orbit is probably the most elliptical of all the Kuiper Belt objects, given that it's apogee and perigee hit the inner and outer edges of the belt. Except if you bothered to read, you'd know that it was of objects of similar size. All 8 planets have done that. Pluto has not. If it had, there would be no Kuiper belt. So you're saying that it's orbit is clear because it's too small to clear an orbit? Charon's existence shows it incapable of clearing an orbit. Quit saying suddenly. 2 and a half decades is not sudden. And we have a good deal of info already. The New Horizons mission won't profoundly affect the mass of Pluto or make it's orbit any cleaner.

Kinda like Macross 7, huh? *leaves thread quickly*

So THAT'S why I've been hearing about this game again! I heard about it shortly after it came out, then it just faded away. Nice to see it having a resurgence in popularity. And yah, it really needed a US release.

Speaking of Alternators... I found a Mirage RIGHT after the boards went down. And had to return it because Hasbro pumped a joint full of glue and it snapped when I tried to transform him. Haven't seen another one yet.