JB0

As far as brontosaurus vs apatosaurus... They're diffrent. But only one ever existed. The brontosaurus was an apatosaurus with the skull of a chasmosaurus. Pluto's non-planet status has been debated ever since the discovery of Charon in the '30s. It was just a matter of time. And the demotion is because Pluto's orbit covers pretty much the entire depth of the Kuiper belt. For it to be clear, there has to be a REALLY big hole in the KB. And there doesn't seem to be. Ceres is off the list. The promotion of Ceres was one of the things that killed the attempted definition that came up a week before this one(it opened the gates FAR too wide). Interestingly, Ceres was ORIGINALLY a planet. As were Vesta, Juno, and Pallas. After Pallas, they realized they weren't finding isolated objects, but an entire freaking belt of rocks, and all 4 were demoted to asteroids. They remain some of the largest objects in the belt(Ceres is a third of the belt's mass. Vesta and Pallas are the next-largest objects, and Juno is the 7th-largest). Pluto's in the same situation. It was originally a planet, and we later discovered it wasn't an isolated object, but part of the Kuiper Belt. And dwarf planet, while a retarded term, has some precedent. Minor planet is a term that's been in use for a long time. It's basically synonomous with asteroid, but... Ceres has also been promoted to dwarf planet status, apparently.

I was at about the same age level, and I didn't really care for Descent. Probably because I didn't have a good multi-axis stick, and tended to get lost, but still...Wish I could find some of my old shareware disks. There was a demo I had that kicked ass, but I can't remember the name or enough about the game to describe it. Darn right! I'd also just gotten a 5200, and played the ever-living crap out of Star Wars: The Arcade Game at about the same time(I was an avid retrogamer even then). After blowing a good 30 Death Stars up in a row, you start really rooting for the empire.

I'd like to think I notice when I hear a word I know... I'm chalking it up to "those silly wiki people." Even on "reliable" wikis like Wikipedia I can point to a half-dozen major errors without even trying. Including self-contradicting paragraphs.

Isn't that what the Thundercats WERE originally? Hey, you can't make the Silverhawks worse than they already are.And I disavow any knowledge of Jem.

12 is about right. 10-16, depending on how you count it. I was using a MS Strategic Commander. Deus Ex was a test game for it. The SC is a bit loose, but a hell of a lot more fun than keyboard mashing and far better suited to ANY commercial PC game than a gamepad.

The sequel was dumbed down for mass-market console play. So Deus Ex3 would be far better served by staying away from the PS3 and 360.

Dubya. Tee. Eff? Sometimes I wonder if these guys think about things at all. There's no name recognition for the current generation of kids, and we all know Snarf is the retarded sidekick that was only there for comic relief.

Yes! Get our TIE Fighter on, and some PC Battlezone(Starcraft+MechWarrior = fun?), maybe even some Tyrian or something.

Guld's "inherited condition" was just a short temper. Plenty of humans have it too, it's nothing major... Unless, of course, they have serious mental issues because they lost control of that temper, beat up their best friends in high school and maybe tried to rape one of them.

Given that humans and Zentradi are related closely enough to interbreed it is cannibalism. Besides I'm told that human flesh is more like pork than beef, so Hayo's steak couldn't have been Zentradi. Cloned beef grown in a vat (not even a whole cow just the muscle tissue) is my bet. 427692[/snapback] Actually, it could just be uncomfortably close to cannibalism. We don't know that zentradi and homo sapiens are the same species, just REAL close. Since there aren't any second-generation hybrids in the continuity yet, it's still possible that human-zentran pairings are like horse-donkey pairings, or lion-tiger pairings. Close enough to have a kid, but distant enough that said kid will be sterile. The capacity to create fertile offspring is usually considered a major marker for species delineation.

It'd be a great control to keep them from propogating without their masters... if they hadn't given them cloning chambers. Except it's not continuity. The whole "zentradi hybrids are all girls" thing was from the Robotech RPG, which is as far from continuity as you can get. ... Actually, it could even work within the RPG setting. Guld's situation is reversed from the Jeniuses, since his mom is human and his dad is zentran. IF the zentradi genes overpower the human ones, he still has a 50/50 shot because his father has both.

I think Deus Ex was actually pretty highly regarded when it came out. Took home a few "game of the year" awards, and did well enough that they made a sequel. ... Deus Ex 2 bombed, though. As I understand things, they dumbed it down in an attempt to make it more mainstream and wound up driving people off. I have it, but I've never gotten very far in it. It was certainly an interesting game, though.

Ahhh... memories... I happened to start doing more than idle surfing of the 'net right as the Zero Wing craze peaked. Entire forums full of nothing but ZWing quotes, and any serious discussion was subject to having it's zig moved on a moment's notice. It got rather annoying. But once things started to die down(perhaps coincidentally, almost immediatly after it made TV news), Zero Wing became funny.

It's worth a shot, anyways. I ran the single-player FEAR demo on my box for that reason. It sucked like a vacuum cleaner powered by a black hole. Stupid GeForce 5s and their stupid broken pixel shader unit...

Same here. It's just that I have a laptop, bought last December, AMD Athlon 64-bit 3200+, 1024 ram, ATI mobility Radeon Xpress 200 Series. Is there any hope running a game like TES:Oblivion? Or any possibility to get some other graphics card for a laptop? Sorry for semi-off-topic... 426592[/snapback] Laptops are capped where they are in terms of video capabilities. There's just no room to install a video card, so you have to upgrade the laptop to get a new video chipset.

True, but in space, aside from the big gas planets, there really isn't that much of it. Even in the pseudo-scientific technical manuals for Star Trek, they don't claim for such a system to be that effective in producing the quantities needed to sustain a long duration, let alone fast, trip. Here's a scientific article on the idea: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bussard_ramjet And some scientific stuff: "The collected propellant can be used as reaction mass in a plasma rocket engine, ion rocket engine, or even in an antimatter-matter annihilation powered rocket engine. Interstellar Space contains an average of 10 (to the -21st power) kg of mass per cubic meter of space. This means that the ramjet scoop must sweep 10(to the 18th power) cubic meters of space to collect one gram of ions per second." In other words, 10,000,000,000,000,000 cubic Km to get one gram. For fun, in imperial: 62,137,119,200,000,000 cubic miles for all of 0.00220462262 pounds of it. 426578[/snapback] Probably why it usually shows up on relativistic ships in sci-fi. The faster you're going, the longer your volume is, and the less width you need on your scoop to sustain things.

By the Matrix... It's the dreaded Bumblebeevanagelion!

Me too. I have a mega system, so F.E.A.R. ran great for me. Loved the game. 426286[/snapback] My big bottleneck is the video card. I've got a GeForce 5, which has serious issues if you're using pixelshaders. And an AGP slot, which seriously limits my upgrade room and leaves the retailers trying to gouge me on anything of reasonable performance.

Hydrogen is everywhere, actually. The sun's solar wind is largely hydrogen. That's part of why it features prominently as a scifi fuel. If you have a scoop of some sort, you can just fly around and collect fuel from space. It doesn't even have to be a physical funnel, you can use REALLY big magnetic fields.

What about Kamjin's Monster? You do realize that you're just rephrasing what he said, right?

So I'm NOT the only person that thought that!

I played the multiplayer demo last summer before the game was released. It was pretty fun, I found. There were a few game modes (free for all and team based games) and the maps were interesting. My only problem with the game is that it was a bit of a system hog. You really had to have an upper tier system to handle all the maxed out graphic settings. 426192[/snapback] Yeah... I had that problem with the single-player demo. It's grotesquely overbuilt, even by PC gaming standards.

There was also a big Leader-1. That was the one I had. And whatzisface... Warpath, I think... was Transformers miniplane.

You can also be complacent and lazy and develop nothing at all. It DOES seem more plausable that they developed many and then dropped back to F-2. But that's less fun than terminal apathy.

You're right, they DID mention that food was being rationed very early on. While this was never mentioned again after the Lynns re-opened the restraunt, it was likely sustained, and restraunts were accepting ration vouchers as part of their payment. The justification used for reopening Macross City's restraunts and grocery stores was probably something to the effect that it would be an easier way for the military to distribute rations if they could send them to businesses instead of directly to individuals. Less deliveries that way. *insert obligatory Soylent Green reference here* The presence of meat IS a problem, seriously. They should've run out fairly fast, as it's perishable and not growable with their supplies(I'd actually be surprised if they had viable seeds, but...). ... Maybe it was a tofu steak?