JB0

Mine does that occasionally. CD audio cable keeps falling into the CPU fan. If you haven't checked, make sure the cables are out of the way.

I can. My video card makes a disruptive amount of noise, and it gets even worse when I start a game. Should replace the heatsink with an aftermarket one, but it seems a shame to spend cash on a card that's 2 generations out of date when I could put it towards something else. Edit: severe typo

Ah yeah... you can always tell which stores have competent management and which ones don't. The few times I've had pricing discrepancies, I've gotten a no-fuss discount. Admittedly, I've never had any huge discrepancies, but they've always been willing to toss me the diffrence, and certainly never acted like I was the problem.

And more immediatly... as soon as it starts charging, the enemy can see it. If you can't finish the job with one shot, they can unload everything they have left right down the barrel. 4 + lunar, actually. Presumably they wanted to stud the planet with a dozen or so eventually. The Alaska one was the only completed Grand Cannon at the time of the battle. Good question... Depends on how strong the beam confinement is, how adjustable the focal point is(assuming it has one instead of being a cylinder), and how fast it loses energy to the outside world(the fact that it glows means it's losing a lot of energy, which is supported by near-miss destructions). The firing plot on the Macross' bridge indicated it fans out rapidly, which greatly limits range. A range reaching lunar orbit could be a dangerous prospect if you accidentally blast your lunar colonies while attacking an enemy, especially given the rate of beam expansion. It likely has a sub-lunar range, though the computer could over-ride a firing command that would result in lunar bombardment. As your enemy gets more distant, the utility of a unguided weapon becomes much lower. In space combat, you can easily get combat ranges where unguided weaponry is essentially useless. Practically speaking, weapon range becomes irrelevant past 1 or 2 light minutes, as your enemy will be changing positions often to avoid incoming vollys from a distant enemy. The Grand Cannon should have a longer operational distance due to the raw beam width and spreading due both to poor focus and planetary rotation. Instead of a straight line(or cone), it arcs and hits a much wider area, similar to rapidly waving a flashlight. This reduces the damage a single shot can do to a given target, but there's so much power that it doesn't really seem to matter matter if the whole beam hits one point(or if it even hits, given the backwash destructions). Unfortunately, you can't aim much. Most of the ships folded out with the destruction of the flagship. http://macross.anime.net/mecha/zentradi/index.html The Grand Cannon wasted roughly 800 thousand. A lot of that debris was probably launched out of orbit. The grand cannon imparted a LOT of energy when it hit, so I would assume that most of the debris from GC'ed ships was sent flying outward. Adding to that, the ships were broken down into very small parts, so solar wind probably helped sweep the debris out. Another million were destroyed through subsequent combat and the flagship's destruction. This is a bit of a question mark, as we don't know what form of attack brought them down. Could be anything from a simple mechanical failure(hell of a time for the reactor's fuel injector to fail...) to reaction missiles to a Macross Cannon-type weapon(there was at least 1 such gun active in the Human-Zentradi alliance, as Britai's vessel was equipped with a similar cannon to the Macross, but the Macross' own cannon was likely disabled due to the pinpoint barrier system). The remaining 3 million folded out to join other fleets. We know from the show that some ships crashed mostly intact. These are almost certainly all non-cannon casualties. They would have an effect similar to a moderately-sized meteor. Really rather trivial relative to the damage the bombardment had already done(which had put mroe than it's fair share of dust in the air already). Debris from exploded vessels would have burned up in the atmosphere(smaller chunks = more exposed surface area = faster burn), filling it with nasty metallic particles and industrial chemicals and so on. These are the bigger problem, partially because they're toxic instead of just "nuclear winter"-inducing and partially because they're likely the majority of the debris. Undoubtedly, a major part of the "Start of nature reclaimation project. Earth ecosystem rehabilitation begins" entry in the chronology is the construction of massive air filters to reduce particles in the air and toxic chemicals.

I can't speak for the others in this thread JBO, but honoring an advertised/displayed price is not some law as I'm aware (discussing this within the context of disclaimers and honest vendor error). My point was simply the need for the decorum of good business when faced with a customer in a physical location as opposed to the advantages of impersonal correspondance enjoyed by online retailers. 363042[/snapback] Ah. I agree with that. The "have to" is usually presented as a "because the law says so" argument, so I assumed people were going on a similar assumption here. I think Amazon probably would have let it slide had it not become such a big deal(of course, being Eva, and the internet, everyone linked it and it rapidly became a big deal). Had a brick&mortar store been hit with the same kind of attention... well, for one they'd be out of stock very rapidly. But as soon as they found out, they'd run to tape an error notification to the window. And given the response to things, they'd probably already have 2 dozen or so customers running around inside waving 6$ Eva boxes around, and they'd be trying to find a compromise fast. If only one or 2 people made it before they noticed the error, though... let 'em have it, then put the correction up before person 3 gets in the door. The distance and anonymity DID help Amazon. They didn't have someone standing there with a box and a credit card in hand ready to yell and throw a fit, so there wasn't a sense of immediacy. They cancelled the order under the argument that the purchase hadn't actually taken place yet, and informed people it was a screw-up on their part. From their point of view, they did the equivalent of taping a printout in the store window saying "that ad flyer is wrong." From our point of view, it's closer to catching someone on the way out the door and telling them the reciept is wrong and they need to pay more or put the box back and take their 6 bucks. It WOULD be in their best interests to offer the people that had placed orders a discount, or credit towards a future purchase. But I don't think they could've feasably honored the price for all the people that caught it before the correction. It would've been eating a MASSIVE loss.

They mentioned in the show that the Grand Cannon actually cleared most of the path to the main ship. Saved them a lot of work, since their original plan had them smacking lesser flagships to thin the heard. The grand cannon was a first strike weapon. You could batter fleets in orbit before they landed, and thin the enemy ranks. Of course, no one on Earth considered a fleet large enough to just crush all Earth's defenses with orbital bombardment. Yes. http://macross.anime.net/story/atlas/index.html lists five, including a lunar one. ... Which poses an interesting question... if the grand cannon is gravitationally powered, would a Lunar one be a tenth as powerful as a terrestrial one, or just take 10 times longer to charge?

Stupid society, crushing imaginations as people grow up...

Actually, they likely wouldn't have to honor the price. Fliers are covered with legal disclaimers that say they aren't responsible for typos, which are further highlighted at the front door when they get caught. And you'll never convince them that they have any obligation to honor a blatantly mistagged product(say, an XBox 360 someone set in the 5$ clearance bin because they changed their mind). I've never actually seen any evidence of any actual legislation that forces retailers to honor any given form of mistakes , just vague references to "the law". And the fact that people from diffrent states and even countries claim the law as relevant to any and every situation tends to dampen my belief that it exists. Such laws in the US would be implemented at the state level, not the national level. Thus they would vary from location to location. And international law should be obvious. The law in one nation is completely irrelevant to another. Seeing someone from one nation explaining to a consumer in another how their legal rights have been violated is comical at best. No offense to anyone doing so here, I've just seen it too often in any chosen direction. Unless you can cite title, chapter, and section of the law you're invoking, I wouldn't place any great weight in it's relevance to the situation, whether the store's online or not. Even IF we grant the existence of a universal "lowest price" law, online retailers are in a rather odd position. Are they refusing to honor a typo'ed ad with legal disclaimer? A computer error with no disclaimer(similar to a register scanning an item wrong)? A mis-printed "price tag"? All those situations would vary in treatment under any given law, but they're essentially the same thing in an online store, and you could make the argument for any one you choose. Where was the purchase made, anyways? At the consumer's PC, the store's server, or both? The location of the transaction changes what laws are relevant. And the last time I saw this happen it was a pre-order and not an actual purchase, which raises even more questions, though the same "law" was clearly just as relevant even when a purchase had not yet happened. As far as I know, it would be up to the manager's discretion to honor typos in a brick&mortar store. They usually let it slide to avoid annoying customers. In the cases of the Amazon.com screwups, the diffrence is so massive that they'd have to either flat-out refuse to honor it or, more likely, attempt to find a compromise position that was acceptable to both parties(likely an intermediary price that was at or slightly above cost, with a freebie gift certificate for future purchases).

This forum allows sigs. Just not image sigs(rather wisely).

What about the zentradi defectors? Without their knowledge of fleet construction, the zentradi psyche, and zent military strategy, the final battle would've been unwinnable.

If I'm nost mistaken, the low-profile screwups ahve a better chance of making it through. When they get swaped with strangely large amounts of orders, it likely sends up a red flag for someone to double-check this.

Ditto. I've got a GaoFighGar one I made. For my non-existent PSP. These demonstrate knowledge of the PSP interface in a way that mine doesn't.

Three of the greatest games ever made... 362625[/snapback] I've got trouble getting into Metroid 1 now. The fact that the first thing I have to do is farm life pellets to run my energy up drives me mad. There's also a very high damage rate, but if I resurrected with full life, or there was even a fast way to refill it(everyone knows the path to the fairy north of the first screen in Zelda 1), I wouldn't mind. As it is... I'll take Super Metroid any day. 362691[/snapback] plus all the rooms in metroid looks alike so I end up going around in circles. 362767[/snapback] Heh. I used to have that issue too. Developed a better gaming sense of direction since then, and I can get around Zebes 8-bit style now, when I care to.

They have an accurate list price(if somewhat dated, it goes for about 30 now, I think)). I'd say that one's a legitimate sale. Probably to clear the shelves for the updated MGS3: Subsistence.

They did that with Nintendogs preorders a while back. There's screwups all over the place, I'm betting.

Three of the greatest games ever made... 362625[/snapback] I've got trouble getting into Metroid 1 now. The fact that the first thing I have to do is farm life pellets to run my energy up drives me mad. There's also a very high damage rate, but if I resurrected with full life, or there was even a fast way to refill it(everyone knows the path to the fairy north of the first screen in Zelda 1), I wouldn't mind. As it is... I'll take Super Metroid any day.

Shatner's stones have an unholy power. They can build houses, heal the sick, raise the dead... even protect threads.

*sighs* Shatner. Alkchemy. Charity. Now.

That's one thing that really impressed me on both thr NES and 2600... the degree to which they could push the system. It's MAME time! Taito Memories Pocket has it, and Taito Legends 2 is slated for it. Taito Legends 1 has Super Qix, which is inferior. My 5200 version occupies a near-permanent station in my cart slot. I have that problem a lot of the time. Too many games. Salamander was the one with no power-up bar, for the record. Blasted close button! Had something typed up, but... Keeping it to scrolling flight affairs(No Moon Patrol or Gyruss sneaking in this one)... My absolute favorite is probably Mars Matrix. Sure it can cause slowdown on a Dreamcast with raw bullet-count(though I've never seen it happen for more than a second), and there's usually more firepower than empty space on the screen, but it somehow does it without ever seeming "unfair." Following that... RType's a mixed bag. I love the first few levels of RType 3 and Delta, but that turns to loathe as they crank the difficulty up and it falls into pattern memorization. Actually holds true across the entire series. I've had a lot of fun with Final, which is widely regarded as mediocre(and IS seriously flawed in some places). Has a lot of the same faults too. I continue-whored a few stages REALLY badly, just out of spite. I think most of the time I've dumped into it was because I got hooked on the pokemon aspect. How on EARTH did I decide that unlocking all 101 ships was a good idea? (I usually hate collection games, so this is by no means normal) irem does that a lot. Lures me in with silky smooth gameplay and promises of alien carnage as far as the eye can see(which is about... 12 inches?), then beats me down with some utterly EVIL level designs once I get addicted. I hate them for it and love them for it all at the same time(you should see the time I've put into Metal Storm...). I like MUSHA on the Genesis a lot. Looking at things, it's a close relative of Space Megaforce(both are Aleste games in Japan). I've got a new reet warez rawm to download. Edit: Oh yes! Old-school Zanac-style Aleste! Compile can do no wrong. Honorable mention to ESP Ra De, Salamander 2, and Darius Gaiden. Oh, and ChoRenSha. The much-loved Ikaruga feels too pattern-based to me, BTW. ... That and I keep getting my colors mixed up and kamikazeing into a bullet. I've never played Radiant Silvergun. Don't have a Saturn or arcade cab(yet) and can't emulate the ST-V at a playable level(I've checked). I tend to enjoy vertical shooters mroe than horizontal ones. They seem to focus more on raw skill, while horizontal ones seem to tend towards pattern memorization. Anyways... Mars Matrix wins. </2-cents>

When a zentran or the birdman was redesign by a protoculture scientist to urinate microns by accident. Ouch.No wonder the zentradi are so against male and female fraternization...

A. Since when to children go through urethras? B. Do you even know what anecdotal means?

Well, look at what the arcades were doing. The 2600 brought the games home, but they took a major hit.On the opther hand you didn't get ports that sacrificed playability for the sake of grapical accuracy(See: PS1 Xmen/StreetFighter) because graphical accuracy wasn't an option. Mmmm, let's see... Probably Asteroids Deluxe for fav game, just because I prefer shields to hyperspace. Quick action, but every motion has to be Probably the pinnacle of single-screen gaming right there. My tastes shift a fair bit with time, but 'Roids games are always near the top of my list.

It's one of my major hobbies, so I've got a lot of trivia in here(according to your profile, you're a year older than me). I actually went from a Vectrex(Bought on clearance when I was 2) and a 99/4a computer(same story) to an SNES. So I got roughly a decade of hardware evolution in one shot(of course I'd had NES exposure at friends' houses and store demos, but not a massive amount). Then I backpedalled to a 2600 and then an NES. My acquisition order encouraged an interest in the history of the market. From there... let's just say I have a dozen different systems and way too much trivia. There's plenty of high-quality games on pre-NES systems. And what happened to the system's first 3 years? It hit the US in '85, and actually dates back to 1983, when the FamiCom hit Japan. If you're cutting it off at 88, just say the Genesis was "the first console," with a 1988 release in Japan, and an '89 launch state-side. Not quite the same situation, since there wasn't any competition to the NES. The crash of '83 had cleaned the US market out. There were a lot of factors behind the crash, but it wasn't just people realizing that "Atari sucks." The primary one was bad business practices at the retail level. Stores were stocking equal amounts of all games. So a bargin-bin Mythicon title(you don't need to know who they are, just that they sucked) had the same shelf space as, say, Joust. The people BUYING the games, obviously, wanted the good ones and not the bad ones. So while the good games were flying off the shelves, the bad ones just sat there. And retailers, rather than looking at specific titles, just looked at "games" and saw that games as a whole DIDN'T sell well, and thus the video game fad was over. And when people started trying to compete with Nintendo in America, Nintendo'd already established themselves and was using their market power to prevent competition. Stores that carried 7800s and Sega Master Systems tended to have Nintendo shipments "mysteriously disappear" during the holiday season, for example. ... Of course, the competition didn't exactly make a lot of effort to raise public awareness in the first place. So it's more like if people had started making bad knockoffs of Comets, the kncokoffs gave jets as a whole a bad name, then the 707 brought back an industry that people thought was nothing more than a passing fad, and shot rockets at every non-707 in the sky. The games were sound, when any effort was put into them. That's why you keep seeing retro compilations crop up, is they're still fun games 25 years later. Asteroids isn't better or worse than Zelda, it's just diffrent. One focuses on completion, the other more on reflexes and quick thinking. Personally speaking, I don't care for a lot of the biggest NES games, including the immortal pack-in. Stuff like Gradius and Castlevania just gets on my nerves. I HATE memorization games, especially when your character is too slow to attempt free-form play(in Gradius' case, you can't even stick to the pattern if you die in the wrong spot). Games that require you to throw hundreds of lives away learning where everything is just get on my nerves. I never liked Space Invaders either. It's got the same problems. Just too mechanical. They got better later, some genres slower than other. I like Mario 3(and Mario 2, but that doesn't really count). Rondo of Blood's player character moves a lot better than the NES CVs did, bringing it to the level where pattern recognition is an aid instead of the entire game. I like the Gradius pseudo-sequel Salamander, which I've described on many occasions as "Gradius done right." My favorite games, though, remain ones where patterns aren't really relevant. Asteroids, for example, is pure randomness. The rocks enter from random locations, and the nature of the game is such that even if they do come in the same locations, slight variations in player input dradically change the game. End result: You'll never play the same game twice. Going a bit more modern, Mars Matrix on the Dreamast is a game that you can play by reflex and instinct(though a large screen and a good joystick are must-haves). And for raw eclecticism, everyone needs to play Qix. Totally random, totally freeform, and totally abstract. It's never been a very high-profile title(original arcade release failed because... there were no patterns to beat it with), but it's a damn good one.

Pre-console to me means the dedicated Pong units, and the Odyssey 1. The 2600 was the first machine to implement the programmable paradigm that has defined every game machine since, and the first to use custom hardware. It's very similar to a modern game console, from a design standpoint. In some ways, the VCS is actually more advanced than an NES. Not many, but a few. Mainly color depth and scanline-based special effects. The shift to sprite/tile graphics came with the IntelliVision, which also introduced the crime against humanity known as the gamepad(in what I consider to be a superior design to Nintendo's, if for no other reason than it was ambidextrous), and was the first to attempt to lock 3rd-party developers out(though it was done after-the-fact and failed miserably). Also brought us the BIOS splash screen, which was blessedly absent for many years afterwards. And was the first 16-bit console. The Vectrex introduced both the analog thumbstick and the "plastic cap on a silicone dome" button construction, in a package that's actually VERY similar to a really big NES pad(inch and a half tall, 8" long, 3 deep). Also made signifigant use of scaling and rotation through specialized graphics hardware(an integrated vector display tube), making it (possibly) the first "3D-accelerated" game machine. On a personal note, this baby was also my first game console, and sits a mere 3 feet from me at this moment(right next to my SNES). The Atari 5200, while missing the analog stick and silicone switches(which on the 5200 lacked the plastic cap of modern buttons) by mere months, and the BIOS splash screen by 2 years, DID introduce 4 controller ports on a console, the almighty PAUSE BUTTON, and the automatic RF switchbox(Whoo. RF. Yay. I should do an AV mod on my VCS and 5200.). I'm not sure what makes the NES so diffrent from its predecessors, aside from country of origin. </rant>

Or maybe HG's already done it themselves...