JB0

Yes there was a regular edition of Lunar but it came out years after the edition that you have... I have it cause I didn't have a Playstation ever(until PS2) so I never got the old release of Lunar. I'm the opposite. I got my Silver Star Story on launch week, THEN got a PS1 to play it. But I was a Lunar fanboy before most of the english-speaking world heard of it. Cousin had a SegaCD and the Lunar games when I was a kid. Actually bought his Genesis setup off him for the sole reason of playing Lunar(I was a Nintendo fanboy at the time, and was pretty sure Silver Star and Eternal Blue were the only 2 games worth owning on the Genesis).

Ahhhhh! Must....get.....in......to...E3!!! I'm considering trying to go and just walk in (hey, always works for me in restricted pits at races...), but I'm afraid I'm gonna end my day smashed and on a plane with a one-way ticket to Tokyo. Yes, but then you'll make friends with a ninja, buy a Cool Thing, and go insane. And everything looks more interesting when you're insane.

But I do portables too. I just like hardware that was DESIGNED to play games. Tends to perform the task a bit better, and have a better input configuration on top of it. Jack of all trades, master of none doesn't do it for me. Similar argument for cellphone cameras. Sure they're convenient. They're also low-res, and have crappy lenses(even if they buy them from a good manufacturer, there's not room for the multiple elements of a half-decent full camera lens). I'd rather have a standalone camera that takes decent photos.

Whoa... Starcraft: Ghost!

That's what Dyson did when guld went psycho and had his flashback. Not as good as max's "fly right into the swarm (rather than away from) with a slower vf1 and dodge milia's missiles swarm in SDF: macross", but good enough. This is why I think if the vf22 had that BCS yf21 system, average pilots might stand a better chance because they could dodge easier. Too bad it was taken out. And can you IMAGINE what a pilot like Max would get out of it? Be like a god of death walking into the battlefield. Problem is omnidirectional barriers have a nasty tendancy to go nuclear when they fail. This isn't good for your wingmates. Thought Basara put PPB disks on his shield. Either way...

If you face the infamous missile storm, and your VF only can generate.. maybe 15-20 barrier discs (lets say each can only cover an area with a 3..3.5 ft diameter) at maximum power, I don't know if doing it manual or computer-control with a flood of missiles coming would be a good idea. Heck, I would just launch decoys and run if that was coming at me. Forget the PPB, must go faster. Yah. I have my doubts about PPB usability against missiles. With luck, your disk is wide enough to block the blast from the impact missile, and the missiles coming in behind the lead one(which the computer blocked) are blasted by the first one exploding. I was assuming a 3-disk system, really. 15-20, just set disks resting on several key strategic areas and to heck with it.

Yeah. The companies are talking about trying that out. I think it'll bomb. Remember the N64? Something else to consider, and I think it was mentioned in the same article, that developers have been using the higher-priced "collector's edition" version of games as an experiment to see if consumers are willing to pay more for games. And I'll say that, from a retailer's point of view, the $54.99 collector's edition games (like Halo 2) have sold pretty well, but the $60 games (like Mortal Kombat Deception) sold much better in the regular editions. If the publishers learned anything from that, they'll keep the games at no more than $54.99. Collector's editions are neat. When they come with something worth having. I love my Lunar soundtracks, Eternal Blue pendant, Lords of Lunar game, and yes, the sexy boxes, but why would I want a red aluminum box with a Gamestop logo wrapped around my standard RE4 package? ... To be fair, neither PS Lunar game was ever offered in a "standard" edition anyways, though(if it was, it flew by too fast for me to notice).

I'm betting the cheaper competition will drive it down fast, regardless of what it starts at. Much like the famous Saturn/PS1 wars, with Sony pulling the Saturn price down untill both settled at 200. Or more recently, the PS2/XBox/GameCube, with Nintendo filling Sony's old role and pulling prices down. Oh, no! The PS3 has announced support for a hard drive, but Sony hasn't said if it will ship with one or not. I didn't mean to imply that the PS3 definatively has a hard drive... my point to MGREXX was that having slots for a variety of flash cards doesn't make the PS3 superior to the Xbox 360 as long as the Xbox 360 does have the hard drive. Okay. I'm back to celebrating the presence of standard media slots. Particularly SD, as they're more standard than MemorySticks. If it keeps me from paying 20$ for 8 MB of flash, I'm good.

Yah. IMO it's better to be a little under than massively over. Sadly, massively over builds better hype, even when the people making the claims get caught red-handed.

"Feel my walking stick you will, yes..."

Yeah. The companies are talking about trying that out. I think it'll bomb. Remember the N64?

This is also what Nintendo did for the Cube. Do you remember the claims Sony made about the PS2 before it launched? Do you remember when they showed the realtime rendered ball scene from FFVIII and claimed it was running on the PS2, when it was really running on several SGI machines? Sony hype should never be taken at face value. I'd go so far as to say their hype for the PS2 was outright lies. And Sega got hammered with those claims, because htey were releasing what they believed were real-world specs for the Dreamcast. In point of fact, developers got more than spec'ed out of the DC rather regularly. But it's damn near impossible to get the "spec'ed" performance from a PS2.

Not if you have force powers or magick which Sara and Mao started to have. Remember they may be the descendants of PC, an advanced lemurian/atlantean civilisation that may have awakened dormant powers of the mind and passed this knowledge to the select few in a sacred bloodline who would use it wisely and not abuse it. You can just use the force to read where the shots will hit, and instead of using your hand to move the controls, just push it with your mind. Now ppl, don't forget that shin managed to do this of his own power when he levitated the vf0 of his own power so I'm not making this one up. Oooohhh... Jedi in a VF...

JB0, I'm not arguing in favor of proprietary memory cards. If you have to use a memory card, I'd say go with CF on account of its sheer cheapness. But, why waste money on either if you can stream media wirelessly and store it on the supplied 20GB hard drive? PS3 lets you save games to a hard drive? ... I have GOT to pay more attention to gaming news. Everything I've seen's just been "OMG TEH CELL AM PWNZ" over and over. If the XBox did nothing else, it got me internal game saves back. And for that Microsoft has my gratitude.

That's a weird market strategy. Do we have any actual tech demos of what the Revolution is able to do? Reports seem to indicate that the new system is "only" about 2 or 3 times as fast as the Cube. Nintendo's own numbers. And what's wierd about attempting to give real-world performance #s instead of grotesquely bloated ones? Average user can get 4x the Wavebird's max range, too. The 3.2 GHz PowerPC in the XBox is pr'ly about 2-3x better than the 733MHz P3. We'll say 3. Dual procs is usually roughly 1.6x single proc performance. 3 procs gets you roughly 2x. Resource conflicts typically prevent the gains from being as great as expected. A problem compunded by the fact that all 3 of the XBox cores are on one chip, and thus one CPU bus. That's 4-6x, hardly the 15x being promised. Sony's 35x is just comedic. They have ONE 3.2 GHz processor with 7 extra floating-point units. Admittedly, FPUs are good for 3D gaming, but not THAT good. Aside from which, SCE's never released an accurate spec in their entire history. These aren't even benchmarks, as far as I know. Just marketing estimates of increased "power." And power isn't even really defined. We can assume, with the context, that it's the CPU(s). But beyond that, what is it? More MIPS? Less cache misses? Watts comsumed? ... actually, I'd believe it if it was watts consumed. It's just the modern version of "bittage". It's a meaningless term without a definition.

PRE-RENDERED custscenes blow. I have no problem with game-engine cutscenes, in moderation. But pre-rendered ones break the visual continuity and make me feel funny. ... Especially when your character's carrying a rifle, and suddenly shows up with a pistol in the FMV.

Ultimately, DTV may make that true. Higher-res TVs = higher-res games = more detailed textures. But right now, the # of games that go above the need for a single single-layer disk can likely be counted on one hand(only one I know of is SO3). It's like everyone crapped on the Dreamcast because it's 1GB disks were too small. I believe a grand total of 3 2-disk games came out. And every PS2 title at the time was a 650 MB CD-ROM. Either way, there's no clear successor yet. Game manufacturers don't want to get caught in another Betamax. So they stick with what works.

Japanese price. Japan has a proud tradition of shafting consumers. PS1 and Saturn both premiered at 500. The PS3's 300$ pricetag at launch made it the cheapest DVD player around, while evrywhere else had 100$ DVD players on shelves a year before. That's not indicative of the american launch price, I gaurantee it..

I hereby dub this the annual booth babe thread! Let the pictures commence!

I have a 6340i. Gogo low-res B&W screen. Only thing I REALLY want is better ring tones. The buzzer is kinda annoying.

I think the key there is if it is a known type. Otherwise, it's hit the decoys, run like hell and/or switch modes and pray you can shot it down. The computer should be able to assemble a rough profile from observed actions in the field. Not as good as a pre-programmed one with precise data, but still useful. Without the profile you're reduced to... what a conventional pilot has, only you still have the BDI's more extensive and intuitive sensor data and the BCS' superior control. Either way, the PPB is still easier to work with a BCS. So you just snap a disk around to catch the incoming fire(and hope there's not enough kick to splash around the barrier), instead of letting go of the stick and lunging for a trackball. ... Ah, heck. Only way a fighter-mounted PPB is really viable IMO is with automated barrier tracking anyways. Never mind.

Yes, but an ace by Kamjin's definition and an ace by Millia's are so diffrent that it doesn't matter. Max was the guy she wanted. If Kamjin had IDed Hikaru for her, she'd've pr'ly been so pissed that she'd've shot him for making fun of her.

Having power available for better graphics doesn't somehow mean that gameplay will necessarily be worse. Nor does having a system with lesser capabilities mean that gameplay will somehow magically improve and be inherent to the system. It's not as if Nintendo putting worse hardware in their next box and settling for worse graphics somehow translates to effort towards how great their games are going to be. A lesser system does mean you can't have both in the same box, at least compared to more powerful platforms. The whole concept of platforms "trading" worse graphics for better gameplay is marketing spin to cover for a less capable system. Sure, developers might be more motivated to polish substance over style on a system they know can't compete in looks... but in the console wars, I've found that the availability of good gameplay depended more on which and how many developers signed on to develop for a console than the console itself. Of course Nintendo has some of the greatest game designers and teams locked up tight. But the quality of their games certainly isn't by merit of their systems' lackluster power. If they produced a box that looked 10 times better, their games would be just as good. And much more compelling visually. -Al I don't think Nintendo's using lesser hardware. I think it's more that they're intentionally understating their performance gains while the competition is intentionally overstating them. Nintendo, like Sega before them, is big about trying to quote real-world #s that you're likely to see in ACTUAL GAMES. This puts them at a disadvantage when going up against Sony's notoriously inflated "optimistic" numbers for a hypothetical tech demo that involves every last transistor in the system in the task of filling the screen with unlit, untextured triangles floating in space.

On the other hand, every other Trek got a sendoff from the prior show in episode 1(Dr. McCoy was the only one on Next Generation, but they worked Scotty, Spock, and Kirk in later).

Don't panic. There's a switch in the front under the loading slot. It's flush so it probably is touch sensitive. It mars the aesthetic design when you have a flip switch sticking out in the front, so they put it in the back - just like the PS2. I think Sony should've left the hard switch off entirely. No one reaches around behind their PC to kill the hard power switch on their ATX computer. No one unplugs their TV, VCR, or stereo to force it out of standby mode. Why is the PS2 special? Just leave it in standby like you do every other piece of equipment in the house.