AndrewTS

Thanks Thoth, for providing a more succint (i.e. less long-winded) answer ahead of me.

Unless you know exactly how much coverage remains on it (the older it is, the less of that 3 years RROD coverage there is, and likely used 360s with have little or no 1 year standard warranty remaining), I'd say forget it. Are you going to download TV shows and movies to your 360? Does IPTV sound like a feature you might use down the line? Do you see yourself purchasing *lots* and *lots* of DLC? If you answered "No" to all of those, then it isn't worth it. The only difference between *currently shipping* Elites and standard 360s is color and hard drive size (ever since HDMI became standardized. If you look for the "standard" 360 (i.e. not the Core/Arcade or Elite), the inclusion of an HDMI port should be a good indicator that it's got at least the extra heatsink installed. *However*, due to limited supplies in relation to the standard, Elites are carried by retailers in smaller quantities, and likely any given number of Elites you see should have been put in the shelves not long ago. The Halo 3 models are naturally pretty new, just ugly and only available in standard. I still think MS should have had a Halo 3 "Elite" Elite rather than shitty Todd MacFarlane art controllers or that green turd 360, but they'd probably make it almost as ugly.

Ign has a review up for Naruto 360. As exclusives reviews tend to be, it's quite a bit on the positive side. BUT, looks really solid from top to bottom: http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/831/831258p1.html. Sounds kind of like Crackdown with the skill-building. I'll definitely rent at least.

I'd say you don't need to rush to get this. As expected, it's riddled with bugs and it's best to wait until maybe 10.5.3 or something to get it. Among the problems I've seen is that the touted finder help search doesn't seem to work very well (or could be that they just don't have kbase articles for 10.5 up online yet), the Mail auto-setup sometimes will sit and spin for eternity if it's an unrecognized mail server and you type anything into Description during setup, Time Machine can see external SATA drives but doesn't know what the heck to do with them and do not support them for back up purposes. Contrary to what Jobs said in his presentation, Airport Disks do not work with Time Machine, either. The redesigned folder icons are hideous. I don't know what the hell is up with Disk Utility's Permissions Repair; it doesn't show details even with that option checked, and it ran for 10 minutes until I stopped it. Spaces is worthless from what I've seen, since Expose did basically everything it did anyway. Oh, Classic is not supported. As in, if you already have it on your system, Leopard will *kill it*. It shouldn't be too much of an issue because few use it anymore, but Tiger didn't affect it so it's kind of weird. I guess Apple wants to cut costs by eliminating their older desktop support soon. However, anyone who recently bought a Mac since Oct 1 can get Leopard for 10 bucks s&h. Go here and follow the instructions: http://www.apple.com/macosx/uptodate EDIT: the link is being kind of auto-converted into half-broken html codes. Well, copy and paste if it doesn't work.

No, the Wii announcement is new (it went up on the major sites today), but people were expecting a Wii announcement because Will was blabbing about the Wii for almost half of the last year. He's a borne-again Nintendo fanboy now, and EA getting major sales out of Wii titles certainly doesn't hurt, either. I stand corrected on both points then. That leaves Geist as only Nintendo-published, but still a distinction you don't see on many (any?) M-rated games. I think Wikipedia is where I saw it referenced as an NST project, likely fixed up since. That doesn't exactly give me any added confidence in a sequel's quality, though. It's quite plausible that the rumor is true, because n-Space did announce they were working on a Wii game but didn't yet confirm what it was. If it's indeed Geist 2, they're probably holding off announcement until they have an impressive build of it, so they can quickly convince game mags/sites to forget Geist's quality issues.

HAHAHA!! The first and only M-rated Nintendo-developed title...and also a pretty crappy one. If Nintendo Software Technology is working on it, it'll be quite puzzling due to H.A.M.M.E.R. being canned and "resources shifted" towards casual games. The concept is a solid one, though. I hope it's true *IF* they can make the sequel really good. If Nintendo begins making a few Mature titles here and there it should give them some high-profile exclusives with wide appeal. I really wanted to like Geist, but it didn't like me. However, this basically confirms that Nintendo *has to be seriously considering* a new Kid Icarus. Geist?! Really, now?! Maybe Halo 3's effect on 360 sales made Nintendo realize that Reggie's statements about H3 were utterly moronic. Oh, Spore is confirmed for the Wii along with the previously-announced PC and DS releases. Source: Will Wright, bitch!

I think it was, at least for the Sonics, more the perception that the games would be better sellers, demographics-wise, on GC than Xbox or PS2; a perception that was confirmed with terrible/mediocre sales for later (also terrible/mediocre) multi-platform Sonic titles. And since I had originally posted that about the Saturn, GameTap's got Saturn emulation working in a very limited capacity. We're still a far way from playing Panzer Dragoon Saga on it, it appears. Plus it hasn't been updated much/often (Virtua Fighter 1 is *coming*; whoopie!).

Yeah, I was wrong. However, you make me sound like some sort of shouting albino gorilla. In retrospect that was undoubtedly quite incorrect, but it was an assumption based on my deep belief in Sega's profound half-assing. I refused to belief they'd have done so many ports (SA1 and 2, Skies, PSO, Crazi Taxi, etc.) without essentially dumping the code and a middleman program. King of similar to Bleemcast, for example. I was rather ignorant of the nuts and bolts of emulation at the time, i.e. the 10:1 rule of thumb. That means that the system has to be at least 10 times as powerful as the console being emulated to make it run extremely well. The 360 is damn close to 10x the Xbox, but not close enough that they can write a single emulator and call it a day. With the Wii's main processor only 4x the speed of the Dreamcast, straight up emulation is unlikely or impossible. Emulation of DC on 360 and PS3 should be extremely feasible. I'm not sure about the logistics of multi-cores for emulation, but each PS360 processor core runs at 3.2GHz vs. the single-core DC's 200MHz. However, I found it really interesting that Treasure actually worked on the Virtual Console version of Sin and Punishment.

If it's wireless, I'd try changing the batteries and cleaning the contacts with a pencil eraser and re-trying it. If it's corded--yeah, trash it.

I assume it means all "Game Boy" systems, which is kind of neat. Gems like Toki Tori, Shantae, and Ninja Five-O might get more of they love they missed the first time around. However, the low quality of the actual games themselves will mean a lot of crap. Outside of Konami, Capcom, and of course Nintendo stuff, most GB and GBC games are pretty much crap. Plus, even 5 dollars would be pushing it for most of those games. Speaking of old games, 1up/Retronauts has a new Podcast up discussing Chrono Trigger. It's a shame that game sucks so hard by today's standards.

There's tons of improvements to the OS, lots of neat touches that are difficult to go into. Time Machine, a more stable Finder, a more stable and effective Mail, etc., but nothing earth-shaking. If you have a MacBook w/ Boot camp beta the final Boot Camp version may be an enticement, but otherwise I'd suggest seeing it in an Apple Store first. If Leopard is like Tiger (and from what I've seen, the installation process more or less is the same), the "Family pack" is exactly the same as the "Single user" pack, and there is *no* registration code to enter to install it or update a system. The "family pack" purchases you 5 "licenses" so you can then "legally" put it on multiple machines, but who cares about that when there is no real reason to do so? So, I wouldn't waste your money on it.

Sarcasm and the internet tend not to mix without lots of context. That was the type of opinion I expected you'd gotten. I virtually guarantee you there's probably going to be a game mag or site that either doesn't have a wrestling fan, or has a wrestling fan that is a graphic whore without knowledge or appreciation of the series, and is going to bag on the game for that reason. The price might help, though.

Action game from the team who made the Hitman games. As for Fire Pro, you probably read from a moronic somewhere that had a problem with the graphics. It's basically a localization of a known-to-be-awesome game.

November is just insane with quality releases. Coming next month (to NA at least) is Call of Duty 4, Assassin's Creed, Kane & Lynch, Mass Effect, Rock Band, Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn, Mario Galaxy, Ghost Squad, Raving Rabbids 2, new Trauma Center, PS2 Fire Pro Returns, Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker, Final Fantasy XII Revanant Wings, and more. That's not even counting likely "decent" titles like Mario and Sonic, Resident Evil UC (which I think may suck, but--BENEFIT), that weird Aqua Teen golf game/beat 'em up, etc. Plus I know folks here will be interested in the new Smackdown game coming out then. Well...at the very least Mario Galaxy and Fire Pro I'll be able to afford.

Considering what they have to choose from to put on the service, it would be sad if there weren't more great VC games than Wii games. XBLA may have original games along with the sometimes-questionable-quality ports, but the appearance of a must-buy title is a bit rarer. However, if you already own the games in cart form it's usually not worth it to get it.

The GH3 demo is useless if you don't own the 360 guitar, right? Is there a converter for the PS2 version, or a universal guitar for either system?

Currently, no. While HD is the main selling point of this version, a minority of 360 owners (and possibly PS3 owners) actually have HD sets.

Since there's no thread for HD Turbo Remix, but it's still SF, we finally have bona fide screenshots of that: http://blogs.capcomusa.com/blogs/digital.p...i_p_screenshots

Older, it was. Looking forward to the 360 Naruto game coming out at the end of this month. Yeah, it's a licensed game, and I'm lukewarm at best on the licensed property, but it's from Ubisoft Montreal (the Prince of Persia/Assassin's Creed studio) and it's been in the works for a couple years. The gameplay seems to be PoP + Crackdown's hyper skills + sandbox structure and missions. Found a video preview with lots of gameplay footage:

Because of my work schedule, I hadn't been following South Park that much... Did they ever follow up on Chef Vader, or just never reference it again?

Tonight's episode:

There's likely a software reason for that. The speed goes to crap whenever it's running old PPC programs through Rosetta. It should be fine running most native stuff.

You have to click embedded youtube vids to play them. At least with the embed codes they provide for you to C+P from the site.

Not sure what he means, but the Mac that most people buy--the iMac--starts at 1200 when you can get a decent PC for half that, or hell, a *fantastic* PC for that same price. If you build your PC, GTFO--the cost difference is huge. I'm browsing around HP's site now, and I can get a HP preinstalled with Vista, 2.66GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 2 GBs memory, a 512 MB NVIDIA GeForce 8500GT with HDMI support (an extra 80 bucks), a 400GB HDD--all for less than one grand (before taxes, etc). Everything except for the video card I mentioned is stock config. http://www.shopping.hp.com/webapp/shopping...do#anchor-m_c_2 Now, for an iMac that's comparable (Mac Minis currently top out at 2GHz processors), a 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo starts at 1800 bucks. 1GB memory, 320GB HDD, video card is ATI Radeon HD 2600 PRO with 256MB memory and you can't upgrade it without buying the higher config. If we upgrade the memory to 2GB, don't get anything else extra, get only the wired keyboard and mouse--we're already at 2K for a machine that still has a slower processor and a poorer video card (They don't have an iMac with a 2.66GHz processor available, it's 2.4 or 2.8). You can CTO a Mac Pro to be almost identical to that HP I mentioned...but you'll be paying 3000 dollars for it. Oh, and if you want to actually game on it, that doesn't include the cost of buying (or pirating...) a retail copy of windows to install on it with Boot Camp or something. For that price, you could jack up the CTO options on that HP computer to the max and then some. When you buy an Apple computer, you're paying for the privilege of using Mac OS X. And you pay far out the ass for it. The privilege of getting a machine that is actually upgradable beyond the memory goes to people willing to invest in Power Macs and Mac Pros, too.

How far you get on Breakdown? I got up to the point where you get the abiilty to shoot the projectile from your arms...and there's an area shortly after that where enemies WILL gang up on you and you WILL have to deal with about 3 of them blasting their own energy projectiles at you, with no real way to snipe 'em or otherwise take them out without eating tons of damage. I actually enjoyed a lot of it at first (liked a lot of the platforming touches, the ability to actually see your own limbs with it, the cool evasive maneuvers like backflip, etc)....but you can't effectively aim your weapon because it's so dependent on lock-on. BTW, for a lot of folks, like me, who are clueless about if their game is pc quality, or what upgrades they need, I found this site: http://www.yougamers.com/games/. Check the "game-o-meter" for a particular game to see if your PC can run it. For curiosity's sake, I ran the Orange Box test to see, in case Half Life Ep. 3 doesn't get a 360 release, if my PC could run it, as I expect the system requirements to be about identical. I'd need a new video card although my processor, os, and memory are fine. I also ran the Crysis one. They may as well have played a little digitized laugh at me after I finished running it, though.