Jobber of the Week

That doesn't look right--the 360 is going to be a monster yet again compared to the others? It looks off to me. Considering that the Xbox's DVI port is shown as bigger than both the PS3's HDMI ports and a third port for good measure, I'd say so.

Also, fighting games. I can Hadoken pretty well on an analog stick, but not many of the other moves.

I do wish they could come up with some new designs, though. The short-haired guy in Advent Children is just Riku from Kingdom Hearts with a leather get-up and an angst streak.

Then how are they going to emulate so many different controllers, from the NES 2 button + pad arrangement to the N64's bulky layout to the Gamecube's kidney shaped buttons? A generic controller-shaped device with a screen showing you the button layout for that console's controller is the only thing I can think of. Well, I don't think Sony is going to lose majority market share or anything, but I don't think they can lead for "the considerable future" from this perspective. Why? THEY SAID THE SAME THING ABOUT ATARI THEY SAID THE SAME THING ABOUT NINTENDO "________ controls so much of the market, even with Colecovision/Genesis breathing down their neck, they'll never let go of majority market share."

They're setting themselves up for a touch-screen controller, what with all those different control pads that need to be emulated, and I'm not happy about it. Of course, I'm pretty much not happy about the whole damn thing. Leseser HD support and far lesser CPU, but hey, you can now download games (possibly at cost) that you can ALREADY do with file sharing and copies of NESticle and SNES9x. If I wanted to play it on my TV, I'd just hook up my Mac Mini. After all that out-there talk, it's more conservative than they implied it was. Congrats, N, and goodbye.

I know what you mean in that I could bitch for hours and hours about how GTA, San Andreas specifically, looks so much worse than it ought to because they're gimped to using the PS2 as a base design spec thanks to the Money Mountain that magically appeared on Rockstar's doorstep one day. In reality, I expect all three consoles to last a full life cycle (although I don't expect Revolution to do much better than GameCube, I expect it to fall short of N64's numbers and be Nintendo's last home console), and certainly competition can thrive for another few years like it has this gen. The point about what I said about Sony dropping a bigger engine into the same design as PS2 and letting loose remains, though, unless their specs suddently become altered later (I'm expecting it will, this whole announcement feels rushed and a bit ametuerish, perhaps to compete with Microsoft's.) Here's the simple fact on what the PS3 hardware, out of the box, does: It makes things look more pretty. That's it. Developers are, as of this writing, still on their own online-wise. Developers will not be able to explore the possibilities of a hard drive without alienating the people who will not buy an add-on. Sony is still advertising Squeenix and EA Sports sequels out the wazoo, except this time they're just that times much more pretty with extra shiny effects. And, of course, what Sony lacks in new things to show they make up for with suits. I wouldn't really blame them for that except that people are falling for what we heard five years ago. Remember "The PS2 can render a scene from Toy Story in real time?" Remember the beautiful FF8 dance scene rendered real-time that was unlike anything we ever saw in a game again, due to it being tweaked out the wazoo like every tech demo always is? Remember how great we thought it was that we were at last going to be seeing CG-quality graphics in real time with no quality loss? Expect the same thing to be said about that FF7 opening tech demo, I guarantee you that. And I guarantee you the same result. And all that talk about devs switching over is probably sourced from, you got it, boastful Sony reps. Which isn't to say that hasn't happened a few times, but I bet I can imagine which developers they were and what their games looked like. I'm guessing it was something aimed at the Japanese market, which makes it a much safer bet to go with Sony even if MS got their hardware into devs' hands first. Which isn't meaning that the 360 is going to be any better. In the end, I expect it to be about the same. Which means, of course, that MS is going to have to be paying out for games because they can't battle Sony's brand recognition without, but Sony did the same thing re: Nintendo. Again, it just blows me away how this is mirroring Nintendo and the original PlayStation. Sony beat Nintendo's household name recognition by embracing technology faster, making things easier for devs, and buying some decent names. PS3 is, if these specs are final, not very inventive in the tech department plus MS has been developing the XNA programming platform. The only last piece is for Sony to raise licensing fees to ridiculous levels like Nintendo did during the SNES years. I guess my bitch with PS3 is that it's the most conservative of all the consoles. Nintendo's Revolution is the far other side of the ballfield, way out there and God only knows what they're smoking when they talk about how they're going to change things as you know it. Somewhere in the middle, with more options than the PS3 but not as wildly unusual as the Revolution, is the 360, which I think is a good place for it. If you enjoy what you currently have on PS2, and want more of the same, except make it more pretty, then this is good news for you. For those of us who enjoyed not using memory cards and downloading extra maps and figured that it all was useful enough to appear everywhere in the next round of consoles, it's kind of disappointing. PS: Oh god, they're using Memory Stick AGAIN. Sony, won't you and your proprietary formats ever reach a price point similar to the other, more standard flash RAM types?

You keep posting misinformation. That was a pre-release rumor and isn't true. There is only one model, and it comes with a 20GB hard drive. That hard drive CAN be removed and upgraded with a larger model that could appear later, but they are not shipping consoles without a hard drive in the box. That's debatable. Even at launch in the midst of all the hype, GameSpot and that CNET game site that got shot down a few years ago were both advising people to not toss out their Dreamcasts just yet, because the system really wasn't doing anything all that impressive in games despite the fancy tech demos and boastful executives (both of which are out in rare form, again, for the PS3 right now.) Didn't matter. The hype and the possibilities of fancier PS2-based sequels to everyone's favorite PSX titles and franchises meant that the Dreamcast was forgotten about. A lot of that is wasted on FMV, I think. FFX fit all on one DVD and while it had plenty of game resources, it also had enough FMV to drive a man to tears. The only big game that I could have seen being a problem is Grand Theft Auto. "Please insert the San Fierro disc, or turn around and return to Los Santos!" Also, a lot of PS2s have problems with CD-based games, so many developers aren't using that much space at all but use DVDs to avoid tech support calls and so much incompatability crying later. Again, what are you going to put on all that space? Unreal Engine 3.0 games are running on DVDs and those are state of the art. Doom 3 and Half-Life 2, PC versions, fit on a DVD.

You know it's E3 time, when the fanboyism goes through the roof. Jesus christ, guys, you're talking about people "not having a prayer" based on hardware specs. Wait until we see some actual games.

EVERYONE that bothers to hook the machine up to their router is going to get access to that Xbox Live Silver, and they've already detailed just what that entails. I think just about every game will have SOME Live functions, such as built-in friends list, so that even if a game is a single player experience, you can still receive chats and get game invites. We all know how well add-ons work. If Sony thinks they can just ramp up the same game experience with horsepower over and over, well, they darn well shouldn't. Especially since their biggest move was taking advantage of Nintendo's complacency to just keep making cartridge-based systems with a multiple of bits more than the last one. MS reps might admit the PS3 has more power, but again, it depends on how you use it. The Dreamcast was buried under Sony's constant hype and pressure about just how the PS2 was so much more powerful and better than anything that came before it, and yet when it launched, DOA2 on Dreamcast had less jaggies and a more refined look than DOA2 Hardcore for PS2 did.

They do sell regular admission, but it always costs hundreds and disappears in a flash.

It just recently got a name. http://www.gamespot.com/news/2005/05/16/news_6124707.html

Gates/Moore blow their load and hand Sony every advantage. Great job. That's simply horsepower, and we remember when Sony used to sit around and tell you "PS2 CAN RENDER 2094284352458347579342754 POLYGONS EMOTION ENGINE LOL" and it turned out that all those polygons had to be white and untextured and have no anti-aliasing whatsoever. Between free online functions in any game that chooses to support it plus hard drives, etc, there's a lot more potential in the 360 in my mind than this thing. The fact that there's no hard drive support out of the box that every game would save data to just blows my mind. It's simply like they put a supercharger on top of a PS2 and decided to not do anything else. Which is fine, sort of, because Sony has all the franchsies that people love, although those franchises won't be getting anything like downloadable extra content or something anytime soon.

I've cancelled before. You just call them up and give them your account name and off you go, more or less. I think you'll need the last four digits of the credit card number on file, but that should be it. They mainly make you call them just to make it a hassle to unsubscribe.

It's not like buying an Xbox requires you to put a mallet to your PlayStation.

Yeah- If going to Yale for undergrad and Harvard for grad makes you "straight fucking stupid"... There's a difference between being educated and being smart.

Forgive us for cheering who we want and not being sheep. SSlam 2004 clearly went beyond that into "intentionally cheering who you're not supposed to cheer just to fuck things up." It's like you guys took the love you got from Rock-Hogan and let it go to your heads or something. Of course, it didn't help that JR & Lawler kept up with "Bizzarro World! Bizzarro World! We're in Canada! Bizzarro World!"

OMG RHETORIC-DEBATE. WORLD'S LARGEST IDIOT VS SPAWN OF SATAN! WHO WINS?

Video files are, by design, pretty huge. I cap entire series, regularly capping a few hours of content each week, so I can give my example: I pull the MPG source off my DVR of a 30 minute program. It's 1.24GB. I then have to run a converter tool on it to make a duplicate that fixes some ordering and audio issues, this is unique to the way I do things but I have to do it for everything I cap and you may have something similar someday. That copy is also about 1.24GB. Then I clip the parts I don't want in VirtualDubMod. This includes commercials, credits, etc. Since I have to save it as AVI, I continue to use a very high quality codec. In my case, PicVideo MJPEG, which cost me $30 to register, but Huffyuv is a well-known free codec. My MJPEG file though is average 2.5GB, and Huffyuv files can be nearly 7GB, which is why I went to buy MJPEG in the first place. Then I extract the audio source from this file, usually a WAV and for my 30 minute program that averages about 250MB. Then I convert this WAV to MP3, which is what will be included with my movie file. Finally, I take that MJPEG/Huffyuv file and do a two-pass encode with a deinterlace filter applied, creating a file of passable quality at 170MB. This is the final file that I may share around the internet later. However, creating that file, my encoding also created a number of support files, including a 400MB file and a 1MB log file. At the end of the encode, all these files other than the 170MB final DivX are deleted, but the whole process of compressing it to that point requires gigs and gigs and gigs of free space.

Record them in a free audio program such as Audacity You're going to have to tell your sound card to look to it's own output for a record source and then play the file while recording.

Hasn't he been doing Cosby since the Nickelodeon days? I seem to remember him doing that for the longest time and it was always a favorite bit of mine. Your typical Cosby bit below. "WELL I SAY WHY THEY ALWAYS MAKIN THE KIDS LEARN THIS STUFF WHEN WHAT THEY NEED IS THE SKILLS TO MAKE IT WORK WHICH IS WHY I'M ALWAYS SAYIN WHOOOAAAA DOGGIE HOLD ON JUST A MINUTE RIGHT THERE. NOW YOU GONN TELL ME THAT *unintelligible* WELL DEN I TELL YOU WHAT IF THATS TRUE THEN I'LL STICK JELLO PUDDIN' POPS IN MY PANTS RIGHT HERE." I fall apart whenever he drags out the pudding pops bit. Also, I thought the commercial bit was really well done since the music and general lighting/coloring effects work met the standards of your usual all-too-happy drug ad (you know the kind, the kind that tells you to "ask your doctor about ____" like he's some kind of a dealer or something.) However, the repeated fine print about having sex like there's no tomorrow hammered the joke home a little too hard. The suggestive visuals of her dragging every kind of individual into her apartment doors were enough to be funny, and if this was SNL of the late 80s or early 90s, they would have just gone with that by itself and ditched the small-print announcer talk.

Okay, sure the men carry the largest load of supplies to the base, but when it comes to actually going out there and putting your life on the line to get the job done, I don't see why women should be exempt as long as they logistically have a chance of succeeding. It's not so much about feminism as it is about "The hell if I'm going to tell someone willing to make that sacrifice that they can't."

Why in the world is this show NOT being done in Philly? I can understand the card won't be greatest, but if you're going to say "ECW for one night only" and not put Philly in the equation you should be hanged or something.

How did the Adventures of the Baron end, anyway?

These are the games I look forward to: And that's what it's all about, ladies and gents, out of that list, anyway. I'm also interested in the next Unreal Tournament, provided it gets here reasonably quick. This gaming PC is my last. Final Fantasy games are NOT the kind of thing I get excited for, but 12 is looking at breaking the mold and actually SUCCEEDING at it. And give me Kingdom Hearts II over Zelda any day thanks.