McPhee

N64 was awesome, still got most of the issues in the cupboard behind me! It started to go a bit crap towards the end of the NGC days though...

yes, but it would have pulled sales away from the Crossfire...

Lare was slated for being poorly executed, not for being based on a dated, repetetive and boring formula. From the reviews i've read the general consensus is it would have been a pretty good game if the controls were fixed and pointless cutscenes removed. A typical case of something being unfinished/undertested upon release...

Things that are most excellent? Im sorry, i couldn't help myself...

£21. It arrived today, the keyboard is taking a bit of getting used to because it's so different from my old one but so far i really like it. The monitor stand is the thing that truly amazes me! It's really, really well built and will move in basically any way apart from pan. It'll even shift my monitor in to portrait mode! Well worth £25! No mouse though because City Link are incompetent. Somehow they managed to deliver the keyboard and monitor stand and yet, for the second day in a row, they made an "unsuccesfull delivery attempt" with the mouse. Either the driver forgot to give me it or it was in another van that got lost.

lmao who feels clever now?

That just means you can wall mount it, not that you can take the stand off. It's possible the stand will have to stay attached, the circular base can be easily removed on that model but as far as i can tell the rest is solid

That i'd agree with, a western developer might westernise the story. As long as they keep the story down to the main arc + some branches and stop trying to build a story around the characters i'll be happy. Nobody cares about Krystal and Fox's relationship! I'd be happy with the smack talk and banter from Lylat Wars :p Im sure they'd cope fine with the gameplay mechanics, space battles are what the Factor 5 is most practised in. Even Rebel Strike managed that brilliantly...

Nooooooooooooooooooooooo! Really, why? Japanese developers have turned the series in to a farce...

Nicely said Kov To me, if someone wants my organs then they can ask for them. I'm not sure im prepared to just hand them over upon my death, without knowing who is going to get them. I'll never sign the organ donors register, but there will be something written in my Last Will and Testament. The organs go to someone who my next of kin deems deserving or nobody at all. Im even willing to lend them to medical research if it's good research.

Like Mass Effect, but with space battles and an infinitely cooler tank? I can dream!

Im sorry, but that is the dumbest thing i've ever heard. It's state sponsored robbery! Either you didn't think it through too well or you're a political idealist. It's ideas like that that remove the humanity from a country...

Sell it, im sure someone on here on eBay or over at AVForums will give you a decent price on it. Something down the lines of £20-£25 inc postage

Star Fox. DO IT!!!!!!!! They might actually do that franchise justice, instead of giving us the pap that other devs have been releasing. Something that actually lives up to Lylat Wars would be nice, surpassing it would be amazing! To be honest they're comments about the Wii tie together, they said it was underpowered, then saw the mess devs were making and are now returning to set the standard again and show other developers up for the lazy bastards they are :p (sounds plausible to me any way)

Kameo was good, as was Viva Piñata. I think they just went through a bad patch to be honest, the real test will be how good Banjo turns out to be. Some people need to get they're facts straight with Rare though. The company began to leak vital staff members in 1997, with the departure of Oliver Davies, Oliver Norton, Steve Patrick, Jeff Stafford, Christopher Gage, and Adrian Smith. These staff members formed the developer Eighth Wonder, who were then bought up by SCEE. Then in 1998 Martin Hollis left left and started Zoonami, with the Free Radical team departing soon after. It was under Nintendo that Rare lost most of it's talent (im not saying it was Nintendo's fault before anyone flames me). Microsoft didn't buy Rare until 2002, when they purchased the Stamper Brothers 51% share (making Microsoft the controlling share holder of Rare). This left Nintendo with a choice, either they kept they're 49% share and worked with Rare and Microsoft in future projects, or sell they're share to someone else. In the end they sold they're 49% to Microsoft, making them the sole owner of Rare. Rare kept every franchise they made, bar the ones relating to Nintendo characters. Some people in this topic seem determined to remember Rare in a perfect light, and blame Microsoft for the mediocre games the company made between 2000 and 2006. This isn't the case, the company was in this shit when they were sold. Since then they've improved, slowly.

It'll play more than that if you want it to, it can handle anything out on the market to some extent. The 8600GT is a pretty powerfull card for a laptop to have, add in the 3GB RAM and the Core2Duo and you've got a reasonably powerfull gaming laptop there

Saitek Eclipse Keyboard: Logitech G5: Was gonna get the MX518, but this is far better and the same price. The blue one was a tenner more New monitor stand: My screen's stand isn't adjustable, so it's currently sitting on a big blue block. This should sort that problem out nicely And a new book: The computer stuff should have been here by now, i ordered it on Thursday with next day delivery. Got told "estimated delivery date: 11th January" and it still hasn't made it to me. Not happy.

That is a brilliant buy! I can't believe how cheap laptops are getting these days!

https://www.bethere.co.uk/ Those guys are the best in the country, by a long way. Every time i see they're name mentioned see glowing comments along with it. If they cover you're area then go with them, they give you what they say they will and they're call centres are quick and efficient (even if they are Bulgarian).

The card itself isn't the problem, it's the crappy reference cooler. Fit a decent aftermarket cooler to it and it's a bloody good card! But with a decent aftermarket cooler costing anywhere between £15 and £30 you're better off buying a GTS and getting a "free" speed boost. Nvidia only put that cooler on the GT to show off, it's quite an achievement getting a single slot cooler on such a powerful card! Unfortunately it isn't the most practical solution...

I was really refering to the new cards, they're a lot better than the 2900 cards

I was actually referring to the Blu-Ray disk association as a whole, decisions made with regard to Blu-Ray aren't just down to Sony. Fair point with the PS3 though, despite Sony's whole getting Lik-Sang shut down and putting the fear of god in to importers they've done good with the PS3. I'm no Sony hater, I just dislike what I see happening in this particular situation. I think the PS3 is easily the best bit of next-gen hardware, it's feature list is incredible and it's price is amazing! It just lacks the games to warrant a £300 spend at the moment. Sony and they're partners make some incredible kit, but that doesn't change how i feel about BD

Apple definitely have the best store, yes. Hardware-wise though can you really see Apple TV taking off? Apple like a world of Apple, something which i can see hurting the company as it expands. I suppose it depends what else is out there really. With the price of computer hardware tumbling all the time and advances in wireless networking i can see Windows Media Centre becoming a good consumer product over the next few years. Then theres BT Vision, Virgin Media and whatever BSkyB pull out of the hat...

Basically look out for any laptop spec that has the words "Mobility Radeon" or "Geforce Go" Specific model numbers are rather complicated. I put this up in another thread a while back so it's a little out of date: Thats a pretty good guide as to what card is better than what. Anything from a Mobility x1300 upwards will be enough, so thats everything from the 8th row upwards. Post up here before you buy though. That table is very simplified, there's a few things to consider that it doesn't take in to account.

Do i really have to go through my history and dig up sources for every point i made there? I'll tell you what, if you highlight which bits you think are untrue i'll go find the source. Bull. Shit. The difference between Blu-Ray and DVD/VHS etc is that Blu-Ray 2.0 was the original Blu-Ray spec. The BDA kept certain features out due to time/cost restraints so that they could compete with HD-DVD. The added bonus of this is that all current players are obsolete before they leave the shelves. With DVD it was years before dual layer DVDs came out, years before DTS and years before HDMI. It wasn't technologically possible to implement these changes when DVD first came out (1997). Same goes for VHS with stereo sound etc. They were all upgrades, they improved the format and were quite a few years apart. And as for consumers being told, how exactly? A little bit of writing in the back on the manual, some small print on the underside of the box or a line of text on a web page aren't enough to excuse the manufacturers of blame. If they truly wanted consumers to know what they were buying then they would have put a nice big sticker on the front. Don't get me wrong, im not surprised they didn't put a sticker on the front. After all, that would have lost them sales and quite possibly some market share to HD-DVD. Much easier to manipulate consumer stupidity and then blame it on those very same consumers. I really take you're opinion with a pinch of salt anyway. If you did some research for a change i might start to take you seriously, at the moment though you just come across as a fanboy. If you'd actually taken 5 minutes to read up on the matter you'd know that 1.0 players cannot be upgraded to 1.1 because of the hardware requirement. Blu Ray 1.1 requires a minimum of 256MB local video storage, a secondary video decoder and a secondary audio decoder. On top of that 2.0 requires 1GB of local video storage and an Ethernet port. These are all hardware components, they cannot be added in at a later stage.