I prefer watching/reading any and everything in its native language. There are cultural nuances and ideas that are hard to translate into a foreign language. Hence the phrase, "lost in translation".

The quality of voice-acting, as well, is at a different level. In Japan, there is a giant industry that is based solely voice acting and is extremely competitive. I cannot say the same for other nations.

It's been 20+ years but I've found my interest goes up and down. Sometimes there just nothing out there that draws you back to the scene for a while. I've also noticed that as I grew older my preferences started shifting.

With the real world kicking my butt and not giving me as much time as I'd like to watch anime, I can't say in 5 years I will share the same fervor as I do now.

H has been a cornerstone in civilization. It's nothing new. With the way things are headed in terms of content, regulations are becoming more lax but recent changes in Japanese law are looking to clamp down on certain types of H (underage, in particular).

H, good stories, and great illustrations are ways to grab the attention of the audience. Its hard to create good stories and great/unique illustrations. H is probably the easier of the three to generate. In a market that more and more people are trying to get into, you're going to see a lot more H since its the easiest to generate.

A million dollars doesn't take you far nowadays. Invest, invest, invest. I would invest all of it but over time into stocks, roth IRA, and metals. In the meantime, I would still work. By the time you retire you'll be living it real easy.

Nuclear energy requires too many regulations and I believe the dangers outweigh the benefits. There is no safe way to dispose of nuclear waste and the half-life of the toxic was is too long. The affects of nuclear power are also too destructive.

Alternative energies need to be researched further. Solar power coupled with battery technology, in my opinion, is probably the best way to pursue. Unfortunately, battery technology and solar panel technology are really lagging and lacking efficiency.

Besides, Studio Ghibli doesn't want to make more movies with nuclear power.

Nintendo is trying to get back to the hard-core gamer. They have enlisted the help of major 3rd-party developers after alienating them from the current console generation. It's a great step in the right direction but at the same time it's like they take two steps back.

They are not including Blu-ray/DVD playback capabilities and they are still caught up in the cycle of creating gimmick contraptions. Gimmicks are great for the first few months of usage but it gets tiresome and boring. After a few months I stopped using my Wii. There was nothing to draw me back to it and the control scheme was, frankly, getting annoying.

Nintendo needs to lose the gimmicks and go back to basics if they want to court the hard-core gamers, again. Just build a powerful system with basic home entertainment feature that is competitive in price. With the current price of consoles, the vast majority of people can't afford x2 or x3 different consoles. Nintendo has to give me a reason to pick theirs over their competitors and this new generation is just turning me off. It's just reminding me of an attempt at Dreamcast 2 with the screen-in-the-controller.

Regardless of whether the content is offensive or not to each individuals sensibilities, one can simply turn away from that which they find distasteful.

If it works for you, great! If it doesn't, move on. And if you're concerned about the taste of others, don't. Compromising your choices/tastes based on what others think is a compromise to yourself/core.

I look for games with a good story or new and interesting gameplay concepts. Of course, challenges are nice but if the game is just hard for the sake of being hard then there is simply no fun and just ends up being an exercise in frustration.

I will also not deny that graphics are somewhat important, too. It's what creates that initial interest in the game in the first place.

A) This original post smells of trolling B) Because I like fashionable European clothing that means I want to be Euro trash? Because I like French black and white art flicks I want to be a prissy French man who thinks they are avant garde?

I won't deny interests MAY influence you in certain directions such as trying to identify with a certain culture. People like to imitate that which they find fascinates them but anime is not necessarily a reflection of what Japanese culture is. It is merely an aspect.

My experience is that it's better to watch the anime first THEN read the manga. There will be a TON of differences between the two because there is a lot of filler thrown in anime to occupy the 20+ minute mark and to stretch certain story arcs to hit season markers (episodes in multiples of 13). ... Or some ideas are harder to translate into animation than being drawn out on manga pages. ... Or to give time to the artist/writer to put out more material.

Ducky0011, resist the urge!!!! By reading ahead, I've ruined the anime experience for a couple of series already, as well.

ANYTHING can be a bad influence according to modern-day interpretation. Honestly, people do bad because of bad parenting. Instead of taking responsibility for their children and being involved with their growth/lives, it's easier for parents to blame society and television.

Is anime evil/bad? It's like saying people who watch hentai are serial rapists. Do you see otakus that are heavy hentai fans going out there and committing those sorts of crimes? Reality is they're probably scared to touch a woman, let alone rape them.

If you're going to be/do bad it's because of how you were raised (that or you have a severe genetic disorder that develops your brain into that of a non-empathetic psychopath). The only negative influence I may see is it may make you more introverted but that's depending on the individual.

Looks like a lot of late nite/early morning watchers. Same here. Between the job and the extracurricular activites/exercise, the only time to catch up is either on the weekends or at 12:00 A.M. to 03:00 A.M.

I typically watch 2-3 hours a day right before I zzzzz out. I can't fall asleep without some kind of background noise.

Marlin000, I can respect your opinion that the Wii is the best console. However, I do not find any validity in your statement that there is no improvement from the PS2 to the PS3 besides the blu-ray and graphics. The PS3 has evolved from just a mere video game console to a home media entertainment center. You cannot say that for the Wii. And virtual console is nothing more than ROMs running on system memory. The PlayStation 3 not only can but does do the same thing as the Wii in this regard.

Whats even more revolutionary is a single navigation menu, the XMB (which has won many international awards), which has completed changed the way someone navigates content not only on the PS3 but also a network of shared media on your home network. You can access your videos, music, pictures, etc. via the PS3 and output it on your TV.

On top of that, there is an ever-evolving remote play that allows you to access your PS3 content via the PSP. You can also use your PSP as a controller and as a remote monitor. At the TGS, they revealed new plans to have PS3's network with each other to access a main PS3, which acts as a server, and the contents of a shared home network through it as well as have multiplayer games running through that same network and being played on multiple PSPs.

The Wii is revolutionary in the way you play games by increasing interactivity with motion senors but in all honesty, thats as far as it has evolved. The only other revolution is creating a creative interactive international community via channels such as polling.

If we're talking about motion sensing then you cannot ignore that the PS3 has also taken strides in that direction. The sixaxis controller also does motion sensing and is being utilized in quite a few games including Ninja Gaiden Sigma and Heavenly Sword where you can control projectile flight by moving your controller around. The great thing about the PS3 sixaxis is that it does not require and additional motion sensor bar like the Wii does.

I have all three major console platforms and at first I was with the XBOX 360, then the Wii, but now I have to say the PS3. The PS3 has one of the best menu's, it also plays DVDs and Blu-Ray in Full HD. It also upscales lower-scaled media into Full HD. Its made all my PS2 games look nicer too.

Rumor has it that there will be a 400 USD 40GB PS3 coming soon, too.

The Wii is nice but its only fun if you have a lot of people to play with. Not a lot of solo games for it that will retain your attention. I have to say, though, NiGHTS and Zack & Wiki look very promising.

As for the 360, it ended up being such a sports and fps platform. I enjoy fps and one of my all time favorites is the Halo series. Bioshock is pretty good, too. However, its not diverse enough for me. It is a very sports oriented platform.

The PS3 is starting to prove more and more to be a very attractive system with games coming out this October and Novermber such as Guitar Hero III, Rock Band, Kane & Lynch: Dead Men, Assassin's Creed, Army of Two, and Time Crisis 4.

Spring next year should also yeild a very nice crop of good games like Valkyrie of the Battlefield and Metal Gear Solid 4. The library is looking very promising and diverse. The PS3 is not just a gaming machine for me, its an all-in-one media center and thats why it gets my vote.

The Americans butcher the voice acting to a point where I cannot play US versions of some games. Because of localization, scenes get cut or dialouge gets completely hacked and changed losing a lot of the character and the tone and method of conveyance of a certain idea.

Voice actors also use wrong voice tones. This results in, for example, someone who is supposed to be suave and rough guy sounding like a complete moron with a 30 word vocabulary.

I prefer to go back to text in these cases. My favorite RPG of all time is Final Fantasy VI - the last all text and non-3D CGI Final Fantasy game on a major console.

The English voice acting has really taken a nose dive. Its pretty horrible. It looks like there are some rough edges they need to fix on the graphics, too, but even at this phase in development the detail they pay to the models are incredible. The new hi-res models have more realistic body shapes as well as much better skin tones.

I see a lot of improvements over the last one. For one, there is a quick menu for you to change your equipment rather than having to go to a seperate screen and select your equipment taking away gameplay.

I also see a GIANT increase in the amount of blood being spilt here. It kind of seems a bit too much. I do enjoy the fact that cuts go beyond just decapitation but also dismemberment of varying from bodies being cut in half to limbs being lopped off.

I wouldn't be too hasty to buy that 360, though. If TECMO put out Ninja Gaiden Sigma for the PlayStation 3, don't be surprised if Ninja Gaiden II gets ported to the PlayStation 3.

A desktop system, hands down, is the more superior system in every aspect. Even if you have a desktop and and laptop with same processor speeds, with today's technological "advances", the processors in laptops will not work as well as their counterparts in the desktop devices. The last couple of generations of laptop processors are specifically designed to sacrifice processing power in favor of energy efficiency so you will find that the laptop processors will not operate at 100% spec.

As for photoshopping on the desktop versus the laptop, again, the desktop wins hands down. Mobo construction leads to better traces and better responses as well as accuracy and stability of signal flow distributed on the board. Chances of having slightly defective boards on a desktop versus a laptop are much less. The problem is the process of compacting traces and their density on such small boards. This transalates to better responses from whatever devices you plug into a desktop versus a laptop.

The only advantage a laptop has is portability and size.

I am currently running Vista 64 Ultimate Edition and after a series of updates it seems like a very stable system, more so than XP.

If you want to take full advantage of your processor you will have to find applications that are multi-threaded. Development of such applications are rare because most applications are not so memory intensive. You should start seeing major development over the next couple of years with the release of multi-core processors.

If you are using Vista-64 to rip media and do complex algorithmic and data conversion such as high compression you will see a "slight" gain right now. Vista SP1 will make performance more optimal (alot of changes) but keep in mind that it will not be released until Q1 of next year.

As fizzboy said, driver support is kind of lacking for 64-bit. However, it doesn't just apply to Vista 64 but 32 bit as well. One of the most well known issues is the fact that SLI causes video driver crashes. Do not expect that to be fixed anytime soon. However, the drivers for 64-bit 8000 series Nvidia card are not bad at all if you are not in SLI mode. I see major frame jumps but my setup may be overkill allowing such performances.

As for program compatability, prepare to run into alot of issues. Most of the applications I did use on XP x86 were no longer applicable to Vista x64. Some companies like Checkpoint (Zone Alarm) do not have any intention to support x64 anytime soon. However, you will find some very viable replacements that are just as good if not better if you put in a little effort.

For your setup, you may want to increase the amount of RAM you have in there so it does not become the bottleneck in your system. Generally, I find laptop computers much weaker performers and should be used mostly for light work so I would not recommend installing a 64-bit OS on your laptop. Having tested a lot of laptops (I worked as a driver developer), you will find that they sacrifice alot of performance for battery life and its controlled at the machine level such as the processor.

___________________________ x2 8800 eVGA Nvidia GTX x2 750GB SATA HDD AMD Athalon 64 FX-62 Dual Core Processor 4096 MB Corsair DDR Ram

It technically violates the user agreement. I understand that it does take away from the game play and it does cause havoc to the in-game economy. These are the reasons why I do not buy in-game currency. And yes, there are better things in real life that you can do with that money.

However, I also understand that to get that kind of money requires a lot of time and devotion to the game. One would literally have to play all day and nite for an entire year to earn that kind of in-game money. That time also has value - such as time you can spend with friends, doing homework, concentrating on work, etc. Casual gamers or gamers that do not have much free time may have a difficult time experiencing more of the game because they are turned off by the copious amount of time they have to spend in the game world to be a "decent" player which is unfortunately mostly dictated by the equipment you use on your chara.

The question is "how much is your free time worth?" You have to measure the utility you can get out of that time and measure it against the in-game currency and real life money you have to pay for it. If your utility for that free time outweighs the cost, then why not buy it? I do not condone buying in-game currency but I can understand why some players do.

Stop picking on Sephiroth. If you read his reply to me you would have noticed that he was wondering in the context of the Final Fantasy Universe why weaker characters could not jump around like Cloud, not why people in reality cannot do it. It is a valid question to ask.

I always had problems loading Windows Vista onto Lenovo systems for driver testing.

This is going to be released but at 1000+ USD without the originally planned planned color lcd lights. To cut cost of production and make this more affordable to consumers they switched to black and white lcd. The high selling point of this keyboard is that the image overlay is completely customizeable for every application and I imagine that you can also download custom-made overlays from other people that have created them. There was originally a set of hot keys for applications you could link to but those were slashed to cut production costs.