April Showers Bring May Questions...

Perhaps the springtime rain is keeping people indoors, thus increasing the number of gaming discoveries and questions... This month's Mailbag features the traditional Q&A, and some neat little discoveries that people have sent in. I don't know if there's been a spike in F-Zero GX popularity, or whether a number of people have simply discovered the F-Zero GX pages on Detstar... GX mail has been relatively quiet, but I've been getting more of it lately... Not that it compares to the massive amount of Melee mail, however.
Keep sending mail, and I'll keep replying/posting as much as possible: DetErest@detstar.com

Dexter Comics is some of the funniest shit I've ever seen! episode 58 and episode 56 are my favs. marley is the man! i laughed my ass of when he whips out a lighter and sets his speeding ticket on fire (episode 65). keep up the good work!
peace out

Marley is quite a character... He was originally just a relaxed and mellow hippie, but now he'll occasionally take a stand if someone deliberately pisses him off... Like someone spitting on his burger at the restaurant, or a local cop who's handing out tickets.

It's definitely weird, that's for sure. It's hard to tell if it's a fish or a machine. It looks a bit mechanical to me, but it swims and moves its' mouth like a fish. It's not something that you would normally notice, and a background detail like this is quite well hidden.

In a past mailbag, someone mentioned that in Super Smash Bros Melee, Peach's dress would go up when performing a taunt on the yellow platforms in the classic Super Mario Bros. stage. Well, I tried with other characters and got some interesting affects. Simply do what you did as Peach,taunt as the platform falls. Zelda's dress creases inwards toward here feet. Gannondorf's cape flows down toward the ground instead of up like it would normally. Try it with other characters for yourself!

This stuff kinda defies gravity... Although it does make sense that Peach's dress flies upward, the same experiment with Zelda and Ganondorf produces some interesting findings...

In the Baby Park track of Mario Kart Double Dash there is train tracks underneath the track itself. The roller coaster has Yoshi's face and you can even see the roller coaster go below the track on those tracks under there.

I had noticed the strange grid portion of the track, but somehow or other hadn't bothered to take a deeper look into it. The Yoshi-faced roller coaster can indeed be seen speeding below, with another strange detail - The individual cars of the roller coaster aren't even joined together.

Can you take a picture the F-Zero GX machine select with all 41 racers?

Well I'll be damned... I had always figured that somewhere within Detstar's 500+ screenshots for F-Zero GX, that there would be a full selection screen somewhere... But a quick search through them turned up no such image. So here's a snapshot of all 41 of those shiny racing machines.

How did you feel when Microsoft got into the Video Game Industry, bought a bunch of video game developers/publishers and made their games exclusive to Xbox ie. PDZ?

I personally think it's greedy and selfish to conduct business in such a manner. There's nothing wrong with doing business to make money, because money makes the world go round - But it's possible to have too much of a good thing, and I believe that the huge Microsoft corporation has snagged more money than any honest person could ever dream of having. Microsoft made it big with the Windows operating system, and continues to make huge profits with their Office software. Had they decided to begin making games for the home computer, I wouldn't have noticed their greed as much...

But instead of sticking within the home computer field, they decided to jump into the video game console war to compete with Sony and Nintendo. With the profits of the gaming industry beginning to rival that of the film industry, Microsoft wanted a slice of the pie... But instead of taking a few moderate slices, they're trying to gobble up the whole thing. Microsoft already has a monopoly in the computer software field... This allows them shut down their competitors by crushing them or buying them out, which allows them to remain on top while keeping their prices incredibly high.

Anyone who has money can make money... But by having a virtually bottomless bank account, Microsoft can literally throw money at their problems until they reach a turnaround. The X-Box wasn't much of a success in its' first year, with Halo being the only desirable title amongst a field of crappy games. But after buying out other companies to have exclusive titles, Microsoft has managed to turn the X-Box into a money-maker.

And by having a virtually bottomless bank account to finance their quest, the Microsoft Empire will continue to grow until it's consumed every last soul on the planet... Perhaps that's an exaggeration. But they're clearly not going to slow down anytime soon, and will surely get into any market that will make them some cash. What's next to conquer? I shudder to think. Microsoft cars? Microsoft appliances and home electronics? Microsoft sex toys? When you're a multi-billion dollar corporation, all of the doors of the world are wide open.