In The Summer Heat...
As the start of summer draws near, countless gamers are no doubt looking forward to summer holidays... This means endless nights of staying up late, ample time for mischief, and plenty extra time to play video games - While the rest of us work like suckers...
This month's mailbag features some cool comments from the minds of the site visitors, along with some thoughts from an ill-mannered moron (see if you can't pick it out). If you've got something that you'd like to see posted on Detstar during the summer months, go ahead and share your thoughts.

Send your questions, comments, and suggestions to: DetErest@detstar.com

Hello, first off, I'd like to say I love your site. I've been through the Zelda WindWaker section, and my question has to do with that website... What happened? I mean, before, it was amazing the amount of information that was on there. And above all else, the Island Info page was awesome! But now, when I go there, over half the site is gone. The original site no longer exists, and most of the former info is gone.

I'd just like to know why the decision was reached to change the site in such a drastic way. Perhaps you were looking for a way to alleviate some of the cost of running Detstar and the WindWaker page had the lowest statistics? I'd just like to know.

It's a very good question, and I completely understand your concerns. As you have guessed, it was a cost issue... But it's not like I decided to shut down half the Zelda site - The hosting company elected to block the database where the info Zelda was stored because of heavy strains on their server, which resulted in a huge loss of content for the Zelda website.

Siberian Guard did an amazing job of putting together a detailed guide to all the islands of Wind Waker... Now that guide is unavailable because of the database being shut down. Aside from manually extracting every single piece of data from the database and rebuilding them into static pages (which is an incredibly tedious and time consuming procedure), the only option would be to purchase a heavier hosting plan... But with costs already beyond what I was willing to pay, I simply can't afford to arrange a new hosting setup for the Zelda database.

Hello. First I am pleased to say that your Goldeneye 007 site is the best one that I have ever seen. But I do have a couple of questions...

Why don't those guys from Free Radical, (who made the TimeSplitters games), make a new Bond game? I guess they are occupied with that series, but they keep the same health meter, and they replicated the train level in the newest game, I think they should make a new Bond game, and I think that they would make it perfect. What do you think?

Any veteran Goldeneye player is sure to get a familiar feel by playing TimeSplitters. So many things were inspired by this classic, and Goldeneye was without a doubt the game that revolutionized the first person shooter genre.

Free Radical creating a Bond game would no doubt be an awesome experience... But it's a little bit more complicated than that... The team members who worked on Goldeneye did so while at Rareware, after Rareware purchased the license to base a game on the Goldeneye 007 movie.

Electronic Arts has since purchased the Bond license, which means that only they can produce James Bond games... Electronic Arts served as the publisher for Free Radical's TimeSplitters Future Perfect though... But I'm not sure if they're legally permitted to grant permission to Free Radical to produce a game that will be published by Electronic Arts... In all this confusion, only one thing is for sure: The law prevents many cool things from happening.

In addition to any legal rights associated with this situation, Free Radical could easily just have no interest in doing James Bond. There's a lot of pride to be taken when working with your own characters and storyline, with a sense of total creative freedom to accomplish whatever is desired - Without having to stick to constraints and realities that are solidified in the Bond universe.

Great job on Dexter! I saw the newest episode of Dexter Comics (episode 71). I can't begin to tell you how much I wanted to blast away at the stoplights myself. Keep up the good work.

The thought of shooting down a worthless traffic light has crossed my mind more than a dozen times in real life... And when I was putting together the first segment of the gang's road trip, my evil thoughts towards traffic lights came to the surface, and I realized it would fit perfectly as a Comics episode. Glad to hear that you got a kick out of it.

The Members Section is good, but personally I'd like to see more Super Smash Bros Melee shots but you know of course that's just me :). I like the design tho, more professional looking then the original.

There's a cleaner, simpler format to the Members Area... It's also white (as opposed to black), which is something that I've never done in the past. At first, I wasn't sure what you meant by "more professional"... But I suppose it does look that way, especially when compared to the energetic layout of Detstar home... This "more professional" style was much easier to make. I suppose the goal was to make it look a bit different than the standard homepage that regular visitors are used to.

And due to the incredibly popularity of SSBM, plenty of new Melee shots and features have since been added to the Members Section.

I would like to see someplace on the site where players can submit their high scores and have them posted on the net so that they can compete against other players and try to beat their scores. Think about it man, it would be awesome!

It's a lot of fun to compete for high scores among the best players in the world... Unfortunately, most players don't have access to digital photo/video equipment to provide proof of their accomplishments... And judging by the bogus e-mails I receive about characters and levels that simply cannot be unlocked, it's no doubt that people would also submit fake scores without proof.

An interesting tidbit is that a system like this was actually created for Perfect Dark a few years back... The system featured every mission and agent difficulty... Sadly, this competition was never actually opened, due to the reasons stated above. As with many things, a few dishonest people always ruin it for everyone else.