With DBZ Season Five having just been released, I feel the need to defend the highly criticized (but largely successful) remastered box sets of one of the world's most popular television series.

I'm a huge Dragonball/Dragonball Z fan, and I've been collecting the DVD Box Sets of the remastered Japanese masters of Z since February of last year when Season 1 was released. I also have to say: I'm not disappointed in the slightest.

There's been a lot of negative criticism towards the new remastered film, as it crops the series in widescreen rather than the original full screen format, losing a fair bit of footage from the top and bottom of each frame, and adding only a little bit on the left and right. There've also been complaints about the appearance of some of the colours and black lines.

First off, I just want to say that the many complaints you may have been hearing are largely overblown. Yes, there's the occasional time where something is more cut off than you might like, but overall the widescreen format works, and it gives the show's appearance a slightly more cinematic look, even if it's no more effective than the show's original full screen format. The "broken black lines" you may have heard of are for the most part from people who are over analyzing the footage and just didn't notice them years ago on TV (I say for the most part, because you may notice parts, say after an explosion, where black lines appear more broken than they should be when things vibrate vigorously on screen). The colours are more vibrant and clear than they were on TV, and work very well with the crisp clear picture they're presented in.

Actually, that's easily the best thing the DVD box sets have going for them; in these incredibly crisp remastered slides, DBZ has never looked so clean.
And though you might be disappointed if you're looking for an exact replica of the show you watched only years ago, if you're a DBZ collector, want to see DBZ in a cool new way, or just plain want DBZ in HD and on your big screen in nice new box sets, these are for you. The entire show is intact, visually crisp, plus you get all the original Japanese audio, the North American dialogue with it's Faulconer music, AND the North American music with the Japanese soundtrack. It's a good package for a decent price, and let's be honest: you just can't go wrong with DBZ.

Here's hoping for a remastering of Dragonball sometime soon!

It wasn't too long ago that Gamespot switched over to a more simplistic 0.5 rating scale for both reviews. Now I know it's much simpler and that game reviews are only meant to give the reader a very basic idea of how the reviewer feels, but I hate this system. Not so much for the reviews I read online, but for writing my own.

I've recently reviewed quite a bit of games on my GS account, and have enjoyed it like always, but I always feel extremely restricted when it comes to the points. I almost never feel a game deserves exactly a 9.0 or 8.5, and I'm often stuck between 2 numbers. You may find that the last few games (with one exception) that I've reviewed were mostly 9.0 or 9.5. However, if the points system was in its old ways, you'd find that most of those games would probably all have much different scores.

Metroid Prime 3 for example. I wanted to give it something more than a 9, but 9.5 seemed too high and I wasn't comfortable giving it that score.

Now I know this sounds a little stupid, and yeah, it kinda is. But what's wrong with the 0.1 scale, and what's good about a 0.5 scale? Why the change, in what ways was it necessary? I really hope it goes back to the old scale.

Tell me how you feel about it all, and how you feel when reviewing games at GS now.