the_d3v

It's plain business. MadCatz didn't make as much money on the alternate top panel layouts for the OG TE. Doing it for the new one would require more investment now due to the accessorites (LED board, acrylic, etc.)

Because there's not enough demand to justify having to invest in new tooling for a new layout (in other words, most people won't just not buy it because it's not Noir/Astro and most people who want those will likely just customize). That, and changing the layout will make the stick incompatible with some of the accessories built for the TE2, such as LED boards, both MadCatz' own and 3rd party ones such as Paradise Arcade's LVT3 which are specifically designed to fit into the TE2. I also disagree on the art bit. The Xrd TE 2 is one of the classiest looking sticks I've seen.

Nah dawg. Just ask around SRK and they'll tell you the same thing I did. The lesson to learn from this is that people will like different incarnations/versions of a game/franchise (even folks are divided between 98 and 2k2, not to mention the UM versions of both). However, the ones that do thrive tend to have players that support the franchise no matter what. Either by actually playing the latest incarnation or by supporting the scene in the background (organizing tournaments, etc.).

Not even close since you picked yet another divisive entry into the series. Especially with how the US scene preferred the much more fundamentally based Alpha 2 while Japan picked the much more rushdown, combo and execution heavy Alpha 3. A better choice would be Super Turbo. But even then, you've got a split between those who like ST and those who think that Hyper Fighting was a purer SFII.

Well, at the very least Xrd is closer to how GG plays than Marvel 3 is to its predecessors (going from a reset focused game with relatively short combos in 2 to a TOD fest with long ass combos in 3). That said, the nice thing that happened with 3 is that, despite people's reservations about it, most of the players either transitioned and continued to play (JWong, Clockwork, FChamp, Viscant, etc.) while others who didn't such as Yipes (who only started playing later on) worked to help build the community.

Is Machaboo still not getting any games in because people refuse to play him? Posting is fine, just don't drink and drive or do anything that'll get you killed. You're still my main source of gameplay impressions for SRK's front page (or the thread there) until we get it outside of Japan.

More like, no eSports money in Xrd, at least not until the west picks it up.

The speculation comes from the fact that A) he has a fleshed out model (not something cheap to make) and B) in the TGS trailer, his portrait was given the same treatment as that of the playable characters. That, and there's the fact that Arc hasn't really shied away from DLC characters.

As previously stated, I highly disagree. I find the clean, abstract design, without any character art that instead plays with the theme of the game and wraps it around the arcade stick parts to be so much classier. My only complaint would be that they didn't add a gear design around the buttons, but then again, the smaller space in between due to the larger holes in the acrylic cover might have forestalled that.

I wish that one didn't look like it was just patched together using whatever parts Sanwa had on hand. The stick looks almost like something that small builders like MAS or AIAB used to do back in the day (no offense to MAS). Heck, modern custom builds actually look better than it.

It's a bit late (wrote this last week, but Ian only ran it now), but our short article on the Xrd TE2 is now up. http://shoryuken.com/2014/09/25/mad-catz-prototype-guilty-gear-xrd-sign-arcade-fightstick-tournament-edition-2-exhibited-at-tokyo-game-show-2014/ Nothing new, just the shots that Mark showed off at TGS. That said, I really like the design of this. Sometimes, just going with an abstract design with no characters looks so much classier.

The FC Pro is fine until the mechanism that controls the angle of the D-Pad breaks and ruins it. The non-Pro version is so much more sturdier, sadly, they don't make those anymore.

They probably didn't want to have to animate it. Even if they did use cloth physics, that's still a bit of extra work and they'd still have to manually animate it unfurling.

But does she at least do it with any of the other female characters?

I was assuming that you were talking about the supposed PS3 only lag compared to the 360, which is the myth I was referring too. Yes, every system has some inherent processing time which leads to some delay, but for the longest time, everyone believed that the PS3 added an extra frame when in fact, it was just the software's fault, something which the folks over at SRK TT worked hard to disprove. In any case, considering that Arc most likely knew the target home consoles for the game, and the fact that the deals with Sony were most likely things that didn't happen overnight (I assume they were in talks for some time), it's most likely that they had factored this in the game's development. I'm more worried about slowdown which is something that they have less control over, especially once players start filling the screen and doing all sorts of stuff. Cross platform, this is most likely going to result in the PS4 version having to add some delay, or slowing down to match the PS3 version (unless they've actually moved with the times and are using GGPO style code, where they might be able to cover that with a rollback).