JsARCLIGHT

That is a known side effect of this kind of tactic...

I think that the ire that Agent one has for this "commercial" is what is intended... I think they put this "warning" in front of a movie you have paid good money to see for a reason: that reason is they want you, the man who just paid $8 to see this movie to get angry that people are "stealing" this same movie for free. The logic is that you, the upright and just person who pays to see the movie, will be filled with righteous indignation and leave the theater all flustered and write your congressman to get new laws about piracy and bootlegging... which you will then vote to pass when they come on the ballot. What they are doing with these commericals in front of movies in the theater is working if you ask me, look at how pissed my boy AO got. In a way they are almost saying "go out and eliminate these crooks and you can watch your happily paid for movie in peace". Because remember, in america they need you the consumer/voter to get peeved at the issue and take action before any progress can be made. After all, that is how 99.9% of legislation passes in this country of ours... the ragged unwashed masses get pissed/scared/bothered/just want to do something and it happenes. Laws go though congress willy-nilly like crap through a goose in those situations.

OK, I need to step in here and ask some questions... just what is the price of the (hotly debated) Q-Rau toy in Japan the market of origin? My guess is it is about $20 to $30 less than it is for us importing it. At least that is the norm for the 1/48 valks... everyone always says they are $99 in Japan but they are $139+ imported in the states and elsewhere. Plus the Yen is climbing against the dollar and forcing those prices up even higher lately. Perhaps we should be complaining about the import costs and not the original item costs? I bet if we all lived in the market of origin like some folks we might not be having this debate. I remember a lot of people who live in around the market of origin like Sithlord (please don't be angry with me for name dropping) who buy two and three of all the toys released but he is just going down to the local shop and paying in market prices... and technically saving about $20 to $30 a toy plus shipping that we all have to pay. Would some folks here be complaining about prices if they lived in the market of origin and saved all that money?... or would the "savings" also be a point of contention as they never paid a premium import price for something before?

I myself always chalked up the whole "Hikaru's first gun fight" encounter as a plot device... they needed to introduce the giants, explain the reason for the battroids and freak out Hikaru in one scene... so he just jiffy pops a battle pod, in the process emptying his magazine and successfully missing all the vitals of the pod pilot. The sheer odds against that are too low to even think about... think about it. If I was standing in front of you and you let off with a M60 in a wild burst eventually one of those rounds is going through my chest or my head. For Hikaru to empty an entire magazine at close range on a large target and not hit a vital part is impossible... well not impossible just infinately improbable. Hence: plot device. Focker pumping a single short burst into the guy's back, killing him instantly is just part of that plot device. This also speaks to the selective penetration capabilities of the GU-11 ammo. If that ammo was made to penetrate hard armor it would have gone through the back plate, through that poor zentradi's chest, out the front of this armor and into Hikaru and Minmay in the trainer. After all, the zentradi have armored suits on inside their armored pods... if the rounds are not powerful enough to go through both sides of their body armor then how can they hope to penetrate the pod armor and the body armor to kill the pilot? And another thing to think about, just what the heck is it in the "cockpit" area of those Regults that is so freaking explosive? Time and again you see a solid hit right into the pilot seat of a pod and it blows into pieces. Are zentradi pilots sitting on a case of plastique or something? Is that their idea of an escape mechanism? When your pod is damaged a small explosion will propell you through the back of the pod and out into space.

Expense is all in what your situation is... some people work at WalMart, make about $3 an hour after taxes, have to support a family, pay bills and still somehow afford to enjoy life every now and then. While in college I worked a ton of low paying, long hour jobs that usually left me with like $20 in my pocket at the end of the week after all the bills were paid. I remember having the loot to go to comic cons back then but not buy anything. I also remember wanting things that cost $30 to $40 and not being able to buy them. It sucked, It really sucked. There were tons and tons of things I wanted and could not afford. But I had to take a few steps back and think about things. I was being greedy and demanding instant gratification... I was still a kid really in those days and had no concept of money, time and most of all value. I discovered something that a lot of people never do... the best things in life come to those who wait. I was lucky enough to have come from a good family, have been born with some talents, have gone to college and got a degree or two and have somehow managed to land great job after great job and have worked my way to were I am now... a business owner. $60 is barely noticed by me lately... heck I dropped that on dinner last night for myself and my fiancee. But still the memories of barely being able to afford gas for my car (something a lot of Californians are feeling right now, I feel for you guys) are still deep in my mind. My advice: remember your priorities first like health, food, your children and your responsabilities. Toys can come later when you have financial room to breathe... after all they are a hobby and not a requirement. If someone told me I had to give up toys tomorrow I think I could do it cold turkey just fine as they are not what really matters in the world. If someone told me I had to give up my fiancee, family or friends that would be another matter entirely... and that puts a $60 toy in perspective for me.

VEFFIDIAS --- Veffidias is a 100% Zentraidi drummer of Fire Bomber. She is inordinately tall and seldom speaks, preferring to drum. Veffidias never stops tapping out a rhythm on whatever surface available. She shares a Valkyrie with Ray as a part of Sound Force. Veffidas rarely talks but when she does she is wise as well as informative. I have no clue how I ended up with this...

You know, the talk of the ten pound jam factory (the DEP) has me thinking... has any game accurately modelled the "x factor" of firearms use? You know, jams... misfeeds... stovepipes... stopages... misfires... if they incorporated those actual issues into a game players would probably be bitching that the game "cheats". True story: while at thunder ranch a few years back with a few cop friends of mine we took the assault course. They had their duty weapons (MP5s and M4s) and I stupidly took one of the rental guns they had on hand, a Colt 639. Let's just say that that rental gun had gone through the course a few times before I got ahold of it that day and was in dire need of a cleaning. I also made the rookie misake of loading 20 rounds into the 20 round magazines... first turn on the main street and bap bap plink the thing stovepipes on me. Had to clear the round. It ran ok for the rest of the mag but then we came into the part (if anyone has been there) when you enter the building and climb through the two stories shooting at the popups on the other side of the street. I had to do a mag change and once again bapbabpabpabpabpa plink! S#IT! If that had been actual combat I would have been a sitting duck... twice.

Mitchell! Mitchell! Keep your eeeeeeyyeeeeee on the sammich!

Can someone tell me why they keep putting the Desert Eagle in games (and movies and books and shows and...)? The thing is useless as a combat handgun. As for the weapons they don't list, my guess would be they are on the way or in the works. Then again when you think about it most guns today are all just clones of each other that do the same thing in a slightly different way. For instance: M16 family - 5.56mm 30 round magazine SIG 220/221 family - 5.56mm 30 round magazine Steyr AUG family - 5.56mm 30 round magazine H&K G36 family - 5.56mm 30 round magazine L85 family - 5.56mm 30 round magazine All those guns use the same caliber ammo with the same magazine capacity... ergo you really have just one weapon profile with a ton of skins. Same for the 9mm pistols, .45 pistols and so on and so forth. So unless the game makers do something really dumb and nerf the weapons so the "cooler" ones do more damage than the others it will most likely end up just like the real world... were you are comparing guns in one caliber and you go with the one that "feels right" to you.

They are actually from a very popular book. I'm someone trying to add some sanity to this situation when others are just fanning flames and trying to start up fights. Listen to Dangard, he knows best.

A complaint kept to yourself is polite, but resolves nothing. A complaint presented with facts and solutions is insight and can solve problems. A complaint presented with only facts is observation, which may be shared by others who have solutions to the problem. A complaint presented alone is opinion and may be ignored by others. A complaint presented with hostility is impolite and may generate a like response with no resolution. A complaint presented with hostility and no fact or solution is bitching and always generates a like response and never a solution. A complaint presented just to be complaining about something is just assinine and should have been seen as such by the person complaining before they even opened their mouth. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "Whatever is begun in anger ends in shame." "If you would persuade, you must appeal to interest rather than intellect." "He that blows the coals in quarrels that he has nothing to do with, has no right to complain if the sparks fly in his face." "Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain and most fools do." --(all above quotes) Ben Franklin

Does anyone else find it ironic that a game with a german name, a lot of german weapons, with a lot of german on the website and a very germanic/european terrain look to it will most likely be banned in germany for being too violent?

Do you mean "License to Kill"? For Your Eyes Only was a Rodger Moore movie. Or are you saying that it was a crap Rodger Moore movie? I myself rather liked it, it was more down to earth than Moonraker at least. I still think if they are going to keep making Bond movies into eternity they might as well just experiment with a darker, moodier and less goof-ball Bond. They should extend that to the gadgets as well... how many grappling hooks and laser watches can you see before you just want something down to earth like a gun in an umbrella or something.

Here is my shpiel: The problem with plated plastic parts is in how they are made. They "plate" the standard plastic parts while they are on a parts tree of some sort and then they remove them from the tree and attach them to the toy. This process results in the plating compound going over things like flash on the model parts and on the stems that hold the parts to the mold trees. When the parts are taken off the trees to assemble the toy they leave "tree holes" in the plating that look ugly as they appear as a "hole" or pitt in the plating. Then to top it all off you can't cut of the flashing that remains on the part as it would cause the same gash in the plating finish. This has been an issue with plated plastic parts since day one... they all have these issues and in my personal opinion they come off as cheap looking. On the flip side of the coin for things like the shocks (the parts on prime that in my book look the worst due to the plated plastic parts) they could have just used some type of fleck plastic that looked like steel. I have a ton of 1/18 scale cars made by various makers that employ that tactic on the engine parts so they don't give off that "cheap plated plastic" look. Some of the more expensive 1/18 scale car models I have like my Dan Gurney Cobra Daytona use painted parts and post-tree "low gloss" plating that looks very, very good on the final car. The paint is straight out for the shocks but for things like the nubby smoke stacks it would have done wonders. Now that I think about it, here is a comparisson on the american prime: the truck's grille is all plated plastic... it has no depth to it and it looks like cheap plastic. But the robot mode's grille has painted accent marks that really bring out some depth in the part and make it look soooo much better. If they had applied the same tactic to a slight degree on all the plated parts they could have made them look worlds better and much less "cheap" looking in my book. After all, they already gave most of his upper body a hit with the stuff why not carry it over to the other plated parts? Still you have to admit that plated plastic used on toys looks nothing like real chrome, it looks like cheap plated plastic. If they could only find out what material that is they use on real cars for making the name badges that look like real metal they could solve the problem in one stroke... but that junk is most likely waaay too expensive.

A common mistake is that people confuse a "machine gun" with a "MBR" (main battle rifle). Most MBRs are not really meant to be fired off all in one burst like a madman and no army in the world teaches their troops to do that unless they are using it in some sort of suppression or break contact action. True "machine guns" like a Squad Assault Weapon or an M60 are suppress and manuver weapons. They are not meant to be accurate, just to keep the enemy's head down while the troops with the MBRs manuver in for a kill shot. A real machine gun has a "broad side of a barn" hit pattern. If that journalist had fired in short controlled bursts like they slam into every recruit at basic he could have diced his target easily... then again he was most likely going for the shot he got for some reason or another, you know journalists. BACK ON TOPIC NOW... what sort of rounds do you think the GU-11 has? I've never seen a real "official" statement on the ammo itself other than "55mm, bullet, big". Something akin to depleated Uranium for armor busting capability? Something along the lines of concussive or fragmenting to dice the pilots inside the zentradi war machines? After all, they knew they would be fighting giants so why not make your bigass ammo like the small "jacket breaker" bullets that work so well on fleshy targets encased in metal armor?

A cheap way to pad their gun lineup would be to add a lot of sub-classes of the same weapons, like letting the players choose a G17, G18, G19, G20, etc. etc. all the way through the whole Glock catalogue. Heck most of the guns use the same frames and the only difference is the barrel and magazine (which in the game just translates to different nerfing properties). I myself would like to see the game take their SWS thing one step further and do like Global Operations and Counterstrike did and make the players "buy" their weapons with money based on their in game skills and kills. But unlike the previous two the game should allow people to sell their guns to other players in an "off stage" area like a bazzar. You could add a whole new level of play to the game with tons and tons of guns and people buying and selling them. Let the players have their "carry guns" and their own special "gun locker" too keep all their backups or extras, so if they get whacked on the game grid they have some guns to use if they have no cash on hand to buy anything. Heck, that system would even promote "looting" of dead soldiers to sell their guns on the market in the game.

For the record I loathe the Yamato 1/48 DYRL hands... I am actually in the process of swapping them all out with top notch recasts of the TV hands for my units in battroid mode. Those Yamato hands have the same issue as my prime hands, put a gun in there and a little while later *clunk* it falls out onto the shelf. I myself find all poseable hands to be quite dumb, there is no need to have articulated fingers when they are perminantly bent in a gun holding fashion. If prime came with neat beefy solid mitts like the new Yamato TV hands I would have nothing to complain about... plus nice rounded beef mitts would be more fitting to the cartoon. Yamatos lack two things this toy has: cheap pearlescent plastic parts and cheap plated plastic with flashing all over it. Nothing says "cheap toy" in my book like mottled color plastic and plated parts like you would find in a car model... it's just tacky and it looks bad on the toy. Perhaps only the american toy has this issue I don't know. My "not getting it" is along the lines of blind love for the toy. Not being a transfan my views of the optimus toy are through the eyes of a skeptic and not a diehard. I'm looking at it like a tree hugger looks at a muscle car... I see the use of the thing and the love that people have for it but it's true luster is lost on me. As for posability the thing is just not as posable as it seems. Those SOC EVA toys, those things are posable... the Perfect Grade Gundam RX-78, that thing is posable... the 20th prime, not so posable. The only reason I brought it up was because all the reviews and raves I heard and read about the toy were that it was sooooo posable. I later found out that most of those reviewers meant "it is so posable compared to the original" or "it is so posable compared to a barbie doll". I admit that the toy has some joints on it, it's just that those joints don't translate well to high posability... just like yamato 1/48s. Every time I try to pose it it falls over (because the legs cannot support the thing, poor foot design. Not so much the foot on second thought but the ankle... it does not support a wide enough arc of movement to keep the foot flat on the ground) or it just can't reach the pose I want. My Yammies have the exact same problems. That is why I leave them in the display case and don't touch them much as they are more for looks than posing. If I were as big a transfan as I am a VF-1 fan I would do the same thing. My 12" soldiers on the other hand can do everything from the macarena to yoga... I just need to get it through my thick skull that non-human transforming robot toys with incorrect proportions can never match the posability of a Dragon or BBI soldier doll and I should stop comparing the two. Things like the perfect grade gundam on the other hand spoil me into thinking they can. The simple addition of the joint structure of the PG Gundam to this prime toy (like they did with the prime knee, the only joint on the thing that works "right") would have made me like it a lot more... that and the whole cheap plastic thing. I just don't like this prime toy, my personal opinion. I'm thinking of selling it if someone offers me a good enough price for it (as I don't like flushing $65 down the drain) or I might just do as others have suggested and box it up (with tape as that box is in shambles) and take it back.

It sounds very ambitious... I will wait for more info to surface. I did peek at the current gun selection and it appears that they are including a lot of next-gen and prototype weapons into the mix... but guns do not a game make, I expect this may be the one game that just might get me back into online gaming. Then again it may blow small farm animals like most of the games I look forward to...

I'm a realist. Anything with real cloth clothing is a doll... if you have an issue with that you need therapy.

The Russians are known for making weapons with very loose tollerances made out of cheap materials that work like a japanese businessman. They have actually had several military weapons go "not right" out of the factory. Most notable are a lot of the guns made before WWII like the SVT1938. To it's credit the early issues with the M16 were a result of terrible government management of it's development and deployment (cough cough... McNamera... cough cough) but Eugine Stoner's design is just as solid as Mikhail Kalashnakov's. Now back to your regularly scheduled topic...

I should probably explain that the other toy line(s) I collect besides Macross are 12" Army Dolls (Joes, Dragon, BBI, etc.)... so I am very, very spoiled when it comes to my expectations of "poseability". If a toy cannot hit certain poses like parade formation, present arms and all manner of neat commando "kick in the door", "pull the guy out of the spiderhole" and "boot to the head" poses I get all bent out of shape... I've learned to deal with my issues reguarding the Yammies but I must meditate more on the Optimus thing. Naaahhh... remember that time I thought I could launch a monkey into space and you said my math was wrong? We fought like dogs over that... Well guess what?... my basement still smells like burning monkey.

I wholeheartedly admit that "I don't get it" and all my gripes are mainly complaints of a non believer. People know I grant leeway to things I like. Anyone wanna buy a Hasbro Prime? Never been fired and only dropped once.

I was expecting a highly posable high quality robot toy and instead I got a poorly made brick. I should state once again that I am not a transformers fan, never liked them and never will. I bought the toy based on the impression that it would be unlike the other unposable brick transformers. Plus all the hype and talk surrounding it got my interest up more than any other transformers toy. I'm not trying to say I have unrealistic expectations of toys but other transforming toys I own like my yamato 1/48s at least have posable arms that can hit poses you you want like two arm weapon carry. Here is the short list of why I'm not liking this toy: The toy's plastic quality in places is sub par IMHO compared to the workmanship that went into other parts. The plated plastic pieces like the smoke stacks, the shock parts and others look like they came off of a revell camaro model kit parts tree complete with flash still on some parts. The plastic used for the grey parts, most noticable in the upper legs, looks pearescent and cheap compared to some of the other plastic parts. Why in the world did they color the button for the light up matrix blue? It should have been red so it would blend in with the cab. The hand units on my toy are very loose and the fingers let go far too easily. I stared at one of the hands for a while and found that it is once again the fault of the plastic. It would appear the holes for the roll pin that goes through the fingers is just a wee bit too large or it has worn down to the point that the fingers flip freely on it. This toy was NIB so I can only assume this is some sort of factory glitch. The posibility... or more precisely the lack thereof. This thing is one giant brick. I have had it for a few days now and tried to pose it in various action poses only to have the poorly positioned ratcheting joints in the legs not allow any leg pose but two: standing straight up and a very strange looking one leg sort of forward pose. The arms are just as bad... more accurately the shoulders and elbow designs are bad. In order to move the arms in a way other than old school star wars guy spinning you have to pull the arm out which makes this huge extention in the shoulder that is wobbly and looks terrible. And even in this extended position the shoulder is still not very posable. The elbows are a victim of thier little shock system and they will not bend more than 45 degrees up or down. Couple this with the poor shoulder and you get the T-Rex effect: the arms are almost immoble and any pose requiring both hands on the weapon or another held item looks clunky and unnatural. It seems to me they spent so much time on the gimmick parts like the shocks and the matrix in the chest that they ignored a few important things in my book. If they were making this toy to resemble the old school anime Prime then why didn't the wheels on the legs fold up? Why are all these shocks on the toy that are never seen in the show? Seems to me if they had not gone for all the gimmicks the toy could have had better posability and looks in both modes. Once again I am not a transformers fan so I'm looking at this thing from a position of what kind of toy it is to me... and to me it is a large, nice looking, gimmick riddled unposable brick. I'd sell it if the package it came in was not totally mangled getting it out and if it's resale value had not totally tanked after taking it out.

Laser or Beam based weapons may also just be too darn fragile to be used as a main battle rifle by a huge robot. Think of how they use the GU-11 in Macross TV... they use it like a foot soldier would his rifle. They hit things with it, they toss it around a lot... heck they even light enormous zentran cigarettes with them. The lasers on the head of a valk are on there along with all the sensative cameras and other fragile equipment so perhaps they are not at risk as much as they would be on a rifle. Let's also not forget that the rifle is a standalone entity... in order for it to be a laser or beam weapon you would have to connect it to the valk's power supply somehow. The only logic most anime has for this to work is that the hands have some sort of power coupling to transfer energy from the unit's reactor to the beam weapon... meaning every shot you take is effecting the power drain on your fighter. Make the beam too weak and you might as well be throwing rocks, make it too strong and your headlights dim every time you take a shot. Conventional powder ammunition has always been very reliable, strong and cheap to produce thus it will always be around in some capacity. As for the magazines inside the gunpods I would assume they are not spring driven like human sized small arms. Almost every large scale mechanical automatic weapon is motor drive ammo feeding, the ammo is not under any "spring pressure" it is pulled along by a motor system that basically drags the belt of ammo through the weapon. Miniguns and Vulcan cannons (like what the GU-11 is designed after) would not use loose ammo housed in spring magazines but rather a motorized belt fed system. When it comes to belt ammo as long as it does not bind or kink at a weird angle you can snake that stuff all over like a serpentine belt on a car engine.

That is why I like him. Bond will never be "Bond" again in the way that Connery made the character and each actor has altered the role to accomodate their strengths, along with script and plot changes to alter the feel of the movie series. The first few Bond movies were far fetched mind you but there were a few (like From Russia with Love, OHMSS and For Your Eyes Only) that actually had some basis in reality and felt like cold war spy flicks... whereas Moonraker and most of the new ones reek of hollywood stunt scripting and prop heavy rediculous action sequence driven drivel. A cold, gritty Bond might turn the license in a new direction that appeals to a more mature non teenage idiot audience unlike the last few movies. Where is Agent One when I'm using his arguments?