Renato

As far as I can tell I totally aced the Gamlin mission and killed him instantly, but I only get an A. I actually think he is not supposed to die... Usually Glavil comes out and flies away. As for the VT-1C.... Well, I'll keep trying, but I'm not really sure if I'm doing it right. You just have to shoot down the nukes and get the whales to escape, right? She is a support character. I can use her in Freeplay but not campaign (the same with the VT-1C).

I find it strange that I can buy tune points for the VT-1C even though I have not unlocked the mecha. And I think I have an S rank on all the Dynamite missions, except the last one with the whales. Do you unlock the VT-1C when you S-rank that one? I still don't get what you're supposed to do. Someone explained recently but it was not clear. Something about "defecting whales"? Does not make much sense to me, sorry... can I have a clearer explanation, please? Also, In the M7 mission "Gamlin's Revolt: I Call Your Name" I only get an A, even though I beat the hell out of everything with no problem as I've got a souped-up Fire Valk. In fact, I even killed Gamlin in an instant. Am I supposed to give him a chance, so that Glavil comes out of his body? And I read that you get the Sound Boosters when you S-rank "Fleet of the Strongest Women: Totsugeki Love Heart". I can only get an A on that one, but I will keep trying. Lastly, how do you unlock Sivil? I thought I had unlocked her because I can select her in the Freeplay missions, but she's not in my roster in the campaign mode. I still have a lot of playing to do, because I am still unfinished in both DYRL and Mac Plus whilst going back and trying to S-rank everything on D7, M7 and M0, and have still not touched SDF TV. Can't wait to try the VF-9 and VF-2SS. Oh, I forgot to mention Frontier! Yeah, still halfway through that, too. So far M7 has been the most exciting, though, and DYRL is a real novelty. Damn hard, though.

I remember reading a few weeks ago that that Alien figure would cost over 10,000 yen... Yeah, Revo's sure ain't cheap no more...

Lemme guess... "Snow Falling on the Milky Way"? I remember a lot of Bridge Bunny Banter in that one. Awesome

Gubaba, thanks for undertaking and succeeding in this monumental task. I own the book but I've only read it once, maybe 10 years ago, and it's been in storage in London ever since. I may dig it out next time I fly ove (if I find it). Sorry I won't have time to read the translation at least until next month, but I look forward to it very much, and will post my comments as soon as I do. Thanks again.

Maybe so, but he did continue yelling at Basara -- this time *urging* him to sing (when Basara went off wandering and refusing to sing). "Nekki Basara! Aren't you supposed to sing?? Sing, damn you!"

Morry also had about as much personality as Shin.

On a different topic, issue 33 of Chronicle came with a production sheet for SDF Macross TV (which I understand is giving Gubaba headaches aplenty with its inconsistent staff credit list). There is a note on the inside front cover saying that this is meant to replace the sheet from way back in issue 13 or whatever, which was originally meant to be the first of many of short episode-by-episode summaries. This new sheet scraps those in favour of the credit list, character profiles and a brief outline of the show. Since we had a similar episode-by-episode synopsis sheet for Frontier, it's likely that will also be scrapped and replaced with a one-sheet-only summary. I guess they realised they bit off more than they can chew in attempting to do 6 or so sheets like that for each series (and they never even started on M7!), or that those sheets were pretty much pointless, or both.

They're still not originating in Japanese, though, so there is a lot of flexibility there that words like 新幹線/"Shinkansen", for example, do not have. If I was arguing for a romanization of that word into "Szhiinquanjehn", then you would have every reason to say I'm wrong, that's not how one should romanize it. The very attribute of being a fictional language liberates Zentradi spellings from all of the "rules" of Hepburn, etc. Having said that, the English speaking fanbase recognizes some terms more than others, e.g. everyone on MW knows what I mean when I type Queadluun Rau. Were I to type "Kedoran Ro" who apart from you, Gubaba, Vifam 7, and a handful of others would know what I'm referring to? But you seem to be championing the latter. Now, Britai and Vrlithwai (can't even be bothered to check it, sorry): Honestly, for convenience's sake, let us keep using the former, and most of us do. Now, Kamjin versus Quamzin? I think that's a 50-50 in terms of usage on these forums. Few people would write Kamujin, though. Basically, we should use the most easily recognizable spelling for us English speaking fans, and not worry about it too much. Agreed. Agreed. Proper English?? I thought we were just referring to the *names* of Zentradi weaponry/ships/stuff? Where would proper English fit into this? , Sorry, you lost me. You just said "that's how the terms would be written if Zentradi was romanized" so why the need to romanize "phonetically"? If you say so.... I think our logic tracks completely diverge somewhere up in those couple of lines of text there. If the Zentradi and their language really did exist and came to Earth, we English speakers would definitely not romanize their names according to the Japanese approximations of those terms. OK, think about it like this. Let us say you have a word like "transistor" in English. To an average Japanese person, he would write it as トランジスター in katakana. Now let us romanize that. Toranjisutaa. OK, now, we have lost a huge amount of the "real" pronunciation of the word because we have to use the *closest* sounding phonetics from the extremely limited Japanese palette of sounds. You know all this, of course. Now, walk up to an non-Japanese-speaking English-speaker and say "Toranjisutaa". They may look at you funny but they probably will not know you are talking about transistors. OK, SDF Macross is a show in Japanese, where the humans and aliens often speak Japanese and the voice actors are all Japanese. The sounds we HEAR -- even when the Zentran are speaking Zentradi -- are all from the 50-odd Japanese limited phonetic sounds. Don't you think it is too much of a coincidence that Zentradi language uses the same sounds as Japanese? Is it not more likely that within the Macross universe, the Zentradi are using more sounds that have to be simplified to fit into the Japanese katakana rendering in the exact same way as every other language in the world has to? I believe that with those strange romanizations like Gnerl and Glaug (would you seriously refer to it as Guraaji? No one here would understand!), Miyatake was aiming for a katakana *approximation* of the actual Zentradi pronunciation: which itself will forever remain a mystery. Lastly: OK... There's more to that story. They "corrected" it in Macross Ultimate Frontier. It is now "Vajura". Which is wrong on BOTH counts, however you look at it. So... Yay?

Thanks, Kresphy! Hey, looks like they changed Hikaru's racer flightsuit from orange to red and white. Damn, I want to see all these clips in high quality..

Haha, Graham is gonna rip these to shreds. I kinda like them though. Like the infamous Banprestos, they're fun-sized, affordable little guys that I can buy for my little brother without worry. I think I enjoy this type of toy more than Yamatos sometimes.

I still don't know what you are talking about. Is it Mylene Beat, as Gubaba appears to be assuming? I think Kawamori had almost nothing to do with that. But that's all beside the point, Mylene Beat takes place in 2047 and tells us nothing about her marriage status circa 2060.

OK... I don't think you do understand my point. Zentradi words are also not in the Japanese language. Therefore they would be treated the same as Vajra and Valkyrie. The only thing that is causing the confusion is the fact that they are part of a fictional language and therefore no standards exist that we can fall back on, other than whatever "official" spellings Miyatake made up, like Vrlithwai, Queadluun Rau, Nupetiet-Vergnitztsszxssz whatever. Er.. they didn't? That was also my point??

That's exactly what happens in Japan, from what I see (unless you are in Akihabara, Nipponbashi or Osu Kannon). Wear a Macross shirt and prepare to lose all street cred. Stupid Engrish is the way to go!! Bad grammar and spelling is so cool.

What recent manga mentioned Mylene?

They were obviously intently romanized to sound alien. Why would you think they would ever go the "standard romanization" route? We would have been using terms like "Barukirii" and "Bajura" by now otherwise. Ironically the Macross Ace Frontier programmers apparently did not know the word "Vajra" and actually did just standard-romanize them as "Bajura" in the game. Then everyone here went into a fit over how they can't spell "Vajra" correctly. You can't have it both ways!!

It hasn't evolved, it's all shrunk into a tiny corner. It's devolved. They should be targeting everyone, not just anime fans, be they moe or mecha geeks. Super and real robot animation was originally for kids, with some elements that adults could also enjoy. There's nothing wrong with that. They're excluding the bigger potential market if they only try to appeal to the otaku, and limiting the spread of the franchise to other demographics. Seen in this light, the SDF pachinko game may actually be a smart move. BTW, I already plugged this in the Anime/SF section a while back, but it relates to this topic, so here's the link again to the Patrick Macias podcast about Moe and where "Otakudom" may be headed. http://patrickmacias.blogs.com/er/2009/10/...e.html#comments

Pretty awesome. He's edited the visuals ever so slightly, but it is still surprising how well the new song (one of my faves on the new album) matches up.

http://hk.myblog.yahoo.com/iam-cybergundam/article?mid=34966 Yamato SDF-1 is now a kit, to be released in December, priced 210000 yen. Yes. That's TWO HUNDRED AND TEN THOUSAND. Discuss: http://www.macrossworld.com/mwf/index.php?...&start=1120

I'm using a Japanese PSP-2000, and I've only tried RemoteJoy.

http://www.amazon.co.jp/gp/product/B002QYN...;pf_rd_i=489986 VF-19kai release date: Jan 25th 2010 (according to Amazon).

Hey there, people A while ago I posted some fuzzy pics of the UMD-Video content. It turns out you CAN view the UMD on a monitor using RemoteJoy (so far the only thing I have found that doesn't work is PS1 games), so here are some clearer pics. I didn't take any of the Lego valks, though. As I mentioned waaay back, when I make captured video files of PSP stuff using RemoteJoy, the files come out enormous, so I don't really want to be the one who has to do that, although if you have a big enough hard drive, it should be possible. 20091027171221_0.bmp 20091027171116_0.bmp 20091027171111_1.bmp 20091027170936_0.bmp 20091027171104_0.bmp 20091027171057_0.bmp

So, many of you might be familiar with Patrick Macias, long-time Japanese subculture journalist and editor of Otaku USA magazine. He, along with Otaku Encyclopedia author Patrick W. Galbraith, as well as MW's very own saviour Save, and myself (also MW member Alex, who, though mostly quiet, once the recording had ended, actually exploded in an uncontrollable rage of fury after being reminded of the panty episode in Macross Frontier*) all got together this week to discuss the future of the Japanese contents industry. Check out the podcast on Patrick's blog here, and do not hesitate to give your opinions. I think Macross gets brought up a couple of times, also. http://patrickmacias.blogs.com/er/2009/10/...e.html#comments *This may not have actually happened.

Here are some fuzzy reflecty pictures of the UMD-V content. There are also lots of interviews with Kawamori, the highlight of which is probably his transformation of the Lego VF-25, which is even better than the Bandai version in many ways.

HEY EVERYBODYYYYY!! HIKARI WO MEZASEEEEE!! Yep, picked up this bad boy the other day. I went into Animate hoping they would have it along with any extra poster or whatever, but apparently all their stock was sucked up by the preorders and they had nothing to put on the shelf! I decided to go into another shop and they had a few copies, and best of all, the poster too! I feel so dirty having gone into Animate for no purpose. Also, the release date was supposed to be the 14th, but when I went the shop the display said the 13th, so I guess Kresphy wasa right, it came out a day early. Like Ultimate Frontier, in fact... Hmm. So here are the pics of all the kind of related stuff I've bought in the past few weeks... Which is a lot more than I have purchased in the rest of the year so far! I've been listening to the album constantly so far... Great, great stuff. My favourite song at the moment is Magic Rhapsody, but I also like Daimon and Waiting for You. The best thing about the CD is the "real" liner notes written by then-and-now producer Shiro Sasaki, and the "fictional" ones, by Akiko Hojo, both looking back on the last 15 years from the perspective of 2009 and 20060 respectively. Most interesting to me is the revelation that Basara never actually came back to Macross7. In fact, he is still wandering the galaxy even in 2060. The album was put together through the Galaxy Network, so essentially Fire Bomber are still not exactly "reunited". DANGAN SOOOUUUUULLLLLLLLL-AAAAaaarghh!!!