Seto Kaiba

Eh... I gave the Strange Machine Games Robotech RPG open beta a whirl a while back and found it pretty unremarkable. I remember thinking it was a pretty poor effort even for a Robotech product. It's not a bad system, but IMO it was even less suitable for replicting the feel of the Macross (or Robotech) setting than Palladium Books's old system is... and that' system wasn't any prize either. Most people who buy it will probably end up using it to run Macross games, though, so if you want to put in the effort then I would say it's safe to say it won't go to waste. Personally, I'm not going to buy a copy because it's Robotech-branded and supports Harmony Gold's efforts to block Macross from markets worldwide. Even if those efforts aren't as fruitful as they used to be, I'm not about to give them any money that they could spend on lawsuits or on trying to hold on their license a little longer. The sooner they fold, the better.

*sigh* Barely halfway into Star Trek: Picard's second episode and from the sound of it they're ALREADY setting up Patrick Stewart's exit from the series. I'm vaguely bothered by how poorly tailored the new Starfleet uniforms look on the extras in this episode. So far, the best moment in this episode has been the quietly snarky Romulan safety supervisor aboard the salvaged Borg cube. He dispenses a lot of quiet snark while giving his very boring sounding safety briefing that Dahj's sister talks over. It's a shame that she doesn't realize this nameless background character is far more interesting than she will ever be. Romulan Science Guy, whose name I have already forgotten because he is boring cliche, seems to be trying really hard to channel Spock from Star Trek: Discovery season two. BIG mistake. There is literally a moment in this episode where Patrick Stewart is basically explaining to his Romulan housekeeper that the show can't afford to bring back the TNG cast for more than cameos. So Picard's ragtag crew here are apparently going to be a crew of outcast privateers on a personally-owned ship. What little we see of the ship, it's pretty ugly and generic... it really feels a bit like they're trying to make this Star Trek: Firefly or knock off Han Solo and the Millennium Falcon.

Responsible readers remember to wrap the comic in an asbestos blanket and safely dispose of it in a nuclear waste storage facility after reading... or before, ideally.

Messer did a lot of Battroid mode and GERWALK mode stuff during the space battles... but from the sound of it, even Hayate's handling in fighter mode was pushing his VF-31J well beyond its normal limits and causing damage. Yup, there's no mention of them finding any alien crew aboard the wrecked ship in the Super Dimension Fortress Macross series or Macross: Do You Remember Love? movie, and I don't recall any mention of finding crew in Macross the First either. I'd imagine a lot of the ship's fixtures would have kind of given the game away... like the gigantic, completely recognizable-at-a-glance toilets. I can just imagine the first work crews exploring the ship... "Golly, I wonder what kind of amazing alien lifeforms inhabited this mysterious ship from beyond the stars?" "Oh damnit, that's a giant toilet. We're on some Gulliver's Travels bullsh*t now." "Don't get so down, at least we're not doing that one TAS episode with the giant Spock and the plant people."

Well... if nothing else, you have to applaud Titan's efforts to make the covers awful enough to be a representative sample of the contents. They're working hard to ensure that you CAN judge a book by its cover.

I get the feeling that for most of us this isn't in "guilty pleasure" territory so much as "ironic punishment from the greco-roman gods" territory...

Finished Demi-chan wa Kataritai a few minutes ago... great show, too short. I want 13 more episodes, stat. This was just plain well-written. The story made me care about the characters with surprising swiftness and without resorting to cheats like fanservice. This is exactly the kind of character-driven drama that should be 26 or 50 episodes, not 13. This was good enough that I am seriously looking at getting the official licensed US release.

Yeah, the so-called "Immelmann Dance" kind of fell by the wayside after just a few episodes... one has to wonder if it was because the maintenance team made him stop doing it, as the series had at least one bit of dialog from Makina acknowledging that the Immelmann Dance was rough as hell on Hayate's VF-31J and, compared to Messer's style, it was coming back all beat-up just from his style of flying. There was a really nice bit a few episodes on where Hayate and Freyja went for a night flight in his VF-31J and had a whole dancing segment before Messer rained on their parade and threatened them with charges for AWOL. That line from Makina about how Hayate's handling of his VF-31J was so rough that it was incurring extra repair time between sorties was one of the odder things we've had in terms of technical remarks. How many G's was Hayate putting on that airframe that it needed more repair between sorties than someone aggressively dogfighting like Messer? VFs are stressed for dozens of G's above and beyond the almost-30G buffering limit of the ISC. Hayate was either astonishingly rough on his VF-31, or the performance enhancements in the Xaos VF-31 customs already overloaded the airframe in normal operation.

When the designers start messing with the core concept of VF transformation, one of the most common outcomes is that they end up removing GERWALK mode altogether. We saw this a couple times in the 90's, like the VF-XX Zentradi Valkyrie from the Macross II: Lovers Again OVA and the VF-X3 Medusa from Macross: Remember Me. The logic is usually that GERWALK mode doesn't have a lot of utility in space besides deceleration and that Battroid can do that just as easily. I've often thought that Macross Frontier neglected GERWALK mode too much, and one of the few things Macross Delta did right in the TV series was to make fairly extensive use of GERWALK mode. There was, of course, that one memorable time that a designer decided to add a fourth mode instead and we got the Metal Siren's Gundroid mode in Macross II, which was explained as a GERWALK-like mode meant for space dogfighting. That same designer is also responsible for the "poor man's VF" that had JUST a GERWALK mode (the GERWALKroid, also from Macross II).

I am torn between the dullahan, Machi, and the succubus teacher Satou. Demi-chan wa Kataritai is so damn pure... it's a feel-good series that really deserves the title.

I'll say this much, this series is RELENTLESSLY wholesome. A largely fanservice-free character drama is right where I'm at right now, so I'm enjoying the hell out of it.

I have heard nothing but good of it, and it seems that trend is destined to continue here.

To be fair, if a viewer felt the Kirk Summation of the week was aimed at them and found it insulting... then it was doing its job. The whole point of episodes like "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield" was to throw the sh*ttyness of certain types of human behavior into sharp relief, and in so doing encourage positive change. It was hamfisted as f*ck but boy did it work, and it was woven into the narrative well enough that it didn't feel like being preached at (most of the time). Gene Roddenberry took the same thinly disguised morality tale format that'd sold so well in westerns at the time and simply repurposed it for his sci-fi series. "Wagon train to the stars" indeed. I kinda have my doubts whether Star Trek: Picard can achieve that, given that Patrick Stewart seems to be aiming for nothing more sophisticated or morally complex than "Brexit is bad".

I'm about to take a whack at Interviews with Monster Girls. Seems like a harmless-enough slice of life-y comedy, quite unlike that other title Kodansha really seems to want people to think it's related to... Daily Life with Monster Girls... which is more or less pure fanservice.

That's one of the few shows I started that I just wasn't able to finish. It just feels... wrong. Like it's blatant lolicon fanservice to the extent that I was two or three episodes in and couldn't shake the feeling Chris Hansen was going to burst through my wall like the goddamn Kool-Aid Man.

The VF-25 technically had it first, since the VF-171EX was a mid-war development in the Vajra conflict.

Miniaturized pinpoint barrier systems were developed for Project Super Nova as one of the major requirements for a 4th Generation Main VF, so the first VFs to get them would be the YF-19 and YF-21 prototypes. Due to the New UN Forces' dropping the VF-19 and VF-22 from large-scale production, the first mass production VF to mount a pinpoint barrier was the VF-171 Nightmare Plus. The oldest VF we've seen mount a barrier system after they achieved production status was Mylene's VF-11MAXL Custom, which was built in 2045 (after the technology had reached a production level on the VF-19 and VF-22). The first VFs with both a pinpoint barrier AND an Armored Pack were the VF-25 and VF-171EX.

There's no denying TOS was campy as f*ck, but then consider when it was made. Despite its problematic production values, it was still a highly thought-of series that was one of the network's best-performing TV series in its programming block. TOS is a terrible show? Audiences certainly didn't think so. Yeah, Gene was... a character. Dude REALLY wanted to hire strippers as actresses, all of his story treatment descriptions of female characters are skeevy as hell and he often called for female characters to be played by actresses with "strip queen" builds. What he conceptualized as far as the bright future that Star Trek belonged to still struck a massive chord with viewers. In the middle of the Cold War, here was a show that dared to dream of a world where we'd put petty political pissing contests and other human evils like racism, sexism, religious discrimination, etc. behind us and created a mature society that was worthy of heading out to explore and settle the great wilderness of space. That belief that humans could be better than they are lasted until Star Trek: Discovery, which took a turn for the dystopian with a racist main character who wore her racism like a badge of honor and rampant sexism throughout the second season. That the bleak and hopeless tone seem to be continuing into Picard is an enormous negative for the series in my opinion.

Gencidas was one of two early concepts that evolved into the designs in Macross, the other was actually a powered suit that turned into a fighter. There's a use for a place to stick a high-gain camera cluster and a gun turret that can rotate independently of the direction of motion of the mecha. Depends on how you want to define "a slight edge"... the VF-25 should have slightly higher flight performance on account of having a marginally higher thrust-to-weight ratio, while the VF-31 has a more passively stealthy profile that tries to compensate for a loss of payload versatility with the ordnance container. Er... 2, 3, and 4 there are all the same thing actually. All told, I'd say the VF-31 is probably the better aircraft for cost performance whereas the VF-25 is probably a better overall performer due to being able to specialize at the expense of greater cost.

Er... they've kind of lost sight of what they were talking about. The "why it tanked" discussion was about Star Trek: Enterprise, which did tank and was cancelled after 4 seasons due to embarrassingly low ratings. @pengbuzz misaimed, and assumed it was about the currently-in-the-process-of-tanking Star Trek: Discovery that nearly didn't get funded for a third season because Netflix was not happy about constant budget overruns and lower than expected average viewership.

Granted, it's a fair question... but they do note back in Deep Space Nine that the Romulan Star Empire and Klingon Empire had both taken especially heavy losses during the Dominion War. The Romulans were already hurting even before the war started thanks to a Changeling impersonating Colonel Lovok of the Tal Shiar orchestrating that joint operation with the Obsidian Order that ended in the destruction of a joint Romulan-Cardassian fleet that crippled both the Tal Shiar and Obsidian Order. Pile on top of that all their losses from the Dominion War, Shinzon's coup d'etat, and the inevitable dustup over who would lead the Empire in the wake of the self-declared Praetor having died after assassinating the Continuing Committee and the entire Senate. There was probably a very brief but very furious free-for-all over ownership of the Romulan government that did them no favors. The Romulans had less than eight years to pick up the pieces after Shinzon completely demolished their government and left the Empire rudderless and probably at war with parts of itself, it wouldn't be surprising if they didn't have the resources to consider an ambitious project like building a fleet capable of evacuating Romulus in one go. That's the million dollar plot hole... why were the Romulan fleet and Federation Starfleet not ALREADY hard at work evacuating the planet or at least preparing it for evacuation while the fleet of evacuation ships were being built at Utopia Planitia? Moreover, why was this evacuation fleet being built EXCLUSIVELY at Utopia Planitia? It's the Federation's second-oldest Starfleet shipyards after the San Francisco orbital yards, but it's not like it's the only high-capacity shipyard they have. There's like a dozen different ones in the Sol system alone that've been mentioned over the years, never mind others outside it like Deep Space 5, 40 Eridani A, Starbase 47, and Antares. It doesn't really make any sense that they'd put all their eggs in one basket the way they did. It really doesn't... the show is reaching REALLY hard to try and make Starfleet and the Federation into the a-holes for being unable to save Romulus after the fleet they bent over backwards to purpose-build for the job was destroyed out of the blue by a synthetic revolt, and it doesn't exactly seem unreasonable to ban the creation of artificial lifeforms when the ones they'd already made were apparently so put-out by their treatment that they launched a terrorist attack that left a planet uninhabitable, directly killed 90,000+ Federation citizens, and indirectly resulted in the deaths of almost a billion Romulans and undermined a major diplomatic move to solidify peaceful relations with the Romulan Star Empire. It's hardly unfair for the Federation Council to take a step back from that and say "maybe creating sentient beings with abilities far exceeding that of organic lifeforms in a lab is probably a bad idea". That it's a bad idea should've been pretty obvious considering Dr. Soong was murdered by one of his own creations and the whole "let's create superhumans in a lab" thing was kind of how the ball got rolling on the Eugenics Wars. It definitely doesn't quite scan with the idea that this wasn't something they could see coming a long way off... That said, 900 million people is a LOT of people... and Starfleet hasn't often been depicted as having a huge number of ships. The one and only time a defintite number was put to it was in a Discovery episode, which claimed Starfleet c.2257 operated over 7,000 ships of various classes. I'd assume that's counting small utility ships, border patrol craft, and other assorted odds and ends such as the unmanned cargo ships, otherwise it doesn't quite tally with other Star Trek shows that've pointed to Starfleet having several hundred to at most a thousand or so ships of the line. Most of them aren't very big either, being able to hold a few hundred people tops like the Miranda and Intrepid classes. It's only the really big ones, the Galaxy, Nebula, Sovereign, etc. that could handle 10,000 evacuees or so at a time. One would imagine they could've dug into the Starfleet surplus depots like the one they visited in the TNG "Unification" two-parter and given those ships skeleton crews to maximize Starfleet's evacuation potential... and the evacuation ships themselves were likely intended to operate with tiny crews or to be crewless like the robot transports that were all over TAS. Well, yeah... they're really REALLY forcing this dystopian thing on the show. If you sit down and look at it, Picard's grievances don't really make sense in context... unless there's something else we're not being told. Starfleet gave rescuing the Romulans a valiant try, but were undermined in their efforts by an unexpected third party's interference. Patrick Stewart is really trying to force this "the Federation is becoming isolationist" to fit his real world contemporary political views into it, but it doesn't tally with the story he's telling where Starfleet put a GARGANTUAN amount of effort into trying to save all the people on Romulus and failed because they were sabotaged by a third party rather than because they weren't trying. Nah, now it's more realistic! Uniforms come in two sizes: too big, and too small. Yeah, that's the main reason I don't like Star Trek: Discovery and Star Trek: Picard. That aspirational future where we'd conquered things like bigotry and inequality and so on was what made Star Trek such a draw, and now that's going away in favor of "see the future? exactly the same sh*thole you're in now but with lasers".

That definitely seems to be what Picard was aiming for... the "big gesture" from the Federation that could've turned the Romulans from their oldest enemy to another close ally, esp. since relations had been warming ever since the Dominion War. I suspect they realized they can't exactly tie into a comic almost nobody read, and couldn't succinctly sum up various major plot points from it because those plot points belonged to Paramount before the re-merger. I don't see it. Vulcans and their relation to the Romulans plays way too much of a role in this scenario for them to write the Vulcans out. The whole reason Romulus went boom was that the red matter from Vulcan didn't get there in time because the Vulcans were uneasy with the prospect of letting such an obviously dangerous technology anywhere near their warlike cousins.

OK, upgrading from "mildly amused"... this is practically Lelouch Lamperouge: Relationship Councilor.

... what you're saying here doesn't make sense. Paramount and CBS were quite clear that the events of the reboot movies have no bearing or impact on the Prime universe and its timeline. The Prime timeline is, officially, the one that follows on from the eight TV series and ten original movies. Vulcan is very much present in those, well after the date of its destruction in the Kelvin timeline. There is no reason whatsoever to think that Vulcan doesn't exist now. The Kelvin timeline is, officially, its own entirely self-contained disaster zone completely separate from and very definitely not equal to the Prime universe setting. Events in it have no more bearing on the Prime universe than events in Star Wars do.