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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, hearing that Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 was coming to Nintendo Switch was a surprise considering Nintendo is normally so obsessed with being family-friendly. The order of the universe reasserted itself when I heard that Koei Tecmo won't be releasing it outside of APAC. (According to ANN, the JDM release for Switch is going to come with English subtitles for those who want it badly enough to import it.)
  2. Seto Kaiba
    ... you do realize we're talking about a drone in space, right? Long-range detection and ranging of navigational hazards is essential if the drone is to survive at all, since the speed that navigational hazards in space are moving is going to be considerable and if the drone is budgeting propellant it will need to make its course corrections well in advance to avoid any collisions. Otherwise it'll end up like the Project Trapeze VF-1 that got thoroughly trashed by micrometeor impacts. That's assuming there's even a high-energy capacitor bank or battery system capable of running the drone's systems long-term. Even VFs aren't known to have that level of power system redundancy.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Well, there is the slightly awkward question of where the USS Voyager kept getting new shuttles of types the ship didn't have when she left spacedock. Voyager was outfitted with two Type-6 shuttlecraft (TNG late type), but over the course of her trip back to Earth she misplaced something on the order of seventeen warp-capable shuttlecraft. One Type-6, two Type-8, and 5 Type-9 were confirmed destroyed, type Type-9 were given away, 1 Type-6, 3 Type-8, and 3 Type-9 almost certainly unrecoverable, and one Delta Flyer blown to smithereens. We're talking about a man too polite and well-mannered to tell one of his best friends he really only wanted coffee and croissants for breakfast... that's not the sort to go slumming with washed-up substance-abusing intelligence operatives and career criminals.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    If so, it was certainly the game's most mocked feature. I remember many reviews from game magazines (golly, remember when those were a thing?) that mentioned the fog as a worse enemy than the actual enemies.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Flagrant copyright infringement has been a part of the Robotech comics experience almost from day one. It got especially bad in the 90's when the license was held by Academy Comics (1994-1996) and Antarctic Press (1997-1998). They would frequently "borrow" characters and designs from Macross sequels and other mecha anime of the period, and sometimes even steal entire plots from whatever the anime or sci-fi flavor-of-the-month was. My personal favorites there are: Academy's Robotech: the Misfits, which illegally used the VF-4 and Captain Higgins from Macross Plus. (Canceled after one issue, lol.) Antarctic's Robotech: Wings of Gibraltar, with its not-a-VF-19F-honest!, plentiful tracing of VF-1s from DYRL artbooks, and one character was literally Brent Spiner's character from Independence Day (traced, not redrawn, so he was in a different art style from everyone else for the entire book!). Antarctic's promo Robotech: Crystal Dreams for the vaporware video game by the same name, which was like 90% traced from DYRL art. My only question is how much HG paid to have the review not just be a full page of gagging noises as the reader tries not to throw up.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    OK, so the captain on Starfleet's very highest horse - a man who spent seven seasons refusing to disembark his moral pedestal - is slumming it with the scum of the universe? Seems someone in creative control at CBS forgot that most booze (and all replicated booze) available in the 24th century is made with synthehol, an alcohol substitute that smells and tastes like the real thing but has none of the negative consequences the real thing comes with like debilitating intoxication, alcohol poisoning, or being habit-forming. How do you have an alcoholic character when the overwhelming majority of booze available is literally abuse-proof? They'd have to be fairly wealthy to be buying the real deal from somewhere, and you'd think Picard might... y'know... notice or do something if he saw a crewmember on his ship was a lush who buying real alcohol in bulk and getting wasted all the time? Drug addiction is another issue, since we've at least seen a number of previous 24th century characters who had substance abuse problems for various reasons... though most of those were abusing medical commodities rather than actual narcotics, like Garak's abuse of an endorphen-producing implant and later powerful tranquilizers when the implant broke down. (There was that laughable almost-PSA by Tasha Yar in TNG's first season about how drugs are bad and that drug addiction in the utopian UFP was almost an alien concept.) I've been saying it since Star Trek: Discovery's first season... this is Star Trek's edgelord phase. Everything has to be dark, gritty, and depressing. Discovery's creative staff seems to be snapping out of it, at least. There are plenty of commodities that cannot be accurately reproduced by a replicator like dilithium, latinum, certain medicines, and so on. It varies by writer, but it's strongly implied that real restaurants are still a thing in the replicator economy because even high-quality replicators like Quark's still can't reproduce the exact tastes, textures, and aromas of the genuine article and frequently gets written off as inferior to real hand-prepared food made with non-replicated ingredients.1 There are also plenty of things that lose their value when replicated, like original works of art and historical artifacts. There's still a thriving market for that sort of thing. Less so than you'd think... many starship components in the 24th century are fabricted by industrial replicators. 1. This was most prevalent in DS9, which occasionally implied that Quark's had an unseen actual kitchen preparing food for people who didn't want replicated. Abraham Sisko, Ben Sisko, and Michael Eddington all took their fair share of free shots at the perceived lack of quality in replicated food or ingredients. Abe wrote replicated food off as "slop", Ben had appropriated part of a cargo bay to grow his own ingredients for home cooking, and Eddington carped endlessly about the shortcuts replicators took in reproducing food that made them inferior to the real thing. Scotty turned up his nose at replicated syntheholic drinks in his TNG appearance as well. Early TNG was missing this, with that lush from that 20th century group of cryogenic defrostees praising the replicator for making the best martini he'd ever tasted... though I guess it's possible his taste buds were simply clapped out after a lifetime of alcohol abuse.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    This week on Photoshop Sins...
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Wow, so soon we can revisit the experience of hunting badly-rendered dinosaurs in pea soup fog?
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Wait 'til it goes on sale, at the very least... I finished it last night, and discovered to my charign that Dying: Reborn for the Switch is a censored edition. I guess it's not all that surprising that a horror game for a Nintendo console was censored but the censorship in the Switch edition of Dying: Reborn is incredibly scattershot. Somehow huge amounts of blood and and disembodied organs were not a problem but a plot-critical dead body was censored by turning it into a mannequin, rendering the game's ending completely nonsensical. Not that the story made any sense to begin with, mind... Fortunately (or not), the Switch version also apparently omitted the Playstation 4 version's hilariously bad voice acting. Also pretty sure the game was developed and made in China and just localized in LA, which would explain the awful stilted dialog. (The wall outlets on a few of the room textures are Chinese outlets.)
  10. Seto Kaiba
    ECCM and active stealth could be done without, but turning off object recognition seems like a bad idea since that'd prevent the drone from assessing what objects in its path are navigational hazards. "Power hungry" is relative. On a modern aircraft these things are incredibly energy-intensive, but we're talking about a drone that has at least a couple hundred megawatts to throw around. Now that's almost certainly a bad idea, given that that's the power source.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Due to the general lack of detailed information from Macross Delta, it's hard to say how the Lilldrakens shake up cost- and hardware-wise. What little we do know about the Lilldrakens does suggest there's been at least some economizing going on though. Like the fact that they have energy converting armor but don't have enough generator output to actually power it, so it only runs when there is excess power being supplied from the mothership. It's not clear if they're capable of continuing the fight even after their mothership is lost the way a AIF-7S/QF-4000 Ghost can. If not, that may be another area where there was a cost-saving cut made. One of the points of unmanned fighters is that they have very little that could be called "unnecessary" in their systems... power to weapons would be about the only thing they could conceivably cut to save energy.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Given that most of the unmanned fighters we've seen in Macross are equipped with sophisticated AIs capable of semi-autonomous combat and thermonuclear reaction turbine engines, I doubt any of them are cheap enough to be considered disposable. Less expensive to lose than a manned VF, sure, but not out-and-out disposable. Though at least some of them are apparently capable of fully autonomous operation, they're generally operated semi-autonomously from an aircraft or ship outfitted for controlling a group of drones. With operating time and range in space limited by available reactor fuel, it's unlikely they were ever operating at extreme long ranges away from a mothership which could either order them home or recover them itself.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    It's not something that was mentioned in the animation, only in the artbooks. Hikaru and Misa's wedding is mentioned in several different artbooks including Macross Graffiti, Macross Times, Macross Guidebook, Macross Chronicle, etc. Somewhat frustratingly, the date is given differently on each occasion. Macross Graffiti had it as 2011 Oct 10, Macross Guidebook as 2012 Oct 10, and Macross Times as 2013 June. Later sources generally agree they got married in 2012 before Megaroad-01 launched. There's not an associated story I'm aware of, it's just a factoid that comes up periodically. The Macross Wiki is... not the most reliable of sites. The image they have of Hikaru, Misa, and Miku is from Macross Graffiti, which is also IIRC the source that mentions her as being born in New Era 0001 (2013). Ah, no... Hikaru, Misa, and Minmay sailed off into the proverbial sunset aboard the SDF-2 Megaroad-01 and that's the last we see or hear of 'em. The subsequent disappearance of the Megaroad-01 in 2016 does become something of an enduring mystery in-universe, but not one that has any real impact on the story. Their story ended with Flash Back 2012, so it's up to new generations of characters to carry the torch from then on. The characters are famed in-story for historical reasons and because of the various popular dramatizations of the First Space War that have been released in-universe like the film Do You Remember Love?, the 2045 docu-drama The Lynn Minmay Story, and a later docu-drama The Lynn Minmay Files, but Minmay's the only one who really gets mentioned regularly because she was the first Macross idol and so every other one is inevitably compared to her at some point. At least until the number of other "greats" stack up to the point that they start comparing against a list or (at one point) suggest the Minmay comparison might be a little outdated fifty-odd years later.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    In principle, a VF's compact thermonuclear reactors operate like toroidal magnetic field pinch reactors (e.g. the tokamak) except the magnets and magnetic fields have been replaced with artificial gravity produced by a gravity and inertia control system. Inertial confinement fusion is pulsed fusion in a solid fuel pellet. This is a continuous reaction using a gaseous fuel stored in the slush state.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Which makes it even cooler when modern science starts catching up and even outright defictionalizes parts of the technology... That translation's still a WIP, I'm afraid... but I can tell you the GU-11[A]'s 1,450kg with 180 rounds and the AMM-1 only weighs about 1/2 what an AIM-7 does (125kg vs. 230kg).
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Which, tellingly enough, is why it has substantially greater quantities of plot holes, inconsistencies, and dialog errors than the rest of the series. What's insane is the parts of Southern Cross they kept virtually unaltered... like all that out-of-nowhere stuff at the ending about immortality. That, right there, is almost certainly a major part of why there has been exactly zero forward motion on making a live action movie... if all you've got is the title, a few names, and one or two key terms, why not just make an all-original movie from scratch instead and not have to pay royalties to a washed-up real estate company from LA?
  17. Seto Kaiba
    In Robotech's version, there was a world war underway when the ship crashed and humanity had its collective "oh crap" moment and opted to throw down their weapons just long enough to form a token unified front against a potential invasion before some parties resumed shooting only with bigger and shinier guns and the whole thing almost immediately imploded into a kakistocracy run by a military autocrat, then a slave society split between official slave labor for alien invaders and de facto slave labor for the militantly xenophobic army trying to "liberate" them. In Macross, Earth was more or less at peace when the ship crashed and humanity had that collective "oh crap" moment that set the stage for six of the G8 nations (the US, Russia, UK, France, Germany, and Japan) to collectively conclude that not being massacred was something everyone could enjoy and start twisting arms to replace the United Nations with something that actually worked to forestall fighting World War III over possession of the alien ship and form a unified front against a potential invasion that became a functioning democracy after the political opportunists all conveniently died.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Yes, that would be consistent with the remarks made by Tatsunoko's counsel in their arbitration over royalties owed with Harmony Gold. Honestly, it IS all-or-nothing... but from Harmony Gold's end. If they can't get the rights to Macross back, Robotech is done. Harmony Gold knows full f*cking well that, for all practical intents and purposes, Macross is Robotech's only real draw. Its holdover characters are what has kept fans coming back for each of Robotech's failures and false starts, and it's the heart and soul of Robotech's merchandising. Take it away, and they don't have enough left to keep the lights on. MOSPEADA's characters and designs aren't well-liked enough to be a viable replacement, and Southern Cross is viewed with a mixture of antipathy and indifference by most fans. That's why they've invested so much time, money, and energy in maintaining their deathgrip on the Macross rights and doing everything the law permits to keep Macross shows and merchandise out of the west. Lose Macross, and there's no point in renewing the licenses for the other two... the staff might as well clean out their desks and start looking for new employment elsewhere.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    No more so than, say, running a technically illegal business selling unlicensed toys for a "big fish" IP like Transformers. I'm more inclined to suspect that they actually do have a license, but were expecting to engage in a bit of loophole abuse by running the crowdfunding campaign from their own site until their first go at it turned into a huge mess. Now they're probably approaching HG, hat in hand, to beg for special permission to use Kickstarter because their own fans screwed them when they tried to go it alone. (I still think the entire reason they decided to license Southern Cross designs was because nobody had ever made proper toys for it, so they could break into legit toy manufacturing without being compared to any prior licensee's work.) Second.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    If you highlight text in someone else's post and put your mouse over the highlighted section, the forum will offer you a context button that says "Quote text" that will generate a quote block containing only the highlighted text with all the appropriate formatting. Frankly, I just assumed the Titan Comics staff was either going through a VERY late chuunibyou phase or were so utterly uninterested in making it that literally anything gets a pass when they're brainstorming new material and Googling stock photos to trace. ... have you, by chance, recently solved any puzzle boxes leading to dimensions of eternal suffering that would cause you to mistake that schlock for a good time? Tatsunoko Production owns Genesis Climber MOSPEADA free and clear... it was their in-house (failed) attempt to make the Macross lightning strike twice. They're believed to have a similarly free hand with the Big West-sponsored Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross due to having funded its development themselves. If they're going to borrow animated material for a live action movie, they'll use MOSPEADA... Southern Cross is too unpopular with Robotech fans for them to touch it. That's why the only appearances by Southern Cross stuff in new Robotech material have been taking the piss out of the story (though admittedly some of it coincidentally overlaps to the creators of the animation taking the piss out of their own creation).
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Seconded. She's much more entertaining than Stamets, even if he has lost a couple levels in arsehole since the second season started. That seen-it-all, not-impressed-with-your-space-voodoo-bullsh*t attitude of hers is like the quintessential suffering Starfleet engineer. It's like having Montgomery Scott or Miles O'Brien back, but without Miles's horrid wife. In a way, she might be a more convincing engineer than O'Brien was since she gives zero f*cks what the non-engineers think and has a demonstrated tendency to "wing it" building the tools she needs to get the job done. (If her attitude towards starship repair includes duck tape, I can only imagine what she'd do given some club soda or bondo.)
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Your understanding is correct. Please take care to note that the (hilariously awful) comic from Titan Comics is an adaptation gone off the rails, where the live action movie proposal that Warner Bros and now Sony Pictures have been studiously ignoring for over a decade now is for a rebooted-from-the-ground-up reimagining of Robotech. "Robotech in name only", if you will. It's something of an apples and oranges comparison. All of the above, really. Granted, quality-wise the difference between pre-Yune Robotech and post-Yune Robotech in overall quality is the difference between laying down in an overflowing septic tank and standing up in that same overflowing septic tank... but gains are gains. The quality of the writing in the 90's was so bad even Harmony Gold couldn't stomach it, and we know that their standards set the bar for quality so low it's a trip hazard in Satan's sub-basement. (When the licensees weren't committing serial copyright infringement, anyway...) As we've noted before, your tastes are... well... "atypical and highly specialized" might be a polite way to put it. That's kind of why nobody has tried making Southern Cross merch for Robotech before. The professional toy companies took one look at the estimated return on investment from such a small area of interest and wrote it off as a bad job. It's only now that they've whittled down the licensee pool to naught but little indie outfits that someone is finally willing to gamble on it, with the decline in quality you'd expect in switching from pros to grey marketeers and "one guy in a garage" outfits. If Harmony Gold is looking to convince Tatsunoko their brand is still viable enough to justify a license renewal, making toys that look like they were salvaged from the Matchbox era probably isn't the way to do it.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Well, come way may I hope that they can hang on to Anson Mount to play Captain Christopher Pike in season three. Discovery's original characters don't really have anyone who's ready to step into the big chair besides Commander Saru, and you know they'll always have a human in the center seat. Captain Pike has really become the heart and soul of the series, as the most likeable character on the series with only the new engineer Commander Reno coming close. Burnham will likely never escape that onus of "designated hero" that colors her actions and puts her in danger of Mary Sue status when everything she does is always right no matter how stupid or immoral/illegal.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    And yet, Tommy achieved more concrete success in the first few years of his tenure than Macek ever did and had a much higher average quality level... Folks romanticize the "good old days" until they look back without the rose-tinted glasses and realize that Macek was the man with the reverse-Midas touch and virtually all of what came out before 2001 was of comically poor quality. Somehow, deliberately producing poor-quality products strikes me as an extra-risky strategy for a brand that was already known for the poor quality of its... everything.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    ... so MAAS Toys is waiting on a company that is death on all things Kickstarter to approve their plans for a Kickstarter? Glorious. I can only assume this entire misadventure started with someone at MAAS Toys saying "I have a cunning plan".
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