Seto Kaiba

They ARE completely daft... the core/main market Star Trek: Discovery is being targeted to is the United States, and unless they've changed their minds that's the ONLY market where it's going up on their crummy proprietary streaming service instead of going up on Netflix. Between that and all the other questionable decisions, you'd almost swear they were attempting to pull a Springtime for Hitler by flying the show into the ground. Nothing I've seen so far has convinced me the show's worth spending ten bucks a month on CBS All Access to watch it. A few friends and I have a bet on how long it'll last. I'm expecting one season and done, tops.

One thing I have to admit always strikes me when I read the Zentradi and Meltrandi sheets is how utterly essential fold technology was to the ancient Protoculture and their proxy military... it's used in almost every essential system. The "countless" number of radar arrays is a new one on me though, as is the detail on the ship's war room on the bridge.

Nah, it's always been Fulgrim... the fight with Alpharius was before that, and ended with "Alpharius"1 dying. The first sources to establish that Guilliman was not-quite-dead also established that the wound that landed him a permanent stasis case was being struck in the neck by a poisoned blade wielded by Fulgrim. It seems mildly likely the Heresy novels will change the type of blade that did the deed, given that... Nothing confirmed thus far... though there's a LOT of speculation.

Well, all bets are off where the Warp is involved considering that the very concept of linear time is a bit of a joke there even with the dubious protection of a Gellar field. In the Materium, that's a bit of a trickier question. The Big E has been confirmed to be a psychic gestalt intelligence created by an elaborate suicide ritual that fused together all the souls of Earth's psychically gifted prehistoric shamans into a single reincarnated existence. He himself has confirmed that he can split off parts of his mind to focus on particular tasks while the part pushing his fleshy meats around deals with day-to-day business of the realm. That's how he runs the Astronomican, soul-binds psykers, etc. while also keeping the Imperial webway closed and everything else he does. (At one point, while on the Golden Throne long after the Heresy, he notes to an Inquisitor that he's split and partitioned himself to do so many things that he's not sure a particular, seemingly benevolent warp entity called The Hydra is a part of him or not.) So, in terms of his unique perpetual physical body that's currently enshrined on the Golden Throne of Terra, only one of that can exist at a time. He could, however, have his mind in multiple places and directly controlling the bodies of multiple people at the same time. (After Magnus screwed up the Imperial webway, temporarily confining him to the Golden Throne to keep the Chaos filth out, his preferred method of interacting with his sons was to pull a Grand Theft Me on Malcador or whoever else happened to be convenient like Raven Guard ex-Librarians.) That's a very definite "maybe". If the Emperor is a true perpetual, at least as defined in the Horus Heresy books via John Grammaticus, Ollanius Pius, and others, once he died his mortal body would regenerate ultra-rapidly and he would simply come back to life in that restored body. Based on the trouble Night Haunter went to, it seems that even injuries that would put a Primarch down for good won't do much more than temporarily inconvenience a perpetual and make them take slightly longer to regenerate. Even incineration or vaporization won't keep them down for long... Vulkan literally fell from orbit stark naked and landed on Macragge as a baked skeleton, and within a day or so he was up and about and ROYALLY PISSED. That said, bring enough psychic trauma to bear on a perpetual and you can make them stay down permanently... at least in theory. So since the Emperor got the snot beaten out of him by Horus both physically and psychically, he may not be able to regenerate like a normal perpetual. The prevailing theories among the Inquisition in previous edition fluff were that the Emperor would either create a new physical body for himself using his immortal flesh-and-blood descendants known as the Sensei if the Inquisition could round them all up, or that he would transcend flesh altogether and become a new Warp God of Order. Given that the Warp's "laws" are often little more than "clap your hands if you believe", it's entirely possible that millennia of humanity's collective belief in the Emperor's divinity and that he claims their souls after death would be enough for the Warp God of Order hypothesis to actually prove out. (Weirder things have happened... they're perpetually out-of-focus, but the bizarre nature of the warp has given rise to minor warp gods devoted to things like Chaos's power being turned against itself, the embodiment of "Not as planned!", and a a warp god of atheism whose power paradoxically grows as the belief in gods diminishes... Malal, Zuvassin, and Necoho respectively.) As of 8th, The Big E seems to be attempting this by proxy. Roboute Guilliman, Primarch of the XIII Legion and perennial "well done, son" guy who spent the last few thousand years imprisoned in a stasis field at the edge of death because of the wounds he suffered fighting the Daemon Primarch Fulgrim is up and about thanks to the intervention of a 10,000 year old Mechanicum Magos named Belisarius Cawl. He was reportedly less than happy to see what the Imperium has become (or possibly not a morning person), marched on Terra to confer with the Emperor, and is now Lord Commander of the Imperium and Wrecker-in-Chief of Chaos's Sh*t as he leads a new crusade in defense of the Imperium. It remains to be seen if any other surviving loyalist Primarchs will come out of the woodwork now that Bobby G's in charge, but theoretically at least The Lion, Corax, Vulkan, Leman Russ, and The Khan are on the table. (The Imperium will probably lose its collective mind if Sanguinius, most celebrated of primarchs, pulls an "I got better"...) If the Big E finally kicks off and becomes a Warp God of Order, that might not be the best thing. The last two times he left things to a council of the primarchs it ended rather badly. The first time, Horus turned half of the Imperium against the Emperor. The second time resulted in the start of The Lion's humiliation conga with the breaking of The Lion Sword and a public dressing down from Sanguinius and Guilliman so severe he literally fled Ultramar and the post-Heresy Dark Angels invented a much less humiliating reason for the sword to be broken and lost.

After the news from E3, it feels like I picked the right time to wax nostalgic. I've been having a blast with the 3DS's virtual console library... I'd quite forgotten how hard true old-school Nintendo Hard was. They had a sale not too long ago, so I grabbed a bunch of old Legend of Zelda games that I never finished including the original Legend of Zelda and Zelda II: The Adventure of Link. They're every bit as frustrating as I remember. (Also took a whack at Bravely Default, which is almost like a rebranded remake of Final Fantasy III... damn if the gameplay didn't age like milk.)

That's an easy one... it's because the target audience for the vast majority of anime and manga is tweens and teens. Creators want the audience to be able to relate to the characters, so the characters are often of a similar age to the target reader/viewer. This does sometimes lead to characters doing jobs that nobody of their age would realistically be qualified or trained for without some kind of special circumstances like a soldier or giant robot pilot, a live-in butler, a revolutionary leader, etc. A similar principle is in play to ensure that, even in fantasy or futuristic settings where traditional nationalities are no longer a thing or never existed to begin with there is always someone on the main cast (if not the main character him/herself) who is identifiably Japanese or part-Japanese. This is also at work in stories set in foreign countries too. They might be the only Japanese or even only recognizably asian person on the entire cast, but to keep it relatable to the audience there's usually at least one. That's not to say that shows based around more mature characters can't be successful... it's just harder for their target audience to relate. (I do have to wonder if spectacle and gunpla sales are all that's keeping Gundam Thunderbolt going, given that every character's a completely unrelatable total bastard.) If we're demanding bread and circuses, I want some proper garlic bread... none of that whole grain nonsense. Most of the time, anyway... the worst offenders in Macross are Basara and Hayate, neither of whom had any kind of formal pilot training before being dumped in the cockpit of a next-gen VF and somehow surpassing ace pilots easily. (It's especially galling in Hayate's case, since we know he didn't have a bunch of offscreen practice and couldn't even keep his lunch down in his first flight.) The vast majority of Macross protagonists are already qualified pilots when we meet them... e.g. Hikaru (a veteran stunt pilot), Hibiki (a licensed operator of civilian market VFs), Isamu and Guld (adrenaline junkies with a flight fetish), Gamlin (special forces pilot prodigy who completed 3 years of training in 2 years), Shin (a trained F-14 pilot), Alto (a 2nd year student in a pilot training vocational school), or Chelsea (a retiring NUNS soldier). Gundam used to be more circumspect about it... like having most of White Base's victories being down to the superior performance and durability of the Gundam rather than any particular skill on Amuro's part. Still, a fair few of Gundam's protagonists are fully-qualified pilots when we first see them too, like Shiro, Bernie and Chris, Kou, Uso, Garrod, Bellri, etc. (Some of that is because of rushed training (Shiro), absurdly young enlistment ages (Bellri), or questionable parenting decisions (Uso).) Still, I'd like to see a return to the protagonists in Macross being part of the actual military. The PMCs are trying too hard to make themselves seem rebellious by badmouthing the military, which falls hilariously flat when they spend the entire show at the military's beck and call. (Did nobody tell Arad not to bite the hand that feeds?)

Yep... the Macross titles where the conflict du jour is taken seriously tend to be much more developed, satisfying stories. While Macross's signature trait is being fairly upbeat because it's a love story set in wartime, there's such a thing as too upbeat. It always did feel a bit unnatural how Basara was totally unaware of people dying around him, or how quickly Hayate gets over things like that Freyja's singing could kill him or that his dad is partly responsible for the worst atrocity in Windermere's history. No problem. It's really frustrating that they don't put worldbuilding details like that into the shows themselves... there's actually a whole faction of antagonists in later Macross titles who became antagonists because they were PO'd about the devolution of governing authority to the individual colonies and the decentralization of the military. That's Latence, from Macross VF-X2 and its splinter/remnant FASCES from Macross R. In that respect, the Macross Delta series is kind of a subversion. The gaiden manga for the Aerial Knights reveals that the cause of the 2060 war was essentially Windermere wanting all the benefits and none of the responsibilities of New UN Government membership, and even the New UN Spacy's acts that the show tries to present as villainous are revealed to be sound strategic and tactical decisions intended to avert disaster and neutralize a great threat only they knew about with the minimum possible loss of life and property. "The Man" is the show's secret, uncelebrated Big Good, while two groups of arrogant and immature hotheads screw things up time and time again. It's so weird that Kawamori and co. are fine with having the New UN Spacy be a well-organized, well-trained, and highly competent force and don't shy away from having protagonists from the military... but when the time comes to put them in a show, they're only around to be subject to the Worf Effect to show that the new antagonist is serious business. They've proved that they can still do stories where the protagonist is a proper soldier and do it well, but why they don't actually do it for TV is a mystery to me. Not entirely... "The Man", by which I mean General Hayase and the other brass, were perfectly happy to pursue a negotiated peace with the Zentradi Army. They were just determined to do so from a position of strength via showing off the firepower of a Grand Cannon before proposing peace talks. If they'd tried it earlier it might've actually worked via shock and awe, but they waited too long and Boddole Zer concluded that Earth had to be destroyed.

I doubt it's anything to do with controversy... plenty of mecha shows, and even a fair few non-mecha shows lately, have had no qualms about depicting teenagers joining the military with all the consequences that entails. One might suspect that, considering how brutal Shingeki no Kyojin and Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans were to their teenage soldiers, more uplifting stories would be entirely welcomed. You'd think PMCs would actually be more taboo, since there are significant international legal issues surrounding the use of private security forces in a combat setting and at least 35 nations have banned the use of mercenaries in combat. With respect to military bureaucracy, the opposite is true... they actually acknowledge in Frontier that SMS is answerable both to the Frontier government and its New UN Forces because their job is to supplement the local military. That quickly gets handwaved and then ignored until late in the series when the New UN Spacy and Frontier government exercise their option to bring SMS under their direct control and essentially draft the entire SMS office into the local New UN Spacy garrison. Almost everything SMS Frontier Branch had was on loan from the local NUNS... the Low Rate Initial Production Block VF-25s they were flying, the Macross Quarter herself. Xaos in Delta also acknowleges on several occasions that they're subordinate to the local New UN Forces and the Brisingr Alliance government, and they have to resort to having Lady M wade in and exert her mysterious influence to get the New UN Spacy local staff office to back down (with disastrous results). Because the New UN Forces are out of focus in the shows themselves their organization isn't talked about much unless you go to the print sources, but they actually have a decentralized command structure. Each planet or fleet is effectively an autonomous state and responsible for raising, maintaining, and equipping its own local defense forces which operate under the auspices of the New UN Forces. The New UN Government maintains a standing military not tied to any one planet or fleet, which is the core/federal New UN Forces. The fleets/planets have treaty obligations as New UN Government members to honor requests for reinforcement or cooperation from each other and from the federal forces. Essentially, though it's not an exact comparison, the local mooks we've seen representing the New UN Forces in Frontier and Delta are the equivalent of National Guard reservists. Their organization is subordinate to the federal military, but able to operate as a stand-alone force. (One of the issues that pushed Windermere towards their 2060 war of secession was their reluctance to send the Aerial Knights to support the New UN Spacy in repelling a rogue Zentradi fleet.) As Ozma put it, the PMCs seem to be valuable mainly because their troops are technically expendable soldiers. If they snuff it, they're legally considered to have died in an accident and not combat, so it's less paperwork for the military under certain circumstances. (Considering the acknowledged Aesop of Frontier was one about corporations getting too powerful for their own good, it's an odd choice to make the protagonists corporate soldiers.) Dunno if that's necessarily true, given that the age of legal adulthood in Macross is established to be 17 and you can legally join the military as young as 15 (as Gamlin did). It's lazy writing, using the military's latest equipment not being quite ready yet to justify both using them as victims for the Worf Effect and justify having a PMC that was conveniently testing those same weapons for them do all the actual fighting. (You'd think the military would just repo the bloody things and get on with their jobs.) In Frontier, the only thing that kept the New UN Spacy out of the fight was that the VF-25 was like six months from mass production and they'd given SMS the Block 1 trial production units for testing. Same as in Delta, where the VF-31's slated to go into service in two years time and Xaos is testing it for them. With all the hoops they have to jump through to justify PMC protagonists, you'd think it'd be easier to just say "Ooo! Look! A NUNS Special Forces team!"

Oh, it's beautifully animated... the mechanical designs would be the standard OYW fare if not for the mountains of extraneous garbage bolted to their backs like some kind of junkyard Super Pack. The one big problem with Thunderbolt is that the story is an action-heavy but otherwise threadbare, barely-there mess that makes Delta look like Hugo Award material. Thunderbolt's story is deeply devoted to Gundam's "War is Hell" message (hence the brutality), but that's the only trick it has in its playbook so it all comes off as rather forced and gratuitous. As much as I'd like to see a Macross series that returns the protagonist focus to the actual military instead of suspiciously hypercompetent (SMS) or blitheringly incompetent1 (Xaos) PMCs, I'd find a Macross show that tried to sell itself on gratuitous violence even less watchable than Macross Delta with its apparent disinterest in the actual war being fought. That's just not what the Macross series is about... war is hell, but Macross is all about love, peace, and communication. Leave this guy's fantasies to The Show That Must Not Be Named. 1. AKA a realistic PMC, were it not for the way Macross Delta treats Xaos as designated heroes the audience is supposed to be rooting for even though they lose or at best draw every battle they fight in, botch every infiltration operation, cause civilians to get hurt by hindering a military-led evacuation, play directly into Windermere's hands for almost the entire series and make things immeasurably worse, and achieve less in 26 episodes than the New UN Spacy resistance does in part of a single episode yet still badmouth the military.

Yeah, I've had a few similar statuses show up on tracking for packages from Japan at my day job. "TOKYO INT V BAG 2" is an internal postal code for one of the international mail handling centers which process SAL and EMS packages, serving Tokyo Haneda international airport.

Depends when his birthday was, he could've been 17 at that time (which means he was a special entry candidate like Gamlin Kizaki). The one thing I keep wondering with this theory of yours is why? Leaving aside the fact that it's impossible to be in two places at once and all the other bits that don't work, what would he stand to gain from such a complex and pointless deception? Considering his service record and participation in foiling FASCES, the NUNS would jump at the chance to have him back. Why go to all the trouble of moving halfway across the galaxy and committing several different criminal acts including falsifying identity papers and committing perjury countless times by giving false information on enlistment papers and all the other legal documents he'd need to set up a life for himself. All it'd take is one halfway competent background check to land him in prison on a laundry list of felony charges and get him a dishonorable discharge. (We're almost certainly not getting a Delta sequel, Kawamori doesn't like doing direct sequels... so don't hold your breath.)

Actually, I overlooked an even more obvious, ironclad reason that Arad Molders and Hakuna Aoba cannot be the same person... their ages. From his official profile, Arad Molders is 33 years old in 2067. That means his date of birth is 10 January 2034, so Arad would have had his 12th birthday around the middle of the war with the Varuata army in Macross 7 at the start of 2046. The youngest you can enter the (New) UN Forces by special admission is 15 years old, and normal enlistment requires the enlistee be a legal adult (age 17+). Pilot training is a three year program, though highly skilled candidates can clear it in two. We know Hakuna Aoba was already a fully-trained, experienced UN Spacy special forces VF pilot assigned to SVF-473 in 2046... something Arad Molders would've been a minimum of five years, and more realistically eight years, too young to be. They really don't look alike, either, except that they have a slightly similar facial shape. Their hair color is different, parts to a different side, etc.

None were used in the series... I don't recall if the Aerial Knights trainees in the gaiden manga used them for their Sv-154 Svards. They always just refer to each other by name, and it seems only Keith and Hermann rate any kind of honorific (Keith-sama and Master Hermann respectively). Keith's title of "White Knight of Darwent" gets bandied about a fair bit, but it's not used like a callsign... it's a non-hereditary title passed down to each top ace of the Aerial Knights. (Since many of the Aerial Knights are nobles, but noble blood apparently isn't a requirement to join, I wonder if the title could pass to a non-noble like one of the Jussila twins?)

Arad Molders himself establishes that he was part of the New UN Forces garrison on Windermere before the planet launched its war of secession... so he'd have to be in two places at once if he were an alias of Hakuna Aoba's, since Aoba was still active in the Vanquish League after the events of Macross R. It'd also be rather strange that nobody would recognize that they're the same guy. For one, the New UN Forces ought to notice that a decorated veteran special forces pilot1 who'd taken an honorable discharge and returned to life as a private citizen before being involved in a high-profile terrorist incident was trying to re-enlist under an assumed name. For two, it'd be virtually guaranteed to fail since Hakuna Aoba was an interstellar celebrity thanks to his Vanquish League career and Arad Molders is an interstellar celebrity as the leader of Walkure's bodyguard detail. For three, there wouldn't be any reason for him to re-enlist under an alias since Hakuna Aoba didn't have a criminal record and was highly regarded by the New UN Forces and other high profile organizations like SMS. (It'd also be rather difficult for him to serve under Ernest Johnson in the NUNS, since Johnson wasn't a NUNS officer. Ernest Johnson was, at the time, a mercenary who was being retained by Windermere's government as a military adviser. He held that position right up until the start of the war when King Grammier dismissed him so he wouldn't have to fight his own people. He even wears an Aerial Knights uniform.) 1. He was a special forces pilot attached to the 37th Large-Scale Long-Distance Emigrant Fleet "Macross 7" during the Varuata War, and was involved in the planning of Operation Stargazer and the liberation of the Varauta system colony. Oddly, his squadron's name is in French for some reason... SVF-473 Étoile Filante, or "Shooting Star".

Since Hakuna Aoba was still active in the 2059 Vanquish season, wouldn't that require him to be in two places at once?

I'd attempted to avoid ever starting to collect Macross merchandise beyond books and other media, and was pretty darn successful at it until just a few years ago. Then Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy came out, and I fell in love with the YF-30 Chronos. Until that point, I'd only purchased one VF, the old Bandai snap-fit VF-2SS Valkyrie II kit. I mulled it over a bit and decided it couldn't hurt to splurge a little on my favorite main timeline VF design to date, and Mr March sped the blow by adding a second one to his existing order for me. Turns out that was the top of a particularly slippery slope... especially as I had a perfect storm of factors favoring starting a hobby like that: the recession was over, I had a lucrative set of new contracts, there had been a bunch of recent releases for designs I actually like, and my girlfriend's bad influence (she collects character statues). Now I'm looking into a third Detolf to hold this year's newest acquisitions (a VF-31F, Sv-262Hs, and Sv-51y) and there's a fifth VF joining the tiny squadron based on my desk at work (Hayate's VF-31J). I'm still quite picky about what I collect though, so I've only got about twenty VFs in total. I have managed to successfully get out of the Warhammer 40,000 hobby... though that escape was only ever meant to be a temporary reprieve. When the recession was at its worst, I'd decided to give the hobby up since I'm kind of miserly by nature and was coming over a bit paranoid that our main client would end up in bankruptcy. Turns out I needn't have worried... since they were the only ones who DIDN'T take some kind of government aid. Though, as a result, I dodged an expensive redesign of the entire faction I favor and a bunch of needlessly complex edition updates that are now being simplified. I'll probably pick the hobby up again once the dust settles after the launch of 8th Edition and the new codices for my factions have been released. (I've currently got, by 5th and 6th edition standards, around 2,800 points of Necrons and 2,500 points of classic 3rd Edition Dark Eldar.)

A thousand times NO. You'd think Hollywood would've noticed by now that every attempt to make a live-action anime adaptation in the west ends in abject failure, and usually ends up as either "our secret shame" (e.g. G-Saviour) or a standing joke (e.g. Dragonball Evolution) among the fans of the original work. At best, it's just mediocre enough to be a mainly commercial disaster like Speed Racer or Ghost in the Shell. Even the superficially flattering comparisons that were almost certainly used to pitch the idea ("like Firefly but successful") are kind of damning in hindsight.

There's a good set of views in the GERWALK and Battroid portion of the VF-31 Master File, though I'm afraid my scanner's busted again so I'm kinda SOL unless a cell phone picture will suffice...

An eyes-on count shows approximately twenty-two gun turrets of various sizes. 4 on each dorsal boom 2 on each knee joint 10 on the torso

Yeah, that'll do it. The default Android web browser on Android 4.4 and beyond is Chrome for Mobile, and earlier versions use a Chrome derivative based on the Blink engine. I've found if you use one of those setting sync features like Firefox and Chrome both have, the logins on one device seem to be portable to several other devices simultaneously. Using Firefox for Mobile on your phone may solve the problem. I think it's something with the IPS session manager.

Are you using different browsers on those devices (e.g. Firefox on one and Chrome on the other)? I had the same problem when I was using Chrome on one machine and the company-mandated nonsense that is Microsoft Edge on the other. When I switched to Chrome on both it stopped happening.

Personally, I'd say Fassbender did a more than competent job as both David and Walter... he really sold that uncanny valley Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? kind of robot, and as David managed to make his obsession with creation genuinely unnerving. It's not a lack of competent acting or a gripping story that ails Alien: Covenant and its predecessor, it's that the movie just can't decide what kind of story it wants to be and that Western directors really seem to have forgotten how to do suspenseful horror. Alien was a great horror film for precisely the same reason Jaws was: because you saw so little of "the monster". The way the shark and the xenomorph kill in a targeted but indiscriminate manner is scary, yes, but what made it a source of genuine horror was that creeping realization that the characters are trapped there with the unseen monster lurking nearby waiting for its chance to make a snack of someone. There are two guidelines that Alien sequels keep ignoring that have contributed massively to the "scariness decay" of the franchise: The more you see of the monster, the less scary the monster becomes. The more monsters there are, the less scary each individual monster becomes. Alien: Covenant would have been a much scarier, more unsettling film if the xenomorph and neomorph never appeared. They had a really good plot going with David's hubris and what he did to the Engineers in the name of disappointment and arrogance, and made the horrible mistake of making that psychological horror a B-plot in favor of a mediocre monster splatter flick revolving predominantly around jump scares. The same problem happened in Prometheus, where they wasted half the film on jump scares and trying to chew over some half-assed Aesop about religion at the expense of a plot about how humanity's creators had decided for their own unknowable reasons to destroy humanity with the most appalling weapons of mass destruction.

Now that's a shame and a waste. Ladies and gentlemen, Professor Rubeus Hagrid... The thing the Neomorph reminded me of most was, honestly, those creepy hairless cats that look like an ambulatory scrotum. IIRC, didn't Evangelion's creators explicitly refute that... saying that the alleged religious symbolism was pure BS, and they'd just thrown Christian religious references in there because it's a minority religion in Japan and sounds exotic as a result.

We've had them all in HD for a while now, actually... some of them, like DYRL?, have even had multiple remasters in HD. There've been multiple editions of several of them as well. Mind you, a single monolithic box set collection would be insanely expensive. Japanese media prices are steep in general, and they don't usually incentivize buying a box set over buying the volumes individually. If you look at many of the blu-ray editions of Macross titles released in the last couple years and run the numbers, it's about $63.50 per disc regardless of whether you buy a collected edition or the individual discs. An "all of Macross" collected edition would be several grand. Macross 7 alone was like $600 new.

Eh... that "perfect collection" wasn't a Macross release, it belonged to that one show we don't talk about on here. (Admittedly "perfect" was probably the single least accurate adjective Streamline Pictures could've applied to that hot mess. Not only did they not finish, the translation quality of the subtitled episodes they released consistently hovered between "poor" and "Chinese VCR manual".)