Sundown

Hah. Yes. The head unit is key. Hence the hate some have for Firevalks. And my personal ambivalence towards the SV-51. And a bunch of other Kawamori designs. It just doesn't fly if it's wearing a silly looking giant hat. Picky we are. -Al

True, but loose code can be fixed over time. What's even more vital is elegant and robust gameplay mechanics. A poor and unbalanced one is a disaster to unwind once you let it run a little while... ie. SWG. If the game design is actually pretty decent, it could be a winner. Anyone know how it actually plays? -Al

Lay off the American stereotyping, please. There's just as much "cultural inference" here with these constant assumptions about American stubbornness and gullibility that certain people seem to embrace at every opportunity. Ie. one that's really as critical and discerning about truth as they'd like to believe would also be also be a lot less willing to accept the common image of Americans as propaganda eating dullards at large. It would certainly be a nice guesture for those who levy criticism against the United States to practice some of the restraint and discernment they accuse Americans of lacking wholesale. This American, for one, realizes that the Lynch stunt was likely a big production done mainly for show. Propaganda exists both within the States and without--the latter often aims to paint Americans at large in some unflattering way or other at every opportunity. Everything, Lynch, Commie Phobia, and Terrorist Phobia becomes to them another reason to say, "Oh, poo poo, look at those silly Americans and their silly beliefs. It's a wonder they haven't blown themselves up already." There's hardly ever any pause to consider that perhaps their own ideas about Americans might be altogether silly and simplistic as well. The actual issues and the Americans involved are very often much more complex than that. Although it was the BBC that broke the story about the Lynch case not being what it seemed, American journalists also continued to probe into what had actually happened, their own willingness to accept the intitial story, and how the Army was using the story for its own gain. This quote says it best: it is "the story of how a modern war icon is made and perhaps how easily journalists with different agendas accepted contradictory self-serving versions of what happened to her." If Americans were so truly gullible, and quick to accept the official line, Michael Moore would not be the hit he is here. Of course most of his "facts" are tenuous connections and accusations with a gigantic leftist bent-- propaganda all its own. -Al

I dunno. I actually found it more disturbing when I thought that the person(s)? behind the costumes was female, with some weird creepy psychosis of wanting to become a real anime character. It just didn't seem like a sane thing for any female to do, for some reason, and rubbed me in all sorts of wrong ways. Now I hear it's a guy, it somehow all makes sense. It makes very sick sense, but sense nonetheless. -Al

Those would be 8 inch heels, mang! She's listed as 5' 9"!. She wouldn't be able to reach that height even by tiptoeing as high as she could. If that drawing's accurate, the other girls need to shop where she does then. Edit: Wait. Just realized my mistake. 5.97 feet is not 5' 9" or even 5' 10". She's close to 6 feet tall. So the drawing does look close to right-- she's slightly taller than Max, due the heels. -Al

Here, I'll attempt to summarize the floating rock sentiments. Floating objects due gigantic alien ships and their mysterious and massive technology = cool. Floating rocks because of naked human women singing, Pocahontas style with all the colors of the rainbow = corny. It's the presentation and aesthetics of the idea. One's not so hard to swallow, as it looks like technology, albiet one that we can't understand. They other looks corny, magical-- not just in effect but actual presentation and aesthetics, and we're left with confused attempts to explain it with "err, something.. to do with her like, alien blood and stuff" and lots of hand waving. Citing Clarke's law of "technology appearing as magic" doesn't dismiss things completely, because Clarke in his own fiction still attempts to explain the technology that would seem to appear as sorcery to primatives. It's a totally different approach from showing magic and having you suppose its technoloy. I suppose if it actually were aliens that were projecting some unearthly noise roughly correlated to song, causing the same effect of rocks floating, it wouldn't strike me as out of place. But if they took form scantily clad women and started singing tribal folk tunes and pulled something that looked like it came from a Disney flick, I'd still consider it corny and cheezy, and too "magical" for my tastes. Actually, to be fair, Adam was equally complicit. He saw that Eve seemed fine, shrugged off what God had explicitly said about them surely dying, and just sort of went "um, okay." Then he proceeded to blame the "woman You made me (notice the subtlely implied blame)" for it. The bible makes no qualms about pinning the responsibility of man's fall on Adam. -Al

Good point there, ewilen. Was a fan of Steel Beasts myself... and while all of the tasks could and were done automatically by simulated crewmembers, they were sometimes better done than they'd be in real life. Mainly because the computer already had all the answers and complete data available to it. It just needed to "fake" the process and delays involved in a human calculating and performing actions based on uncertain data and limited situational awareness. Other things you might actually do better yourself. But in either case, trying to do it all on your own was just overwhelming. Yet, in more simplistic games where the targetting data was laid out conveniently in pretty icons for you, where you have a perfect view of the battlefield and aren't required to expose yourself to incoming fire just to see-- and all that was left for you to do was move and shoot, you could certainly operate your "tank" as a single person. I hypothesize that's what OT would do, improve sensor technology and improve the presentation of combat data, abstracting away some of the complexity involved. And it'd apply to tanks as well. The use of multiple crew members then becomes reserved for even more difficult tasks, like moving while attempting longer ranged shots, or operating several cannons and engaging several targets at once, destroid or otherwise. -Al

I've decided. Although I may enjoy viewing M7 more than MII in isolation as a whimsical diversion, the fact that it smears my beloved SDF with all sorts of fruity ungoodness bears my greater and more significant hatred. The use of eye gouging designs is actually among the lesser of its offenses. The transformation of love and emotion into a quantifiable energy measurable by a meter, bottled by aliens as a refreshing afternoon beverage is its greatest. Boo M7. *checks the M7 box* -Al

I believe his point is that in an OT world we'd also have single pilot tanks, which takes away the argument that "tanks must be multi-crewed" and are thus at an inherent disadvantage. And the argument remains that if OT was available, we would probably be better off implementing it in tank or close-to-tank form. Still, multi-tank crews might be a good thing. We can probably get rid of the loader and commander with improved auto-loaders and wraparound displays. But having one person concentrating on driving while the other shoots is just a nice thing to have. A commander does provide the additional ability of being able to plan out the targets to engage in advance even as the gunner is focused on one target and working out the shot... but if targetting and situational awareness is significantly improved with technology, this advantage might also go away. Bye multi-crews. Oh wait... or not. See Mac II Monster. Destroids don't inherently forgo the need for multiple crew members. It really depends on the function and complexity of the unit involved. -Al

That's an interesting idea, although that's a lot of engineering just for a battroid mode on a heavy, slow, ground-borne unit with arguable usefulness. Armor should just avoid urban combat if they can at all help it, and be supported by troops if they can't. But being now easier to hit by being upright and blotting out half the skyline makes their support troops' jobs so much the tougher. Wonder if small scale exoskeletal armor might be useful in bridging the gap between armor and infantry in urban combat. They would be more mobile than tanks and be harder to hit, with the added advantage of being able to use building corners as cover. They would also be able to withstand small arms fire while supporting infantry who would be supressing and rooting out anti-armor squads. Of course the trick is finding a power source small and powerful enough. Yeah, ground pressure. I've heard it mentioned being one of the primary reasons multi-ton mecha just won't work. Again, multi-legged spider tanks would help with that problem, but I don't know if throwing a few extra legs would really be enough. Maybe if we gave them all giant clown shoes. -Al

The destroid's problem isn't so much as that it doesn't have sloping armor to deflect incoming rounds. It's just that it has a huge profile, being upright, with its main weaponry mounted on arms that would require it to expose at least a good deal of its torso in order to engage a target. Modern tanks take advantage of "hull down" positions, which uses hills as cover and exposes only the gun and a portion of the turret when firing. And even in open terrain, it has a significantly smaller profile. Ie. it's much harder to hit than something sticking upright. Sure, a destroid's fusion powerplant would allow it to carry better armnament and protection, but then it just makes you wonder why they don't slap it on a tank, upgrade its weapons and armor and be done with it. Okay, a destroid would theoretically be able to navigate terrain that tanks can't get at, but now it makes you ask why they don't also simply stick four legs on a tank, giving it newfound mobility while retaining all of a tank's advantages. This is why I love crab, multi-legged mecha, like the tank mecha in Patlabor or Appleseed. They make a case for giant robots and limbed vehicles without straining plausibility by throwing out everything we know about armored combat today. Finally, I suppose an upright HIT-ME mecha might be slightly more useful in navigating urban terrain, having a smaller footprint and all... and if it were agile enough, it could actually use upright building structures as cover while engaging, as human soldiers might. But it'd still be insanely easy to take down with smaller and more mobile anti-armor units, unless the sudden additional armor it can now carry far exceeds the progress of portable anti-armor weapons development. -Al

That character chart and their height numbers are all kinds of messed up. It lists Grobal as being taller than Claudia (who only measures in at 5' 9" by the numbers), but looks significantly shorter here even with his cap. And Roy is simply not 7' 1" in that guide chart, and isn't drawn that way most of the time. He looks about 6' 8" to 6'9" (sans hair). Then again, it could just be that Claudia's massively out of scale. It appears that they used Hikaru's hair as the marker for his 5' 8", and scaled her from there, while everyone else compares correctly to him without hair. Roy's own hair seems to be included as part of the measurement according to the drawing. Conclusion: Claudia's silly huge in that sheet, being drawn as 6' 5" O_o. And Roy's 7' 1" only including his massive do, maybe 6'7-6'9 tops. Or he's still drawn too short, as tall as he is. -Al

Okay, fair enough. I suppose young adults in Japan might have a different sense of aesthetics. But at the same time, all this -real-mecha-action seems to be targetted for them, too. I still say M7 was aimed at early teens with a nod towards older fans who might not balk at the super robot cheeziness. Okay, granted M7 gives a nod towards classic Sentai styled robots that a nostalgic older fan might appreciate as sort of an in-joke. But as far as I know, the Sentai aesthetic was always aimed primarily at children. -Al

While a higher level of maturity might a viewer see past certain aspects of M7's visual design in order to appreciate its more complex themes-- if it were actually made with this target audience in mind, then it would have offered designs that directly appealed to them. It's just bad form to force your target audience to bear visuals that are grating to their sensibilities, as some sort of test that deems them worthy to experience the other things you have to offer. Ie: It's bad form to make a show that looks like a corny kids cartoon, inject some more mature themes, then write off your target audience for not being "mature enough" because they dared to be swayed by the fact that your show looks like a corny kids cartoon. If M7 was made for a more mature target audience, then it's failed miserably. Its target audience would be the sliver of the population that's somewhat mature but yet remains unphased by designs most in their demographic would obviously find unappealing. It's a funny way to do things. My hunch is that M7 is aimed squarely at young teenagers. None of the core themes of M7 are beyond a young teen's comprehension. The level of writing just happens to be decent enough to hold the attention of a more mature viewer, especially if they had been a Macross SDF fan. The outlandish designs aren't there to test the sensibilities of a mature and refined taste, but simply to sell toys, cd's, and merchandise to kids and teens. And don't forget the fan service. M7 is a commercial grab at teens and younger children, with a nod towards older fans while leaning heavily on their established loyalty. It's a little of something for everyone, except that some of these everyones have to fight through lots of stuff that obviously wasn't made with them in mind. I'd like to think that I've matured somewhat through the years. Yet I don't recall a growing affinity for mecha with mammaries or corny alien monsters since SDF. If anything, Mac 7 makes me wince visually, precisely because of my maturing tastes. And it makes me shudder, because it treats emotional energy as a Pokemon-esque power meter and commodity. Sure, being more mature does allow me to sit through several episodes and appreciate the things it's got going... but it also allows me to be painfully aware that M7 wasn't made for folks like me. -Al

I can't decide. Mac 7 is vaguely watchable and entertaining when viewed, then immediately denied as being associated with any other property bearing the Macross name. Bit it's but fatally egregious because it is in the Macross continuity. It taints all I hold dear in Macross, and if taken with heavy seriousness as befitting canon, forces reinterpretations of the other Macross series and movies. Certain M7 fans have been forcing just this for years, except they see such retcon as the way it had always been intended. If M7 existed as a semi-alternate potential reality as does MII, I would probably be a lot more forgiving of it. It's more entertaining than MII in its better characters and writing. MII is just a bit of pretty, shallow fluff that doesn't deliver much beyond the first viewing. I wouldn't have as severe conniptions if it were MII that were part of the Macross continuity... as dissapointed as I'd be. But watching M7 with the mind that it's actually absolutely canon makes me pee fire. All hypothetical admiration I may have had for your pectorals are now summarily revoked. -Al

Err. I think the fact that the US has survived so many "collective psychoses" points clearly to the fact that the US is not a conglomeration of like minded, simple individuals as you paint. Time and time again, the US come to recognize its mistakes and move on. Luck or masonry seems to be on the US's side a lot. I'd argue that its the US's diversity of opinions, backgrounds, and its promotion of the public discourse of all ideas that allow the US to repeatedly recover from its mistakes. Sure, there have been nuts in government at one time or another and been able to hold sway for a moment, but this little thing we call "democracy" and the Constitution seems to yank the country back to cluefulness time and time again. Lucky maybe. But I'd rather give credit where it's due. I'm assuming that you're not actually an American, for you to so easily paint us all as bumbling simpletons prone to hysteria and ever under spell of propaganda. But if you actually lived here, you'd see that it isn't what you seem to believe. Different parts of the country, different demographics all have vastly different opinions... And around here at my office, it's all "Bush sucks this way" and "Bush sucks that way." They would be harsher critics of the current administration and ongoing "conspiracies" than you'd dare to be. Very often the United States is its own worse critic, and is the first to examine its own flaws and ways of thinking in a fair manner. There are public elements within the nation that are ever asking us to own up to our failings. It's only foreign nations that have the luxury of painting the US with some broad and critical brush. Err. This wasn't a "psychoses" on the part of the Russians. It actually happened. Western powers were actively attempting to contain, weaken, (and possibly eliminate) communism. Exhibit A: The Berlin Wall. Sure, it might be argued that Western Powers were trying to take credit for something that occured without their intervention (and no right historian would argue that), but why would they attempt to unless they had a very vested interest in it in the first place? The McCarthy Era just shows how eager we all were to see it happen. Why, I even saw the recently passed Pope as being given partial credit to the Union's downfall. I'm actually reading a book called "The Cost of Discipleship" by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, which I believe is his response to what he saw happening during the Nazi regime. Hitler was using some churches for his own ends, as they laid aside core Christian teachings and truths in eventual favor of a mildly Christian flavored concoction of beliefs that tolerated the most horrific of acts. However, the Christian faith's true message remained just the opposite: That none are really "good" even though we'd love to think we were. That we've all rebelled against our creator, just like the next guy... criminals, prostitutes, what have you. And that our sole hope lies in the person of Jesus, who was sent from God as a demonstration of what "good" truly is, and willingly took upon Himself the judgement we deserved. So its message remains that we're all in the same boat. And with that in view, we're to deny ourselves. To love our neighbors. Jesus went so far as to say that we should love our enemies. He wasn't very popular with people who would use religion for their own means. In the same vein, religious leaders like Bonhoeffer were Hitler's greater threats from within as he actively plotted against his downfall, driven on by his loyalty to the true message and faith-- he was executed in a concentration camp a few days before the camp was liberated by the Allies. I'd try and refrain from commenting on the irony here. But I'd fail. -Al

O_o ? Metal. Gear. Solid. 2 and 3. -Al

Er, now everyone's hating on Mospeada designs because HG's using them for the new Robotech series? Naw I just think the majority of us(including myself0 think Knight26 is a very capable spaceship designer who also knows his stuff as well. I'm actually surprised this is all happening. Whether it actually reaches fruition and becomes a full fledged series longer than sentinels is yet to be seen and I would be surprised. Hopefully it is good but again I've got a bad taste in my mouth due to HG. I'm sorry, but the new Robotech designs are pretty much Mospaeda designs, albiet tweaked a little. They don't become horrid simply because HG is now somehow associated with them. They may be unoriginal, but yes... I do call them ship designs. The only one that irks me is the "SDF-4", which doesn't look especially "SDF" in any way. I would wager that had Knight26 been hired by HG to do the new ship designs, and one of our resident members been responsible for Horizon V and new Shadow Alpha designs, we'd be saying the exact same thing, only in reverse. I'm not saying anything about the comparitive talents of HG's designers versus Knight26. But there is a bias around here-- whenever anything is associated with HG, it automatically becomes teh suck, while nearly anything from our own Macross World membership gets lauded with praise and adoration (much of it rightly deserved). But if the tables were flipped, the adoration would be quickly stripped away... until we find out that artist is actually an MW member, anyway. Like the artist who did some of the old Robotech comics way back. I do agree that most of HG's own efforts have been pretty sub-par. This one is the best they've put forth so far.

Agreed. I'd say to start developing problems with the symbiote in the first movie... Along with that build tension between Parker and Brock at the Bugle, even while the focus is on another villian, and be forced to get rid of it at the movie's end, as part of Peter Parker's character development. Maybe make it something he needs to do in order to defeat the villian, ending the movie as good old red and blue spidey. Then hint at the symbiote's rejection complex... or do without that and have it be a "surprise" of sorts in the next movie for watchers unfamiliar with the comics. Would work either way. I almost think it'd be better to stretch out the symbiote story across three movies, just so that we can end one movie with him beating the next villian as new and improved black spidey-- where all seems right with the symbiote and so we can get used to his new costume. Then a second movie where he's eventually forced to reject it-- contrasting with the first movie where he needed the symbiote to defeat the villian. Here he needs to reject it and rely again on his own spidey self in order to triumph. And finally a third movie where it and Venom come back to bite him, playing on the theme that while he struggled in the last two movies with dependency on the symbiote, it was the symbiote who truely needed him. Black Spiderman was the Spiderman in the comics for quite a while. It'd be nice to see that treated as part of Spiderman's identity, and as something more than a one-flick gimmick. And no Carnage please. -Al

Just more food for thought... Good argumentation does not necessarily turn "opinion" into "fact". And opinions still require evidence and backing to remain valid and coherent as sound opinions. Without such, these opinions become nothing more than baseless assertions. Opinions that have been argued coherently are valuable, even in a discussion where fact cannot be arrived at with absolute certainty-- Ie. in discussions on politics, religion and philosophy. -Al

What if... Spidey picks up the symbiont in THIS film, and gets to prance around as black spidey, while fighting whoever they've got him set up with-- setting up for a showdown with Venom in the next? I can dream. -Al

Yeah. Even odder that this hadn't occured to me until just now. Fire Bomber and its music is in reality the antithesis of everything Basara and Mac 7 preach-- Formulaic, commercialized pop music for a tv show for the purpose of improving ratings, selling cds, and moving toys. Backed by underage fan service. Fronted by a lead idol that's as "fabricated" as they come-- who sure doesn't write his own songs. Oh sweet, delicious irony. That's not the first time I've heard that this week. Dare to dream. Really. Just dare also to be whacked over the head with the paddle of Reality as we all point and laugh. -Al

Err. The prequels are the "same old crap". But even then that's debatable. The OT is the "original old crap". -Al

I think it's a big reach to apply Mac 7-isms and philosophy to real life, as if it really were the way things actually worked-- when Mac 7-isms are just again one particular creator's musings about culture, emotion, and creation as we know it. Trying to make Mac 7 itself "real" by supposing that emotions themselves are some quantifiable medium-- and that music and poetry's influence on others is directly due to emotional energies injected to it by its creator-- just doesn't match up well with how things seem to work in real life. Yes, there is a correlation between an artist putting his soul into something, and his audience being moved by the outpouring of his being. But it's not direct. Someone who just goes through the motions can often move others if the performance and content of a creative work just happens to resonate with them. Ie. most pop music. And conversely, someone who bears his soul in song might be totally unbearable to most others, because of thier lack of musicianship or because their style just doesn't speak to them. One is affected by a song partly due to the artist's craft, partly due to a listener's own tendencies to find meaning in it, as well as the artist's ability to express, and sometimes even the artist's ability to fake it. I find it ironic that ideas presented in Mac 7 are being hailed as how things actually work, and being used to define "real" music from the soul versus commercially crafted fluff-- when Mac 7's own J-pop really falls into the same category as Britney Spears. It's sugary pop music crafted to evoke simple emotions, push an image and sell merchandise. Sure, it's not focused on sexual titilation, but then again, Mylene and all her fan service was put there for a reason. One wonders if Mac 7's music production would actually have been vilified by the fictional character it's attributed to, because it really sounds like the usual stuff from yet another commercially crafted, formulaic J-pop band. Not to mention that no real Basara exists. -Al

It's was a joke. Said so later in the thread. Still had me snickering for a good whole though. -Al