Apollo Leader

I haven't had the chance to play the Crackdown demo, but word so far on it sounds favorable. One of the guys who created the GTA series headed this up so it should have potential. Of course the first round of copies of Crackdown will let you get access to the Halo 3 beta, so extra bonus!

I'm in the same boat there with ya. After the hyper fruitiness of Earth Girl Arjuna and of course Macross 7 (I have not fully watched Macross Zero yet to make a final judgement), I remain skeptical where the great Floating Head will take Macross next...

Though it's pricey for its size, I'm moving forward on getting one of these bad boys this week. It's been two decades since the 1/3000th scale Macross toy and it's nice that the DYRL SDF-1 is finally getting a fully transformable toy/display model like this.

Something long forgotten about... Several years ago (2003 to be exact) when there was plans for releasing Zeta toys and figures in the US, 7.5" size figures were shown at the New York Toy Fair and I believe other shows. Though the US Zeta toy release never happened I wonder why the 7.5" figures were never released in Japan?

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The Exploitation of Eddie Guerrero Wrestlecrap's annual Gooker Award, which is voted by readers of the site, went to the WWE's exploitation of Eddie Guerrero's death over a year ago. Here's the text from the site:

It took over an hour after the registration went up, but I was able to get in on the "Rule of 3" registration. Guess I'll find out next week or so if I made it aboard!

Just finished it a little bit ago. All things considering I thought it was an okay flick... okay as in B-rated, Saturday afternoon, popcorn movie "okay". Unlike Van Damme's Street Fighter, Doom, or Super Mario Brothers, I don't regret having watched it. Then again, I didn't spend a penny to watch this! Since this has gone the direct-to-video route I would strongly suggest that the distributors work a deal to put this up for downloading on XBL Marketplace. Since DOA has made Xbox its home for over the last 5 years now, it would make perfect sense.

Just a reminder that the Halo "Rule of 3" promo started today. Basically play 3 hours of Halo 2 on your 360 during today through Friday then be amongst the first 13,333 to register at http://halo3.com on February 5th and you will secure a chance to be part of the Halo 3 multiplayer beta. Looks like I may have to give up GOW for a few hours. Then of course you could go out and get Crackdown in a few weeks.

In the case of Zeta, it was somewhat understandable for the soundtrack changes to the opening and closing credits, but its turning out that some of these Japanese companies and producers are real douche bags. Remember when the Mobile Suit Gundam TV series was released here in the US over 5 years ago? It was bad enough already that we were getting it as an English dub already, but Tomino in his infinite wisdom thought the US market was "too good" to have the "Doan's Island" episode as part of the release. Then on top of that after the third DVD release, they replaced the original opening and closing credits with what was used on Cartoon Network's run of Gundam. The huge majority of people who would have been interested in seeing the original Gundam TV series would be "purists" and old school fanboys; all that Bandai Japan caused to happen with this release more then went out of the way to tourque these fans. About 4 years ago I had the opportuinty to swap some e-mails with Keith Rhee who was the original founder of the Gundam Project and was working for Bandai at that time. He pretty much told me that Bandai Visual there in Japan and a lot of these other anime producers in Japan are totally in the dark about what it is that the anime fan base outside of Japan (especially the US) want. Because of the lack of a complete Gundam TV series on DVD outside of Japan, fans have had to go the bootleg route. Bandai Japan was so incredulous about the subject matter that reps from Bandai USA actually went out and snatched up a bunch of bootleg Gundam DVD's and dumped them in Bandai Japan's lap to prove a point! Still 5 years later, we have yet to see the original MSG the way it was meant to be saw and heard. As someone who has only watched a few minutes of Gunbuster from clips off of the Internet, the apparent changes that have been done to part of Gunbuster's soundtrack obviously won't effect me hardly at all. But to those like Macross World's own Noriko Takaya who has been a die hard fan for a very long time, he has every right to be unhappy with the changes since has to do with the tampering of something he really likes - the total production - audio and video - of Gunbuster. Anime is an enthusiast based industry and a lot of these companies, either in the US or Japan, need to relaize that. Though I have not seen Gunbuster in its entirity, I myself am a bit of a prefectionist and a purist and when I get my Gunbuster DVD set in a few weeks, I would prefer to see, and hear, exactly the show as it was originally meant to be seen and heard. (If this revised soundtrack was an optional track on the DVD in conjunction with the original, I would have no problem with that).

A lot of live action and animated films utilize the same sound effects and sound bits that come from the same libraries. Gunbuster has been available in the US since the 90's so I extremely doubt there would be an issue now.

Haven't and probably won't, but I did download the demo. Also got to get to work on Lost Planet. Also want to get back to DOA4, Over G Fighters, Chromehounds, and Lego Star Wars II... choices! Other then briefly sticking in COD2 late in December, I have only been playing Gears non stop since after Thanksgiving. Been so obsessed with getting all its achievements and it's just been so fun to play! I have spent some time with plenty of the XBLA games I have. Heavy Weapon and Assult Heroes I highly recommend.

Last night I got the "Tubes" achievement so I now have 48 of the 49 achievements at GOW. Right now I believe only 100-200 people have gotten all 49 while only a few thousand have gotten 48. Since I'm at about 2,800 kills right now, at the rate I'm currently I should have the final achievement sometime this spring. I'm still enjoying the game so I think I have the energy and determination to do this. But I probably will be going back to some of my past games like COD3 and GRAW and get those beat through.

I didn't recognize him... that is totally awesome! So there were two Robocop alumni last seaon! The guy who plays Tom Lennox, Peter MacNicol (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_MacNicol), looked familiar so I looked him up and it turns out this is the guy who was the European sounding museum curator in Ghostbusters II! To make 24 more interesting, they should have these actors reprising their most famous/infamous roles... Peter Weller as Robocop gone bad, Peter MacNicol as Dr. Janosz Poha, Sean Astin as Samwise, Lou Diamond Phillips as either his character in the Young Guns movies or Stand and Deliver, and so on and so forth. Of course Jack Bauer would turn out to actually be the vampire from Lost Boys explaining his near invincibility!

On the F-8 episode dealing with the dogfight where one Crusader took on like four MiG-17's and two MiG-21's in a 10 minute dogfight, after that Navy pilot had used up all his Sidewinders it alternately showed the Crusader either with all four Sidewinders loaded or it would show not only the missiles gone, but the pylons gone, too! Obviously they are trying to recycle some of their CG work, but hopefully this is a detail they will pay more attention to in any future productions. Otherwise awesome show. Even cooler that one of the pilots they have had on the show, Steve Ritchie (last Air Force ace), I have met twice in the past.

...and they're even using stock footage from Top Gun... about 2/3 of the way through the second video, you see a "MiG-28" F-5 exploding. http://www.sinodefence.com/airforce/fighter/j10_video02.asp

I remember someone giving me a hard time about using the Hammer, but I didn't see who it was that was making the comment. Don't worry, I've had people talk much worse smack and send me some nasty messages just because I was kicking their @$$ at Gears, Halo 2, etc.!

They showed several episodes yesterday afternoon (Saturday). Awesome show!

Actually it was that SpaceHarpy and "gir and pig" that seem to be cleaning up the place the last few games, but then again i wasn't doing too bad myself. But it was well past 2:00 AM my time so I was starting to get a little tired. Anyway, it was great to meet both of you guys online and I would like to try orchestrating having a bunch of us Macross Worlders play some Gears again in about two weeks or so. I'll try to throw out an exact date and time further in advance so we can try maximizing who can play.

I didn't realize it was you that had the crying kid in the background. Still it was great that you joined us.

For the late guys I'll definitely stay on. For Oihan, Sarge, and anyone else, would you guys like to move things back two hours? Otherwise I think we'll go ahead and start at 8:00 Central. We can just make sure to go for 19 round matches to help stretch things out.

That'll be 2 hours after our intended start time, but we'll see who's still playing. If anything, I'll try to meet up with you. Again regarding tonight, I'm going to start a player match in which I'll initially set all the slots to private right before 8:00 central. From there I'll start the process of sending individual game invites to everybody.

Since the good old AIM-120 was being talked about again here, I decided to do some online searching about the AMRAAM. Low and behold I discover for the first time that "Slammer" has been a popular name for the missile. But after 25+ years of the good old AIM-120 being around, the missile has never recieved an official name like Sparrow, Sidewinder, Phoenix, Falcon, etc. It's very unique in that the program accronym for the missile has been its official name. Does anyone know if there was every an effort to get a real name for the AIM-120 or was it finally decided that AMRAAM would be its true name?

Just a reminder 8:00 central time tonight, Gears of War action!

I wish some of you would use your Macross World ID's for your Gamertags! That would make life so much easier! Anyway Oihan (Ashmedai), Mechafan (TechGhostR6), Chowser (Sarge051), and Godzilla (Tsoumeister) are currently on the interest list. Hopefully we can get MilkManX (nice guy to play with online) and Pharohman to play too. Unless something comes up in the next 24 hours, everyone should have their copies of GOW fired up right before 8:00 PM Central (otherwise 9:00 eastern, 7:00 Mountain, or 6:00 Pacific).