RavenHawk

From what I've seen, they listen, but they've already made their decisions and don't tend to change their minds.

I know I haven't read the last few issues, but in the summary,"The fight led to Miriya... unleashing Invid warriors on Macross City as a distraction..." Huh?

Here's hoping for some good pics (and that the Hargan and transporter are looking close to finished)!

You realize you're just making me wish that Kitz Concept would tackle the Alpha/Legioss that much more...

Finally watched the first episode (you need to be a member to watch the second). I'll start with this: I absolutely hate this animation style... hate it... but the dogfights looked pretty good (except for g-forces apparently not being a thing and stray gunfire not taking down buildings...). With that out of the way, I actually thought that the writing was pretty good. The story was decent, and is admittedly the type of storytelling I tend to enjoy. There were flaws, and I have my nitpicks, but overall I enjoyed it. The dialogue was actually a lot better than I was expecting. As for the mecha designs, I liked them. I thought they looked pretty cool and are nicely designed (especially the fighters, enemy mecha, and enemy soldiers). I agree that the designs are nothing groundbreaking and we've seen plenty of similar before, but I think that's largely because these types of designs have that "realistic believable" scifi look to them. Let's not forget the most important thing: David Tennant! Yeah, I'm on board.

I'm going to confess my ignorance, but I don't know any of the manga you mentioned in your first sentence (except Macross the First). Google machine, here I come! As for Blame!, I just read it about a week ago and enjoyed it quite a lot. However, you can definitely tell that it was his first work (well, except for the virtually unrelated short Blame (no exclamation point)). I liked it, and the world building, and the visual style, but some part of me is surprised that it has remained as popular as it has. It deserves to, don't get me wrong, but Nihei has gotten so much better since then! As for Gundam Thunderbolt, I can definitely see the issues you mentioned about the characters getting in my way of caring for it (as well as, let's be honest, the pompadour). I decided to chance it on the cheap, and ordered a used copy of vol. 1 that I found for a few bucks. Now, I don't usually go for the more lighthearted stuff, but Developers: Mobile Suit Gundam before the One Year War sounds interesting. I'm going to check it out. Thanks for the recommendation!

Has anyone here read Mobile Suit Gundam Thunderbolt? I tend towards the more scifi, especially with mecha, but have never read any Gundam manga. This one seems to have solid reviews though.

My solution: Have kids who have had no choice but to develop the same taste in movies that you have. Nine times out of ten, the movies that my lady doesn't want to go see are the same ones that my son is suggesting that we go see.

Thank you!

This one sounds interesting to me, but i'm having trouble finding much out about it online other than actual sites with scans that look slightly sketchy. Can you say anything else about what it's like?

Since there's an excellent thread about what current anime people are watching, and we have a lot of manga readers on here as well, I thought it might be informative to have a similar thread for that. Largely, this is selfish, since I never really read much manga (though I've been watching anime and reading comic books/graphic novels for decades), but stopped into a little shop in Boston on a recent visit and decided to pick something up to support the small business. I picked up Aposimz vol. 1 and really enjoyed it. I immediately ordered vol. 2 and flew through that one as well. For anyone not familiar with Aposimz, it's by Tsutomu Nihei (Blame!, Knights of Sidonia), and has a lot of the same elements that you would expect from him. There are things called gauna and heigus particles, though they're not the same thing as in Knights of Sidonia. This is typical of him, as he recycles the same names and a lot of the same concepts (like seed ships in at least three of his works), but they're always slightly different. Sadly, no Toa Heavy Industries, which I always enjoy seeing pop up in his work. On the other hand, the art looks very different. It is set on an ice planet, and everything is very white (apparently at the urging of his daughter). Story-wise, it's a quick and entertaining read (so far), though it feels more like a video game premise than a scifi manga epic. Without giving much away, the main character has to travel taking on lower baddies, building up to the bigger ones. It feels like levels of a game initially, but he puts some twists in it that make it entertaining and unexpected. That's it for my "current" manga reading. For older stuff, I'm now in the midst of a Nihei kick, so just read through Blame, Blame!, Noise, Abara, and am halfway through my second reading of Biomega (read it once years ago, and am now taking my time and enjoying the second reading). It's really entertaining, if you read his work in the order that he created them, to see his artwork and storytelling evolve, though they're always definitely his own style and have a lot of common elements. Biomega is by far my favorite manga... but I really haven't read much. Next up, I plan on working my way through Knights of Sidonia (closing out the Nihei phase, since I can't find Snikt! for a reasonable price, and enjoy reading hardcopies of comics and manga), and then reading Aldnoah Zero season 1 (I just watched the anime for the second time and enjoyed it a ton, so I figured I'd see how the manga, which I believe was based upon it, and not the other way around, holds up). What are other people reading?

I thoroughly enjoyed the book, and I find the movie entertaining every time I watch it. The two are two completely separate and unrelated entities to me.

Don't boycott them for tackling a less-popular figure that some folks have been asking for for years. Boycott them for trying to sell people on a lazy design. I'm not familiar with MEPToys. Has this person put anything out before? From the "shop" link, it only shows a Breetai listed as "coming soon". The sample looks pretty nice, but the transformation on the Logan looks very amateurish (that said, it may just be a very early "let's see how the parts need to most basically move" kind of thing).

They can't even keep their own names straight... I stand corrected, and apologize for my (good-natured, really) correction.

I think you meant the soldiers. Weren't the Enforcers big ones, same as the Inbit Garmo/Gamo? I think that Sentinel is using the same basic figure design as 1000Toys does for all of their 1/12 stuff (if someone knows otherwise, please correct me). Considering the variants that have been put out, modifying that basic design to fit Blame!, Biomega, G.I. Joe, and assorted Kamen Rider-style characters, it doesn't seem like a stretch to use it for a few different color variants of the soldiers/Protect Inbit, too. It just depends if they believe there's a market to justify the new add-on pieces.

Give it a try and let us know how it works out. In my personal experience, kit bashing makes sense if there is a specific part that you are looking to use on something different, or if there is a frame that you are going to remove parts from and replace with your own parts. In the case of the Matchbox Invid, it's pretty much all shell pieces that are screwed together. Since it looks like you're talking about replacing something like 3/4 of the shell pieces, I suspect it makes more sense just to do a new one from scratch. Something like a Kotobukiya frame with custom parts attached to it might be a good starting point.

I could see Arcadia doing it, but it seems unlikely to me that Bandai would tackle it without some reason for significant new and increased interest in the property. I'd love to see Arcadia take a stab at it, and think even Kitz Concept could do something interesting, in a relatively small scale. Personally, from what little we've seen, I actually like the stylized Sentinel approach.

Always always love the way the two look attached together...

The annoying part is that some of these designers (not all, by any means, but some of the ones that I've seen interviews with) take themselves very seriously, and think that they design robots and know how it's REALLY done... but, in reality, they're very talented CAD artists, but don't know any engineering at all.

What kind of a sadist are you, expecting us to read these a second time to look for Furmanisms? (and no, I didn't notice any the first time through, but I wasn't really looking; I was too caught up in how far his writing has fallen)

One of their designers (from a different MAAS toyline) said outright in an interview that he designs the look of the toy and how it should transform, and leaves it to the factory to figure out how joints should work, how parts should peg into place, and what tolerances to use. The quality of the figures and transformation completely depends on which factory they go with, and they switch between multiple different factories for different lines.

Full Disclaimer: It's been a long day, so I may be reading the Facebook page with a bit of a negative lens. Tekering, your post was polite and gracious, so my respect for that. On to my reaction: My read of their response pretty much lines up with what I said a couple days ago (I think... sorry if I'm misremembering). Their response to you is typical of what I've seen in the past. Most people only praise them on Facebook (and don't get me wrong, I have two of their products and LOVE THEM), but any time someone has pointed something out that isn't right, they just respond saying that they've thought it through already and what they are doing is the right way to go. My criticism isn't that they don't respond to people, it's just that they listen but don't hear.

That's the thing. When I was a kid, my neighbors had this toy. I remember folding the legs under it to try to simulate the hover tank mode. It looks like they are literally just taking this version, and adding in a couple details, and that's it. The benefits of modern toy engineering over mid 1980s toy engineering... just don't seem to be there in this design.

In all fairness, I think this is actually a pretty decent cover. I feel dirty admitting that.

Agreed. With MAAS' history, it'll be a good year or so before a product comes out, so I think a few extra weeks on redesigning the initial concept (and let's remember, right now all they have is some CAD models and renderings generated from them) wouldn't hurt the timeline. If you make a clunky mediocre toy, only hardcore fans will buy it. If you make a sleek, aesthetically pleasing toy with some innovative design and transformation gimmicks, then you can draw in people who wouldn't necessarily be hunting for a SC toy, but might just really like your design.