RavenHawk

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.

Minmei had character development?

I'm pretty those panels are from a different issue, like 5 or more months back. The good new mecha panels are a different artist, I think.

Thanks. Yeah, I saw the picture in the posting, and thought "That looks like a Machine Robo DX", but it wasn't until I got it in hand and transformed it that I realized, "Hey, that's Herr Fiend!" Either way, it was a fun little find, and it let me add a Matchbox Cyclone to my shelf without eating into the budget for the (hopefully soon) Yellow Sentinel. Oh, and I think I'm pretty "young" too. I had more Gobots (well, knockoffs even less expensive than the real ones) as a kid, but no DXs (those were approaching Transformers prices back then).

As I wait for new MOSPEADA (and Megazone) products, I've been slowly looking around at deals on old items to fill out the collection. I'd just like to say "thank you" to the few folks who still post items on eBay without looking online to see what they are. I just picked up this sweet "Matchbox motorcycle", and it even came with a "Bandai metal car". Perfect condition? Not at all... but for a whopping $5.50 (plus $3.50 shipping), I'll take it.

So... they're taking this thing in totally new directions, with increasingly less to do with what is commonly known as "Robotech?" All things considered, that may not be a bad thing... This reminds me a bit of when Furman took over the US Marvel run of Transformers, and started running the stories towards less of a direction of what was previously Transformers, and more as a springboard for his own original (or heavily modified) human characters. Anyone remember the Neo Knights? Furman was readying them to be their own series for when Transformers inevitably got canceled.

Their tank mode definitely looks off compared to the lineart. I know it's a boxy design, but theirs looks less... sleek, I guess. Too much legs just folded under it, not really collapsing into place... the gun/cannon looks too small and just sort of sitting on top, instead of partially nested in place, and the, uh, fold-out hover thingies (sorry) look too small too, or at least too small compared to the rest of the lower leg.

My only real nitpick here is with their statements about how they listen to the fans. In my VERY LIMITED experience with some of the products that MAAS has put out, while they are very active on social media, they also are convinced that they know best. So, they do "listen" to fans who are very vocally praising them, but input which doesn't line up with what they have already decided upon or which is more critical than glowing seems to get ignored. So, I guess they're a good fit for partnership with HG... (again, limited experience with them, so it might not speak to the specific folks behind this particular project)

Didn't realize it was going to last that long...