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JB0

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  1. JB0
    Space folds: they work like they need to.
  2. JB0
    I'm actually curious where the first actual description of how a space fold works actually was, though I don't doubt you in the least. Given the amount of depth the series has had in background material over the years, it was probably well before Frontier made fold mechanics an actual plot point. That was just the point at which an anime-only audience was exposed to these mechanics. To an audience without access to the voluminous supplementary material, a space fold usually appears to be flying through fold space. Certainly, though, the name "space fold" implies more than that, and the infamous first fold did look like a portal, with the sunny sky over the ocean visible where the Macross defolded, as though sunlight was still pouring through. But on the other hand, we know that the trip (normally) takes measurable time to the passengers inside the fold, so it isn't just a portal(and travel within the fold is illustrated as chromatic aberration in the original series, and a trippy CG rainbow tunnel in Plus). Also, rather than a visible portal, we see a light show on most folds. This creates the implication that there's actually different KINDS of fold. Or that the fold from Earth to Pluto was embellished for artistic effect, or that it behaved differently because it was a clear malfunction of the system, or... Too many words starts now! Ill-informed speculation: The big problem, to me, is that the "exchange of a volume at each end" explanation doesn't work well when the defold is non-synchronous. It causes a problem in one of two ways. 1. The volume of space that a ship folded to will arrive at the place it left some time after the ship gets there. Best case, it arrives instantly whenever the ship defolds. So there's essentially an undetectable mine sitting there where the vessel launched from, just waiting to go off at some indeterminate point in the future(a very long time in the case of, say, the Megaroad). Admittedly, this is a really good reason to not do folds in atmosphere, in addition to "we're hauling a huge bubble of atmosphere, ocean, and island with us". You'll do a lot less damage if a block of mostly-empty space suddenly drops onto an innocent vessel cruising through a place you folded out of years ago. ... 2. If the volume at the defold location arrives instantaneously while the ship takes decades to defold, you've created a trivial time travel mechanism, as the volume from the destination will arrive when the fold is initiated rather than when it is completed. In an illustrative example, the Megaroad's "destination volume" has ALREADY arrived at Earth even though the Megaroad herself won't be swapped into that space for many decades. She has pulled a chunk of space from the future into the present at the instant of fold initiation. Since a fold swaps equal volumes, the transit is obviously bidirectional. Some unfortunate soul caught without warning in a ship's defold location will find themselves flung backwards through time into the past. Figure out how to start yourself at the "defold" side and travel to the "fold" side, and you can go back in time at will. This shouldn't actually be hard, since the same fold drive generates both openings, apparently simultaneously. The protoculture were horrified enough by the prospect of time travel to cover an entire planet with self-replicating murderbots to make sure no one actually DID it after they built a time machine(as is typical of the protoculture, this was in lieu of converting the time machine into a black hole). It seems probable that they wouldn't leave everyone with a potential time machine just sitting in their ship's engine room. Warning! Unfounded non-canon explanation! No one should take this as fact! Personally, I think it can be cleaned up consistently, though I doubt anyone writing for the franchise cares what I think. A fold opens a portal into fold space as a ship enters the fold, and a portal out of fold space as a ship leaves the fold. Within fold space, all matter moves at a constant velocity. For undisturbed fold space, that velocity is ∞(or so close it doesn't matter). A fold in such conditions is, in fact, instantaneous and the fold just looks like a portal from point A to point B. When fold space is stressed, that speed goes down, and a ship spends a measurable time traveling through fold space before arriving at the destination. In those scenarios, a fold just looks like a portal into fold space, because both portals are not open simultaneously, so you just get the flashy light effect instead. And from THAT perspective, a better fold drive works like an improved suspension on a car, in that it allows faster travel over worse conditions. And the "zero-time" fold drives are just an ideal suspension that allows travel at maximum speed under all road conditions(I believe such a car is called an airplane). A fold fault in this analogy is just an extreme stress in fold space. Completely pointless sidenote: I find it interesting that fold faults and fold-based time travel both wound up being present in the Robotech novelization years and years ago. I am pretty sure it was wild coincidence, but it is interesting nonetheless.
  3. JB0
    Yeah. Blasting Again did it first, but it was really just namedropping Eve. Who died offscreen before the game started, as did Jason. Zero, I feel, did it harder, though Zero Eve is not the novelization Eve. The first world of Zero 2 seems an overt homage to the origin of Novel Eve and Sophia 3. The novelization of Blaster Master had a LOT of elbow room for improvization, as the manual story leaves gaping holes. There's no explanation how we go from "chasing after a pet frog" to "driving a jumptank in a one-man war against the Plutonium Boss", and the novel wrote a big sci-fi story to fill in the gaps(chasms, really). Probably the most fun Worlds of Power book to write, since there was so much blank space. I think that's why it is best-remembered of the series. ... Kinda wish I still owned it, actually.
  4. JB0
    Fun story: The original Blaster Master/Metafight is actually fairly influential. It did poorly in Japan, but while japanese GAMERS didn't notice it, japanese DEVELOPERS did. Before Blaster Master, games had solid color backgrounds and crude chunky sprites with two-frame animations. After Blaster Master, detailed backgrounds made from unique tiles and detailed sprites with relatively lavish animation became the norm. As a modern game, it has some warts. There's limited continues and no save mechanism in a relatively large metroid-em-up, which I consider a serious issue even for the time. There's also the fact that destructible blocks reappear when you pause. You can actually get permanently stuck by pausing at the wrong point. Other pain points it is debatable if they're actually a problem. Some actually carry forward to Blaster Master Zero. (The easy-come, easy-go nature of powerups for your on-foot gun goes straight back to the 8-bit days, though the weapon guard is new for Zero and makes for much less suffering.) As far as Blaster Master Zero goes, I'm afraid I can't run out and buy it. While I adore what Inti Creates has done with the series, and the sheer amount of Blaster Master/Metafight love they have dumped into it(even making weird quirks from localization changes into actual plot points*), I've already bought the game... *sigh* four times. I originally got it on 3DS, because it was that and Switch. I didn't own a Switch at the time and it was thrilling to have a new Blaster Master game that was ACTUALLY GOOD(and wasn't a reskin of a Bomberman spinoff). After Zero 2 came out, I bought Zero 1 again so I could have both of them on Windows, where I prefer to play and where my low-res chunky-sprite game can stretch it's legs on a giant screen with literally millions of pixels. VERY important that each pixel be the size of my fingertip so I can appreciate all the subtle details. When Limited Run Games announced the fancy box with both games and soundtrack CDs and pewter tanks and crap, I bought it a third time so I'd have a permanent copy and some cool trinkets. (Inti Creates actually announced Zero 3 shortly afterwards, so my complete box set ceased being complete before it even shipped. LRG did a very good job making the Zero 3 box extend the 1+2 box.) And then I imported the Zero Trilogy set from Japan because it had voice acting and I am a shameless consumer whore. *So yeah, one thing I was really curious about when they announced Zero was if it was going to be a remake of Metafight's "alien space empire attacks alien planet Sophia III and Kane Gardner fights back with a prototype jumptank named Metal Attacker" plot or Blaster Master's "Jason's frog got giant and fell in a hole on Earth, then he found a jumptank named Sophia III and started shooting everything for some reason" plot.
  5. JB0
    It really seems like this was designed from the start as a crossover toy in the GI Joe toyline, and it has had the misfortune of being sold as a Transformer instead. I think this is cool, I don't mind the scale(in fact, I consider being GI Joe-scale a plus), but it needs to be Transformers first and GI Joe vehicle second. Megatron is built like a GI Joe vehicle toy, and that's where the problems lie.
  6. JB0
    I really love the look of the teched-up Mazinger toys. Add a bunch of panel lines and vents and they really pop.
  7. JB0
    My thought is that waether brontosaurus is "real" or just an apatosaurus with the wrong head, Sludge was based on that wrong-headed apatosaurus, not a "proper" apatosaur. Thus "brontosaurus" is still a legitimate label for the character regardless if it is accurate for the bones in much the same way that the vertical, tail-dragging tyrannosaurus is right for Grimlock while wrong for science. ... Or we can just sidestep the issue and call him a "sauropod".
  8. JB0
    The other scene that stuck in my head was the school bus in the lake. The writers want us to think the kids were trapped in the bus, but it is VERY hard to be trapped in a school bus. The children are banging on windows that have clearly labelled emergency exit levers on them(and open inward), the water forces the front door open, Clark leaves unnoticed through the rear emergency exit, and there's trapdoor exits on the roof. NOBODY was trying to leave the bus or organize an evacuation of it. If anyone died because they couldn't get out of that bus, it is only because they were too stupid to live. Dumbest thing I've seen in a movie since the live-action GI Joe had a collapsing base with ice chunks falling down through the water. ICE FLOATS. This theme is repeated later in Metropolis when people are running from the... was it a mining laser? ... thing. They ran thirty feet from an expanding threat, turned around to take pictures and stream video, then turned and ran again as it got closer. Like everyone just forgot it was coming for them until it got too close.
  9. JB0
    Oh, that would be gloriously evil of them. Honestly, if I were Hasbro, I'd just swim in my vault of gold all day give up. Frenzy and Rumble would only be sold as a two-pack, and I wouldn't identify which is which on the packaging.
  10. JB0
    I blame Harmony Gold, if only for old times' sake.
  11. JB0
    They Uncle Ben'ed Pa Kent, and for bad reasons. The message was "with great power comes great responsibility to keep your head down and don't make waves". ... And then the dog Pa Kent was holding escapes the tornado, demonstrating that Pa Kent had plenty of time to escape without the aid of superpowers anyways. The entire movie is full of crap like that.
  12. JB0
    "Rumble(Blue)" Man, I love that the arguments over color schemes for these two have gone long enough and fierce enough that THIS is the packaging label they need to use.
  13. JB0
    That was me, actually. I like your follow-through, though.
  14. JB0
    Next Macross straight-up stars Hatsune Miku.
  15. JB0
    Even if it didn't work, the zentradi might would've been stunned briefly by the audacity of someone equipping a stationary planet to do a death blossom.
  16. JB0
    It didn't fail to blow the city councilmen away either.
  17. JB0
    And a video about the making of Lore lore would be Lore lore lore.
  18. JB0
    This is the first thing I've heard that makes me interested in this film.
  19. JB0
    They're more of a force of nature in terms of scale and predictability. You live in California, you just accept that the ground moves and sometimes houses fall down. Stuff happens. You live in Oklahoma, you just accept that sometimes thunderstoms get out of hand and the wind might throw a car through your front door before throwing your roof into the neighbor's yard. No biggie. You live in the Macross universe, you just accept that a hundred thousand flying pickles manned by millions of thirty-foot soldiers sometimes fly in and shoot up the town. It's just one of those things.
  20. JB0
    They WERE, but I think they're being ignored now. Honestly, I'm here for the adventures of an intrepid band of explorers going on thought-provoking adventure, with occasional ridiculous detours to the Tribble-verse. And the Enterprise is one of those characters. When the original 1701 blew up on the TV(I was too young to see Search for Spock in theaters), it was like one of the other members of the cast had died to bring back Spock. When the 1701-D went out on the big screen(I WAS old enough to see Generations in theaters!), it was a big deal, though overshadowed by Kirk's death. But Kirk almost immediately came back in the novels, the Enterprise-D stayed dead. ... And an entire era died with her, as the ships that followed were of a more militaristic bent. The -E felt like a warship, and it didn't help that we were introduced to her in Star Trek: The Action Movie. If an Enterprise is going to die, it deserves to die onscreen.
  21. JB0
    Warp faults are sort of a thing, actually. One of the NexGen episodes(Force of Nature seems to be the title) they found out high-warp travel damages the boundary between realspace and subspace, and can actually cause it to tear open so subspace spills out into realspace.
  22. JB0
    I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess that the evil King Koopa has kidnapped Princess Toadstool Peach(fiiiiiiiiiiiiine).
  23. JB0
    I've known about Mario's jerkface side for years. Donkey Kong Jr tried to warn us all.
  24. JB0
    Hey, that was the second-biggest movie about dinosaurs in 1993! I actually saw it in theaters because Jurassic Park was sold out.
  25. JB0
    Tell him you have the Mario movie at home, and pop in the DVD of THE Mario movie.
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