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JB0

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Everything posted by JB0

  1. JB0
    Aren't the FAST boosters also vectored? They could angle them so it's off-axis thrust to counter the rotation. Inefficient, sure, but in my mind the FAST packs were a retrofit anyways, so those limitations are understandable.
  2. JB0
    (And if they aren't locked at 30FPS and with a max resolution of 1920x1080)
  3. JB0
    I think without tan looks far better, but a full-body tan would be better than either option. Your mileage may vary.
  4. JB0
    You forgot "lazy ports of console games six months after everyone else finished them" and "weird 'things' made by one guy in his garage that no one actually wants." Oh, also "japanese porno games."
  5. JB0
    Likewise. I don't regret watching Mac7. I have very mixed feelings about it, and think it could've been done far better with mostly slight changes, but overall I enjoyed the run.
  6. JB0
    Score one more for DYRL. There's some crazy attention to detail in parts of that movie.
  7. JB0
    Absolutely! He counts DOUBLE.
  8. JB0
    Also seems to be near a ridge facing the sun, which is casting a shadow across it. Basically, it bounced from a nice landing spot to darn near a worst-case scenario.
  9. JB0
    Oh, I realize I'm being unfairly critical, but... it still bugs me.
  10. JB0
    Well, in fairness, flying in space is a very different situation than flying in an atmosphere, which makes it harder to give an operational time limit. Your controlled flight time is going to be WILDLY different depending on if you're going in a straight line or maneuvering. You could run out of fuel just parked twenty feet off the ship's bow doing an infinite series of rolls with no forward thrust. And when you run out of reaction mass, you don't stop flying. You just lose all control over that flight. The whims of gravity are far more fickle in space than on Earth. That's honestly something that bugs me about Macross. Valks don't fly like spacecraft, they fly like airplanes. Heck, just showing the main engines unlit sometimes would go a long way towards making me happy(since constant thrust gets you constant acceleration, not constant speed). I can accept the rest as Valk computers being programmed to make the atmospheric-to-space transition easy for the pilot. That actually makes a degree of sense, though it's an inefficient use of limited reaction mass.
  11. JB0
    It's a super robot show. In general, I don't watch them for plot. Until we get to the american-original episodes, where it's definitely him and not a repurposed twin brother. Then why does she show up later? Right, because they wrote an entire second arc for Lion Voltron. But perhaps the most notable Golion/Voltron difference is that the mice don't get their own robot in Golion. If Harmony Gold had commissioned an extra 36 episodes of SDF Macross from Studio Nue, I think we'd all look at Robotech a little kinder. (And I DO give HG credit for trying to NOT sanitize the shows that made up Robotech, though I feel they ultimately made a huge mis-step by trying to present all three shows as a single story instead of three unrelated shows united under the Robotech brand.) In any case, I ultimately view Voltron and Golion as two separate things. They diverge very wildly very rapidly. But ultimately, the main draw here is nostalgia, and I grew up with Voltron, not Golion.
  12. JB0
    *clicks link* Symphoge- wait, that's Chris?! Outfit threw me, it's wildly out of character for her. In-continuity, I'd REALLY like to know how they got her to wear that. That facial expression is dead-on for any possible circumstances, though. It's her transformation crystal. And... apparently the lanyard broke? That catch musta took some quick thinking.
  13. JB0
    I think those are his robot custodian/bodyguards, and his parents died before the show started. He's probably the wealthy heir of some huge technology firm. Waynestarkco or something. He bought a Nyan-Nyan franchise basically on a whim, like that time Howard Hughes tried to buy Las Vegas. Hey, we already said anything goes because he has no established story. You can't prove the company that built those Petite Cola machines didn't have anything more advanced.
  14. JB0
    A. It's NOT a personal exchange, though. And while WEP would likely have ignored it before(just like they had been), now they can't really. If these things show up, they know who made them. And they already told them "you need to stop that, this is our guy you're cloning, and that didn't work out so well for King Zarkon." So Mad Toys can't even claim they thought they were good. A small run sold one at a time to individuals would not be ceasing and desisting(nor nearly as profitable, if at all). They'd basically be hanging a big neon sign out front that says "So sue me already." And WEP WOULD sue, not because they WANT to, but because they can't afford NOT to. Basically, once legal documents get involved, a lot of avenues you COULD have safely pursued before suddenly become closed to you. B. Actually, HG COULD go after you for making your own manufacture-on-demand VF-1 and selling it with PayPal. Well, they'd have as much standing as they did with blocking VF imports. Whether that's none at all or totally in the right is another matter entirely. Perhaps more pertinently, Games Workshop has gone after people for EXACTLY what you describe with modified Warhammer 40,000 figures. Not even selling, just putting the models out there for free. And in what is technically described as "a serious dick move", they also went after people who were making original figures not directly based off any GW product, because they were made in the Warhammer style. Which was true, but not really a legal stance. As always, whoever has the deeper pockets wins, but it cost GW a lot of good will in a situation where they DIDN'T actually have to do anything. Even if they did have trademark concerns on the modified units, the original designs were totally clear(I'm pretty sure you can't trademark "any tank with knives and skulls hanging off it", and Marvel and DC killed "look and feel" cases pretty thoroughly). This is, of course, different in Japan. There are explicit legal protections for small-run fan products there. American law makes no such distinction. C. It's not remotely like the Beta Toys thing. Selling officially-licensed-just-in-a-different-country toys is a completely different legal situation from manufacturing your own completely-unlicensed-in-any-country toy. It's a gray area, and my understanding is that the volume sold seems to be very important*, but... it's not outright illegal like making and selling your own unlicensed toy would be. Also, you know, HG didn't really WANT to sue. They'd've had to show someone the actual license, which we know for a fact can't say what they claim it does. They wanted the THREAT of a lawsuit, but never an ACTUAL lawsuit. Basically, they were mugging people with an unloaded gun. *At some poorly-defined point you stop supplying a specialty product to collectors and become a mass-market competitor, and THEN you're infringing on the licensee's rights, but as long as you're below that threshold you're totally legit.
  15. JB0
    That would be an... exceedingly bad idea. They're being watched right now, if any more toys show up "in the wild", or any hint that they're TRYING to get these toys out there, they're in serious legal trouble. I'd hope for an official license like that (adorable) SD Voltron. It'd really be a case where everyone wins. Mad Toys get to actually CALL the thing Voltron, and gain access to a significantly more powerful marketing force, WEP gets to not look like big mean stinkyheads, and the fans get their merch. Odds seem slim since it would be in direct competition with the Toynami re-release, but... here's hoping.
  16. JB0
    It's impressive, but I wouldn't say it's comparable to Apollo. Apollo put MEN on the moon, not a remote-control lander. And brought them back at the end of the mission. That's FAR harder, and it's why we celebrate Apollo 11 while Luna 9 is forgotten. THAT SAID... that the lander managed a successful landing on effectively unknown terrain, with BOTH initial anchor mechanisms offline(top thruster to thrust down, harpoon gun to kill the whale tether the lander), ON AUTOPILOT(by necessity due to the several minutes of light lag) is VERY impressive. I mean not to belittle the ESA's efforts. Especially their coders, because that's an impressive little bundle of logic there. Now let's put a man on that comet!111 (Actually, a manned mission to Ceres would be awesome. But let's get back to the Moon and get to Mars before we start raiding asteroids.)
  17. JB0
    Successful?! The harpoon didn't even fire, much less kill the dang thing! Captain Ahab is FURIOUS! Seriously, though. Good job, ESA. Got the first, second, AND third cometary landings in one drop. That's impressive on multiple counts, especially as the landing was fully automated on unknown terrain. (Landings 2 and 3 are believed to be because the comet was softer than expected, and thus the anchors on the landing gear failed to secure purchase initially. And without either the top thruster to press it down or the Ahab Gambit to tether it, it bounced back off the comet twice before gaining a toehold.).
  18. JB0
    Sadly, GunCon 1 is fundamentally incompatible with non-CRT displays. To my understanding, it actually watches for the flare as the electron beam refreshes the display, and uses that to determines shot location. No beam scan = no flare = shot offscren.
  19. JB0
    Ugh. Man, Nintendo dropped the ball on that one. It's a rare thing for me to say, but Sony did it right with the PS2. Overload the RGB pins, with an option to toggle between component and RGB mode. ... Ah well. Can use a Wii for component out on GC games. Works for everything but the GameBoy Player, as far as I know.
  20. JB0
    Ah, but... read the FAQ. This doesn't cover GameCube (right now). There's no RGB on a US 'Cube, so Super Nintendo cables don't work. And they haven't reverse-engineered the digital AV port (yet). ... And my GC doesn't have a DAV port( )
  21. JB0
    I'm just wondering if the person that posted was a naive and well-intentioned fan that just wanted to spread the word, or a troll that wanted to see this happen. Honestly just out of curiosity. Oh, I don't defend Toynami in the least. Just WEP. ... Does Shadow Chronicles really count as a plus? Honestly, I did consider it, but... two complete TV series vs an OVA produced on a shoestring budget(that was allegedly the first in a cancelled series)? It's like a full meal at a five-star restaurant vs a bowl of store-brand Froot Loops(™ Kellogs Cereal please don't sue) with no milk. Anyhow, my main point was that WEP actually has a leg to stand on, and HG is just crapping on fans for fun because no one's going to stop them. But I also give them a bit of moral high ground because they ARE actually doing something other than making a complete fool of themselves. They've just made some poor licensing decisions. But... WEP DID try to bring something new to the table for fans. I haven't seen enough of the follow-up shows to know if they SUCCEEDED, but... they at least tried. I'm reasonably certain they knew about this thing for quite a while and WERE turning a blind eye to it. But... you can't turn a blind eye when someone paints it on your face.
  22. JB0
    Well, I think a single converter box would be the better option, due to greater versatility, but I don't deny this is far cheaper. I'd like to believe anyone that would spring for one of these has more than one pre-component console, and that versatility will make up the difference. But then, I'd also like to believe they're maintaining a decent CRT, which I know many of them aren't. It's worth noting that the Genesis has a tendency to use composite artifacting to generate colors and effects that the Genesis "can't do", and those are going to be lost this way. It's not going to affect most games, some of the ones it DOES affect will be subtle, and it's going to be such a major improvement over the Genny's composite video output in many* cases that the tradeoff is worth it, but it's something that needs to be mentioned. * The Genesis has a good deal of hardware variation, and some of the TV encoder chips Sega used were... not very good, to be charitable. The good ones are VERY good, but the bad ones are equally bad. RGB, fortunately, is unaffected by the TV encoder. This leads to an amusing situation where the 32x can "upgrade" the graphics of regular Genesis games. Due to the way it works, the 32x is fed raw RGB from the host Genny in all circumstances, and it's encoded into composite video by the 32x's internal TV encoder. All 32xes have the "good" encoder, so on many Genesissies, the installation of a 32x greatly improves image quality for ALL compatible** software. **Which means this doesn't work for Genesis Virtua Racing(the 32x version is better anyways, geez!), and Master System software(this is more problematic, but... buy a Master System. It'll look sexy as hell on your shelf. Everything else works through a 32x just fine... except maybe the Game Genie. Not sure on that one, you dirty cheater. Basically, it's a non-issue in the modern era. ANYWAYS! It's a neat thing, and I do like that they're considering the different output behaviors of the different systems. (Is the Super Nintendo one dual-mode? Because my understanding is there's two very different behaviors for SNES RGB)
  23. JB0
    That's hardly fair to World Event Productions. WEP DOES actually have a case, whereas HG's Robotech C&Ds are just children throwing a hissy fit. To my understanding, WEP purchased Golion outright from Toei. And even if they didn't, they have unambiguous merchandising rights, which is something HG was never willing to prove and the licensing chain doesn't support. Also, you know, they actually produced something in the thirty years since. Half the original lion Voltron episodes, Voltron 3D, and Voltron Force. They ARE actually doing something with it. Which is, again, something HG can't claim EVEN if we accept at face value their (ludicrous) claim that they own all things Macross. So yeah, WEP is not HG's equally thuggish kid brother. Now, I'd argue it would be better for them, from a PR perspective, to turn a blind eye a la Hasbro. But they DO have to defend their trademarks or risk losing them. And this is one they might kind of WANT to keep. I mean, their logo IS lion Voltron. It's like Mickey Mouse is to Disney. He's not just a character, he's the public face of the company. And some digging tells me that someone actually linked a YouTube review in a comment on WEP's facebook page. That'd make it kind of hard to claim ignorance when people have very publicly linked a clone of the company's friggin' mascot on their mother-lovin' facebook page. There's simply no credible way to turn a blind eye after that happens. They know, and everyone knows that they know, you know? So in short: one genius on facebook forced WEP's hand. I kinda wonder if he was a troll that feels empowered now or a well-intentioned fan that's horrified by what he's done.
  24. JB0
    Hence the apocalyptic lizardmen. In the absence of news, we make our own.
  25. JB0
    Except for the chromed lion legs. Infinity Gokin is attempting to present an illusion of hidden legs with the colored thighs and matte gray shins/paws. It works well on the arms, honestly. Far less so on the legs. That said... I was actually surprised when I double-checked the cartoon and realized the lion legs AREN'T visible in the combined Voltron. Heck, even most of the non-combining Voltron merch has the lion legs exposed. The actual show is one of the few places that the legs AREN'T be visible, and that was abandoned for future cartoons, as Third Dimension and Voltron Force both have exposed legs. It's one of those cases where a toy "deficiency" replaced the cartoon as the "real" version. Voltron looks better with lion legs all over him. Also, it makes that childhood mess where I folded the lion legs out of the combined Voltron to give him clawed punches and kicks workable, if not advisable.
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