JB0

I always do.

Which would arguably be more true to the franchise's origins than a big-budget original-production Hollywood blockbuster.

Best sequel ever. This isn't as out there as you think. Heihachi was HARDLY a lock on the Soul Calibur 2 PS2 exclusive char. While Pac-Man himself was not in the running(that I've heard), Dig-Dug WAS. And while he was PROBABLY beefed up like in Namco X Capcom, I still like the image of classic DigDug rampaging about and beating people silly with a bike pump.

Mmmm... Earth Defense Force 2017(XBox 360) Lunar: Eternal Blue(SegaCD, yo!) Parasite Eve 2(PS1) Asteroids(pretty much any entry in the franchise. Near as I've ever seen to a perfect game) Metal Storm(NES) Those seem to be the ones I keep circling back to. EDF especially. I tell ya, launching swarms of 30-foot ants into low Earth orbit with a shotgun is the best way I can think of to kill an afternoon.

Oh, that's very nice. I think the old Unicron's biggest problem is WAAAAY too much clear plastic. IMNSHO, It should be used as an accent, not a primary "color." And generally in places where there's some detailing under it so there's not just a big gaping void, or where there's a REASON for it to be transparent. Armada/Classics Unicron misses on both counts. There's LOTS of clear plastic, both in vanilla and "purple haze" variants, and most of it isn't well-used. As for usage... The good: The chest plate has significant detailing under it(in the form of a rocket launcher) as well as using paint on both sides to create a rather nice 3D effect. This part is actually a great use of clear plastic. The iffy: The fist is clearly for the illumination effect, though I think it was overdone, especially given it doesn't diffuse well. I'd really like to see a "glow spilling out of the joints" effect used somewhere, even if it IS harder to build(possibly prohibitively so, but I still wanna see it). The planet shell could be so it's easier to ignore in robot mode. Given the shell's only real purpose in robot mode is to prop the wings up, I can get behind this(too bad there's no snaps to lock the wing braces in place, though...). Unfortunately, it's a complete dud in planet mode. The bad: The skirt armor and the abdominal panel are VERY poor choices. The skirt armor is especially offensive, as it isn't even consistent. Parts of the skirt are gray and parts are clear. The missile launchers in the legs form the OTHER part of the planet hemisphere, so they kind of have to be purple haze if the wings are, but MUCH more could have been done with them. There's no sense of mass underneath them, just a big empty void. And unlike the wings, these fail to impress in BOTH modes. That's my take. Unicron's clear is overused and underutilized, except in the chest. Were I tweaking the design... I would've... not used clear plastic in the skirt or abdomen. At all. Maybe let the abdomen slide due to the minicon prison feature, but I remain highly unimpressed, and it's not like the minicon cells in the legs are transparent(thank Primus). The inside part of the leg guns would be designed to add detailing instead of just to hold missiles and springs. If I couldn't convince Hasbro to let me add the plastic for volumetric detail, I'd mold something into the flat parts. Even just cliche circuit traces. Those leg guns are the single worst part of the toy.

But they're obviously a cheap knockoff. For the REAL cheap hamburger experience, you want a Macrossnalds!

You mean MacrossNalds, right?

All of the above... AT THE SAME TIME!

Definitely. And it helps taht it's so incredibly over-the-top nonsensical and awful. A lot of the 80s cartoons are just BAD when viewed with adult eyes, but Transformers falls out the other side and becomes a rather hilarious parody of itself. SOS Dinobots is probably my favorite, though. If you watch it with adult eyes, it is painfully clear that the Autobots are incompetents and fail miserably at absolutely everything they attempt in the episode. They fail to guard the meteor from the Decepticons(who trusts THE DINOBOTS for guard duty?). They fail to stop the Decepticons from harnessing the captured meteor to make energon. They fail to accurately identify the threat posed by the meteor(they're convinced it can destroy the entire world if it blows up). They fail to stop the "planet-buster" meteor from exploding and doing minor damage to a few dozen yards of wasteland. And then they pat themselves on the back for a job well done at the end.

I'm gonna buy Thrust gently, so I don't break him. Peg is on my list too. Solely because of this thread. When I saw the Thrust and Drift link I was just going "Who the hell is Drift?" Then I saw the pictures, and went "It's PEG! WHOO!"

Two sentences hardly makes a lecture. The REST of the post was a fairly neutral sharing of opinion/amateur analysis.

And on a less antagonistic note, but also a very late one... I found an Animated Arcee! Apparently going into a Toys R Us and not even really LOOKING for Transformers is the key to finding what you want. The gigantic backpack makes me sad, especially given how high over her head it rises. If it could slide down, it'd be a lot less ugly. The lower legs are shaped funny, but it doesn't really bother me as much as I thought it would. And she holds her balance MUCH better for me than most Transformers I've had. And the real reason I'm bothering to comment on it so late after everyone else has seen it is... I REALLY like the transformation sequence. Flipping the arms down to expose the face at the very end made me smile. I like the head coming out last(probably from too much Voltron as a kid), and the way it was done has style. As an added bonus, the arms can drop into an action pose right out of transformation if you pull 'em right, as well as any spring-loaded automorph effect. It's a toss up if I like this or movie Brawn's guns-in-hand transformation more. The toy was worth it for that last step alone, and I wish I saw this kind of style in more transformations.

As someone that finds "leader-class" Transformers a difficult expense to justify, and has only ONE import collector's toy... I think you're probably wrong. But then, I'm the Transformers fan that still can't bring himself to actually LIKE Beast Wars. I can RESPECT it, but I actively dislike the robot designs. It's a purely aesthetic call, but it's my call to make. Maybe. Maybe not. I know when I was a kid, MORE transformation was the big thing, not LESS. Cars, trucks, and planes that turned into robots and then combined to form bigger robots wasn't enough, so they made their GUNS AND HEADS AND ENGINES turn into robots too! Actionmasters didn't really impress me. I own ONE, and that was because my love of Shockwave was greater than my love of transforming robots. On the other hand, and perhaps more close to the new combiners... Power Rangers did and do sell really well. Yes, I'm going somewhere here, even though it seems a HUGE tangent. The fact that the robots weren't usable as individual machines, only combined, just struck me as incredibly, monumentally stupid. And it got WORSE later, when the leader's robot could fight on it's own and the rest were only usable as battle armor for the leader's robot. Sounding familiar yet? Admittedly, as a kid I watched an episode or two, filed it under the heading of "cheap Voltron knockoff," and ignored it as much as my little sister would let me, which turned out to be "not very much." But that doesn't change my evaluation of the robots. And that's what Power Core Combiners are. Megazords. Is it marketable? Sure. You can convince grown adults to want anything, no matter how bad it is. You can even convince them your cheap knockoff is better than someone else's quality product. It's a lot easier with kids, if you spend the ad dollars right. But do I want it? No, not really. I haven't seen the pictures, but Transformers: Megazord is just INCREDIBLY uninteresting to me from the concept alone. The appearance of a rational argument is usually destroyed by AOL-speak and "witty" catchphrases. Bit of friendly advice there("FYI" in AOL-ese).

Yeah, that's a copout, IMO. Up there with part-swapping. Of course, the movie designs were done backwards. They're making toys from the animation instead of animation from the toys. That causes no end of trouble, and I respect that htey can make them work at all... except Arcee and company. There's nothing to respect there. The only movie-line toys I've really liked are ones that didn't appear in the movies. Including the first live-action movie Arcee toy. and why movie 2's Arcee isn't based on that design is anyone's guess.

Would also explain why Macross 5 was a mainly-zentradi colony mission, despite the colonization program being mainly to ensure the survival of humanity. Reduce the zentradi population back home by sending them across the galaxy. And if they FIND a good planet, well... can always send a few carriers full of humans to crash the party later, right?

I feel obliged to note that I REposted that. Original credit for the effort goes to Roycommi. http://www.macrossworld.com/mwf/index.php?...ost&p=65839 (links now dead, hence the reposting)

HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!! Man, I at least thought another Seeker repaint was gonna follow Grimlock. But another PRIME repaint?

Sentiment. No matter what happens, it's still home. Of course, it COULD be turned into a giant shipyard to supply rapid-fire colony missions, but... you'd still need colonists.

See the long talky bit. There's simply no way, under the modern understanding of physics, for energy to exist without some form of associated particle. Even if it's import energy. Super-dimension energy is going to have to play by our rules once it's in our dimension. I suppose we can Trek it and throw technobabble at the problem. Say it creates a brief dimensional rift across the beam path? But that doesn't fit the animated effect, which shows an impact with a force primarily in the direction of fire. Hmmm... String theory. That's it. It's an application of string theory. Clearly the directional effect of the blast is because closer strings will be affected before more distant strings. The Macross is a giant guitar pick plucking the strings of its enemies. And THAT is why music is the ultimate weapon. BOMBAA! Crisis averted. Sort of. That's actually an interesting defensive approach. How demoralizing would it be for your enemy to attack you, and watch their beams hit you, blast out the other side... and you're completely unscathed? But... right from the first appearance. missiles exploded against barrier disks. Maybe it "bends" the fold rift, creating a destructive warp in space instead of an actual fold? But that doesn't explain why the disks dissipate momentarily after they take a hit. In the end, it's just one more sci-fi program where shields don't make a heckuva lot of sense. Yeah, I took the "energy" to be a permanent rift to fold space(which I assume to be the same place "super dimension energy" comes from. Which also explains the interference with the "super dimension energy" cannon, if they both use the same source of energy. The methods of manipulating the energy into a barrier would, logically, interfere with manipulating those same energies into a beam. Actually, the barrier doesn't really rate a topic. There's so little info that it's just random speculation. But it's fun enough to hijack every other thread it comes up in for a few posts even if it IS all rampant baseless speculation! And most of what we know is the omnidirectional barrier. They're implied to be the same tech, just applied different ways, though. We know the ODB actually absorbs part of the energy applied and stores it(presumably to be radiated later. Maybe even to power the shields during a lull in the combat), while part of it "washes over" the bubble without being absorbed. And in the event of an overload, the shield generator room(at the centerpoint of the sphere?) AND everything outside the shield is in incredible danger, but everything between the generator and the shield bubble is safe. Maybe the disks can use a lower deflection percentage because they're being exposed to less energy overall, so absorption to the point of overload isn't a large issue(I'd consider deflection sub-optimal since it raises a risk of a deflected beam injuring someone on your side). Heck, maybe that's why they dissipate after being hit. They cut power to the impacted disk briefly to allow it to discharge the absorbed energy safely. Doctor Grant, Doctor Satler. Welcome to Cenozoic park.

I think the plan was total sterilization. They just didn't get to finish the job because some teenie-bopper pop star got in the way and started singing about love and peace on the army's communications channels using comm frequencies provided by a bunch of dirty hippie traitors. (Tangentally, the Minmay attack would be devastating just from the havoc it'd wreak on coordinated fleet maneuvers, even if you ignore the psychological effect totally. No one can talk to anyone else without shouting over My Boyfriend's a Pilot, 0-G Love, and company.). Remember, they scoured a planet to a cratered, atmosphere-less husk while they had Hikaru, Kakizaki, and Misa captive, just to prove they could. Why would they HOLD BACK on a planet with a verified threat to the Zentradi's very existence? As far as radioactivity... that's actually to be expected. High-output particle beams are going to screw things up no matter how you slice it. They're going to hit something, and when they do, they're going to mess up it's atomic structure. While we can't guarantee that zentradi ship-mounted "beam weapons" are the same tech as the "electron beams" seen on the smaller craft like the amazing exploding reguld, it's safe to assume they're SOME kind of particle weapon. Matter and energy are inextricably intertwined, at least for physics as we know it. Laser beams, electron beams, neutron beams, positron beams, gravity beams, lead ion beams, whatever. There's always a particle carrying the energy. I would expect the same to be true even of "super-dimension-energy" cannons. Whatever the rules are in fold space, once that energy's brought over to our universe it's gotta play by our rules to at least some degree. * Even ignoring all that, you can argue the energy transmitted through the beam was enough to initiate fusion at the impact sites(it was clearly enough to generate some kind of explosion, and massive ones at that). That'd get you some radioactive isotopes fast. So long story short... yes, it's plausible to generate radiation without being radioactive. ... Ya know, I'm actually impressed that they're still depicting the Earth as a barren wasteland. It's rare enough even outside cartoons that there's long-term devastation that can't be fixed. For even Frontier, iffy as it was at points, to be leaving Earth largely barren and not just going "yeah, we totally cloned trees and grass and bushes and flowers like twenty years ago" is nothing short of astonishing. *Having said that bit about obeying OUR laws of physics, I'd love to see them try and explain the barrier system, just so I can laugh at the technobabble. Handwaving it like they did is really the best they can do in that situation.

Hey, at least VP is faring better than Star Ocean these days. VPTactics was supposed to at least be half-decent.

Sorry. There's a lot of anti-WD sentiment these days, and I tend to just assume now. Speaking of changes... the whole "play Alex's harp to reawaken Luna's memories" thing was actually added for the US, then backported to the Japanese remakes. In Japan you just ran up the ramp and took the hits. Vanguard Bandits is mean to me. The bad ending was awesome... until I realized my save was too late to recover from it. I never claimed to be good at SRPGs. I like Alundra a lot.

And once again we get the Working Designs hate with no evidence to back it up. Fact: Hiro and Ronfar got punched into orbit for staging a peep show while Lucia was changing clothes. The games were always a little light-hearted. WD may've had a bit of fun with some of the NPC dialog, but they're HARDLY responsible for it not being SERIOUS BUSINESS all the time. For all the hate that gets heaped upon them, WD actually CARED about the games they translated and did their best to keep things intact. In fact, Game Arts WANTED WD to do the original Lunar: Silver Star translation, because they had TG16 releases to prove they DID do localization right. And both companies worked very closely together all through the localization process to ensure it was right for Lunar too. Which is why XSeed is following in WD's footsteps(actually, based on the demo, it seems they just bought the old WD translation. Not that I mind that.). If you've got some examples of WD ACTUALLY messing Lunar up as opposed to "THEY MADE A JOKE! BURN THEM", I'm all ears. In fact, I've long wondered if the secret origin of dragon diamonds is a bit of WD "flavor." I do know of a few minor goofs, but no one seems to want to say anything more than "E BAY AND BILL CLINTON!"(Victor Ireland has publicly apologized for the NPC Clinton joke in SegaCD Lunar 2, for the record.) Either way, I KNOW the PS1 version is hugely different. US version to US version. And it's not because WD wanted to change them(Hell, the script in Lunar 2 PS was largely cut/paste'd from Lunar 2 SCD) And until they restore Nash to the badass I know he is, I will not forgive Game Arts! BRING BACK STUDIO ALEX! RESTORE LUNAR TO IT'S PROPER GLORY! CLEANSE THE BLASPHEMOUS WORK OF ZOPHAR'S FOLLOWERS WITH THE GLORIOUS LIGHT OF ALTHENA!

I was under the impression the PS version was more or less a port of the Saturn version. Guess I'm wrong. Man, now I may have to actually play it. I don't deny that The Silver Star needed a remake. My problem is that the remake it GOT was a mockery of everything the original game was ABOUT. It's sad, but it makes me very hesitant to recommend one of my favorite series of all time. I can recommend a dated and awkward game, followed by one of the best JRPGs in the history of ever. Or I can recommend a twisted mockery of that game followed by a broken version of one of the best RPGs ever that no longer works properly as a sequel. Rewrote and BUTCHERED the story, not expanded. Lemme tell you, it was a serious case of whiplash when you're playing Eternal Blue for the first time and you find out Althena's dead, and has been for the better part of a millennium. Alex is the REASON Althena retired, not a damned booby prize. Not as good a kick as the first EB ending, but... EXPANDED would be developing more on the history of the magic emperor, the original ME's connection to Ghaleon, the relation between Althena and the Dragonmaster, and WHY the dragons are dying out(the ones in the game are the last surviving members of the dragon tribe... raising a hell of an unanswered question for Eternal Blue's dragons). Not scraping the whole magic emperor back story, changing Ghaleon's, Althena's, and Dyne's motives and actions completely, skewing several other characters severely(most notably Nash, who got totally screwed), and *gripegriperantcomplain* Actually replayed TSS recently, and was struck even more by how far things had skewed in SSS. And Nash's triple-cross is STILL badass... oooh, add an FMV sequence of his daring escape from the Vile Tribe soldiers, dragon helm in hand! THAT would be quality entertainment. Not dressing him up like a giant robot banana and making him a boss. Honestly, I was appalled by the maps being broken up into 2-4-screen mini-maps more than anything else. That was what did me in. The world map I could live with. It served no point in the PlayStation version, may as well abolish it totally. I knew the FF-style bottomless item bag was coming, distasteful as I find it(even in Final Fantasy!). I even expected limit breaks after what I'd seen of Lunar Legend. I was ready for them, sort of. I could even LIVE with the generic menu screen instead of a proper Lunar menu, maybe. Though it broke my heart(Nall is for saving!). But those black screen transitions every few steps? Not enough premium box content in the world. I can't do that, because I never played Dragon Song. It's one of the little edges I've gained in my fight to keep my tenuous grasp on sanity. From everything I've heard, it'd push me over the edge. But either way... Studio Alex wasn't involved with anything after Walking School. None of the remakes, and not Dragon Song. That's my official justification for not counting them.

SegaCD original > Saturn remake > Saturn MPEG cart port(yes, this is a different release) > PS1 port > Windows 9x port > GBA remake > PSP remake So yeah, re-re-remake. Just with a fistful of ports on the way there. And I must apologize to XSeed. I really like you guys and want you to succeed, but I won't be buying this release, premium box or not, and I hope no one else does. I played the demo, and it was good for nothing but raising my blood pressure. This is not XSeed's fault. Game Arts is making the game worse with every revisions. They need to be taken out back and shot. Lunar has been dead since Studio Alex stopped being involved. Yes, this means I am officially disavowing the Saturn/PS1/Win9x versions as well. The SegaCD versions are the ONLY versions. Well, and that Game Gear game no one likes to talk about.